Index
The Eureka Factor: Creative Insights and the Brain (Kounios, John;Beeman, Mark)
The ultimate goal of Zen is “satori,” which Japanese scholar D. T. Suzuki explained as “acquiring a new viewpoint for looking into the essence of things.”
“Flynn effect”—startled the world: Average raw scores have been increasing. The worldwide “new normal” has been getting better and better. We don’t yet know for sure why this is happening, but the numbers don’t lie. People are getting smarter. Aren’t they?
Fire wasn’t just the problem—it was also the solution. He fought fire with fire. The conceptual restructuring that produces an insight can be relatively simple—in Dodge’s case, a straightforward inversion—or it can be a lens for viewing subtler relationships.
Analogical thinking solves a problem by revealing a deep relationship between two things that appear very different from each other on the surface. Insights aren’t the only way to experience an analogy. You can deliberately try to construct one. But when you spontaneously realize that one situation is similar to another, you’ve had an analogical insight.
The answer appeared when he took a break from work to enjoy a baseball game.
The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds. —John Maynard Keynes, preface to The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1935)
Everything you do has the potential to limit what you do next.
Everything you do has the potential to limit what you do next. Everything you think has the potential to limit what you think next. And you won’t even know that this is happening.
The fact is that you are the sum total of your experiences, even fleeting ones. Your past informs your assumptions, beliefs, and expectations but also limits your ability to think and act flexibly.
This is how experts get better results while thinking less, not more.
That’s why you shouldn’t even attempt to consider all your options and possibilities. You can’t. If you tried to, then you’d never get anything done. So don’t knock the box. Ironically, although it limits your thinking, it also makes you smart. It helps you to stay one step ahead of reality. But also remember that your box isn’t perfect. It can’t enable you to anticipate everything, because doing so would mean that your brain would have to be as complex as the world around you. For those occasions when your box is insufficient, you have insight as a way to break out of an old box and swap it for a new and improved one.
“Einstein’s razor”: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”
The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes—ah, that is where the art resides. —Artur Schnabel, pianist
Just as your ability to use language requires two intact hemispheres, so does effective, practical, creative performance. But the right hemisphere provides the spark that ignites the creative fire.
Aspects of sleep stages can persist for a while. Descartes’s insight may have been the product of a conscious mind still under the partial influence of the last phase of the previous night’s sleep.
One way that sleep can incubate ideas and promote insight is by removing blocks that prevent a weakly activated idea from becoming conscious. Cognitive psychologists call this liberation of thought “fixation forgetting.”
“Zeigarnik effect”: An interruption improves memory for the unfinished task; but once completed, the odds of forgetting the task suddenly increase.10
The universe tends toward disorder. Objects fall because falling is the most disorderly and likely outcome to emerge in this complex system.
To get the maximum benefit from a break, it helps if you “change your mind”—the greater the change, the better.
Context is the key. Your memories are associated with the contexts in which you originally acquired them. If you learn something in one place, type of situation, or frame of mind, then you’ll remember that information better if you recall it later in the same context. That’s why you sometimes can’t remember the name of a person you know only from your office when you encounter that person at the shopping mall. (Cognitive psychologists call this the “butcher-on-the-bus phenomenon.”) So when you’re stuck in a rut and take a break to resolve the impasse, you’ll shed the misleading ideas more quickly and thoroughly if you think about things that transport your mind far from your current situation.
Of course, actually getting away and taking a walk, especially on an unfamiliar route, would be an even better way to change context (as long as you aren’t thinking about the problem during your walk). But if you can’t get away, try thinking about getting away, to another town, another country, or, even better, another planet. Thinking about a situation far removed from your current one might have additional benefits beyond those afforded by a mental reset. When you do this, you are also exercising your ability to change perspective, which seems to be the same sort of ability that you use when you reinterpret a situation to achieve insight. Later, we’ll tell you about research that suggests that exercising this mental flexibility can, at least temporarily, boost your insightfulness.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, “When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer—say, traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal … it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly,” and other such anecdotes would seem to suggest that a positive mood enhances creative insight.3
But the fact is that cognition and emotion are closely intertwined, even blended, in the brain.
“mood congruency”: If you’re sad, then you’ll tend to think of sad things, even to the point of interpreting ambiguous situations negatively. Likewise, happy people tend to have positive thoughts and interpretations. Just as our unconscious associations are filters through which we view the world and ourselves, so, too, are our moods.
