Be More Creative. Think Like Goldilocks
“Creativity comes from conscious facts planted in the unconscious and allowed to germinate.” Bertrand Russell
The unconscious mind plays a very important role in coming up with ideas. But you need to create the right conditions for this to happen. There’s no guarantee ideas will pop up from your unconscious, but it’s like planting a seed; if you plant it in a sunny spot in good soil and give it plenty of water, you’ve given it the best chance to grow.
One of the most common misconceptions is that “creative” people have these “light bulb moments” that just pop into their heads as if from nowhere. But no one has great ideas without thinking about a problem for a long time. It only seems to come out of nowhere because it comes from your unconscious. They never just appear without a lot of hard work.
John Lennon spent five hours trying to write a song “that was meaningful and good”. Finally he gave up and lay down. “Then Nowhere Man came, words and music, the whole damn thing, as I lay down…So letting it go is what the whole game is.”
If you work hard on a problem and are passionate about finding a solution, your unconscious mind will then deem it worthy of putting its processing power behind it. But one of the side effects of working hard on something is that you’re likely to get to a place where you feel you can’t think of any more ideas. This is often when people feel either blocked or start to feel self-doubt.
But this is when you need to follow “Goldilocks” thinking — neither too hard nor too soft. If your unconscious is to be allowed to do its stuff, you want to avoid the two extremes: on the one hand getting too stressed and on the other hand totally zoning out and doing something mindless, such as watching TV or checking up on Facebook.
You just need to keep the problem simmering away on the back burner. As John Cleese said, “This is the extraordinary thing about creativity: if you keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious.”
It often helps to stop thinking about the problem altogether as Hilary Mantel said in her “Ten Rules for Writing Fiction” in The Guardian: “If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don’t just stick there scowling at the problem. But don’t make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people’s words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space.”
When the breakthrough or insight you’ve been looking for does come, it’s accompanied by a surge of energy. This isn’t just mental, it’s actually physical.
When J.K. Rowling described getting the idea for her first book for adults she said, “I had a totally physical response you get to an idea that you know will work. It’s a rush of adrenaline; it’s chemical. I had it with Harry Potter and I had it with this.”
Scientists have found that the moment of creative insight is actually accompanied