This suggests that being put in a good mood enhanced his creative thinking but not his analytic thinking.8
One is the “winner-take-all” strategy (aka “the rich get richer”). Squash or ignore the weaker, less obvious tendencies and let the strongest, most obvious one dominate. This enables a person to focus on the most straightforward path to solving a problem without detours or distractions. Just twist the jar top harder! This is the analytic mind-set. The other approach is the “Robin Hood” strategy of taking from the rich and giving to the poor—let a weaker, less-obvious tendency dominate over a stronger, more obvious one. Forget brute force—use a can opener. This is the insight mind-set.
remote associative thinking and positive mood can’t reinforce each other indefinitely. Otherwise, a person’s positive mood and insightfulness would amplify each other in an infinite chain reaction. We know that this doesn’t happen. Every once in a while, the cycle is broken, and this can have practical benefits.
To help you achieve a creative breakthrough, do things that make you happy. Take a walk in the park. Listen to music. But after you’ve had your aha moment, fun time is over. You’ll need to analyze and refine your new idea, and a state of bliss won’t help you to be at your critical best. In this case, a mild dose of anxiety may do the trick. To regain your critical edge, go see a scary movie, ride a roller coaster, or just watch the news—whatever makes you a little nervous. A positive mood may be the best kindling for a creative spark. But once that kindling starts burning, it takes careful work to turn that spark into a useful bonfire.
Try this: Open your mouth a little and then hold a pen in place horizontally with your lips for a few seconds without clenching your teeth. How do you feel? That exercise forces you to tighten the same muscles that you use to smile, causing a tiny, easy-to-miss wave of positive emotion. The researchers used that technique to induce a subtle good mood in their participants (who were tricked by a cover story).
A positive mood energizes a person’s unconscious associations so that when she views a coherent problem, the problem’s parts prime the solution and one another more strongly, making them easier to perceive. This triggers a little burst of pleasure that she interprets as an intuition that a solution is present. It also encourages her to continue working on the problem until the solution proclaims itself in the form of an insight.
intuitions can be caused either by bursts of positive emotion from fluency or by bursts of negative emotion from disfluency. Either way, emotional surges, whether positive or negative, seem to have their strongest influence on intuition when they occur against the backdrop of an ongoing positive mood because that’s when a person’s associations are most energized.
So mood influences intuition, but not equally for everyone.
when you have an intuition, don’t make an impulsive decision to either follow or reject it. Ask yourself why you are having that hunch, at that time, and at that place. The answers to these questions will help you to decide whether to trust a particular intuition. Remember, your brain knows more than you do, but it doesn’t know everything.
“bottom-up” processing is a grassroots movement. It occurs when something in the environment grabs control of the brain, as when you reflexively attend to a loud, unexpected sound, such as a door slamming. Bottom-up processing is dominated by what’s happening in the world around you; top-down control is an expression of your goals, plans, and values.
There is reason to think that creativity and mental illness are related and that they are both expressions of something that is relatively stable—one’s genes.
when you purposely ignore something, even briefly, it’s difficult to immediately shift mental gears and pay full attention to it, a phenomenon called “negative priming.” This can sometimes be a minor inconvenience, but it occurs for a reason. When you ignore something, it’s because you deemed it to be unimportant. By inhibiting something that you’ve already labeled as irrelevant, you don’t have to waste time or energy reconsidering it. More generally, inhibition protects you from unimportant, distracting stimuli. Without it, your thoughts would wander all over the place, even retracing previous mental steps.
However, all things being equal, you are at your inhibitory best during your peak time. This means that you are most analytical at your peak time and most insightful at your off-peak time. For creativity, your finest hour is literally the low point of your day.
People can voluntarily broaden or narrow their attention. This isn’t news. Wegbreit’s innovation was to show that these adjustments can influence one’s cognitive style. After the participants’ attention was either broadened or narrowed, they tackled a set of remote associates problems. Narrowing increased the number of analytic solutions; broadening increased insights.
Once your attention has been broadened or narrowed, it stays that way for a while. It doesn’t immediately snap back to its previous focus. Your attention and cognitive style are flexible, but only within limits.
Experience and the environment are important, to a point.
Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have…. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it. —Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, Inc., quoted in Fortune magazine, November 9, 1998
when confronted with a deadline an Insightful tends to make “errors of omission” by drawing a blank, while an Analyst’s errors are more likely to be incorrect solutions (“errors of commission”).
Since creativity flows from a promotion orientation, not prevention, creative insight will be enhanced after a prize is won, not in anticipation of one. So make your way through the maze and eat your cheese in safety. Then your mind will expand.
Thinking, as well as feeling, can energize the mental machinery that produces creative insights.
Considering long-term consequences enhances creativity.
imagining a new world by adding something enhances creative thought; taking something away improves analytic problem solving.
To entertain an additive counterfactual, you have to expand your awareness beyond your current situation to include extra things in the mix. It’s the here and now plus something. This should broaden conceptual attention and enhance insight. But when you consider a subtractive counterfactual, you have to think about the here and now minus something. This isn’t as simple as pushing the banished thing out of your mind.
Like love, adapting to another culture demands the cognitive flexibility to consider situations from another perspective. It involves learning to think about alternate, even opposite, interpretations of events and circumstances. (If you haven’t ever lived abroad and don’t believe this, just watch a foreign news channel or read some foreign newspapers to prove this to yourself.) It
We’ve seen that thinking about the distant future, faraway places, different cultures, and imaginary worlds can prime you for insightfulness. This is not a laundry list of unrelated techniques for enhancing creativity. These factors are all manifestations of a single psychological principle.
to empower creative thought, you should imagine unusual people, alternate realities, and the distant future. Think about a loved one. Take in the view—and broaden it. Visit or envision faraway places and cultures. Ponder “what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars.”6
The key point: The right kind of training and experience may help you learn how to solve specific kinds of problems, but it won’t help you solve other types of problems, and it won’t teach you how to have insights. Real-life problems aren’t circumscribed. For an Insightful, there is no boundary between the problem and the rest of the world or the rest of one’s experience.
Sometimes, insight is the specific tool that you need. Unfortunately, it can’t be pulled out of your mental toolbox at will.
You are more likely to have creative insights and valid intuitions when your brain is in a general state characterized by remote associations, broad flexible attention, abstract thought, positive mood, a sense of psychological distance, and a promotion orientation.7
Quick reference that help you retrieve the main concepts of the book.
MAKING IT HAPPEN
To put a twist on Pasteur’s famous saying, chance favors the happy mind.
The truly essence of the book: how to achive more insights from change your habits to choose the good environ and what should do for start it NOW.
“The music is like a mask; I don’t hear it.”
You can tap these same principles to design your own personal technique to maximize your own creative potential. Just be sure to test its effectiveness on yourself so that you can optimize it.
You could make your dream enviroment but test it if it really works best. TEST OFTEN
In these common situations is better train your insight mode instead focus only in be more productive.. perfect time to improve crativity without too much effort!
What time can you repurpose for creativity? Any time in which you are engaged in no task, such as when you are waiting in line, or are doing a task that demands minimal attention, like housework or gardening, can be commandeered for creative work in this way. The classic example is the isolation of the shower. Meal times are another possibility. (After all, you have to eat.) Try taking your breakfast or lunch alone in a quiet, isolated environment. Start by priming yourself for a positive mood, psychological distance, and a promotion orientation, for example, by thinking of what long-range goals would make you happy. Then let the ideas flow while you unhurriedly nibble on your meal. Thinking about a problem while doing an easy task may not be particularly convenient. However, incubating a problem while doing a simple, unrelated task can help more than incubation during either a demanding task or no task.
thoughts about our always connected world
constant attention to the environment. There is continuous pressure to produce, especially during economically uncertain times. Meanwhile, many people strive to be attentive parents, spouses, partners, relatives, or friends. Leisure time is hard to come by, and it’s difficult to resist expending what there is of it on the alluring social media platforms, games, videos, gadgets, podcasts, and television channels that are constantly clamoring for our attention. Our thoughts can be interrupted by a cellphone or text message anywhere and anytime. And when the cellphone isn’t ringing and there aren’t any new text or email messages, we think about when the next call or message will arrive. The twenty-first century is all about staying connected, staying on top of things, not missing anything. This is exciting and often productive, but we need to be aware of all of its effects on us. The truth is, we live in an environment on steroids, far removed from the more relaxed pace of life just one generation ago. We are slaves to the present moment, with little opportunity for quiet introspection and mental travel. The inner world
default brain state, the brain space ON when you rest
All 24/7. All enemies of the (default brain) state.
Modern life can stimulate, as well as sap, one’s insightfulness. We’ve seen that alternating between the inner and outer worlds is the best way to enhance your creativity. The impediment to achieving this balance is that the outer world keeps its thumb on the scale. The only way to compensate is by giving extra weight to the inner world and by periodically banishing its enemies.
Create the state. It’s the empire of the future.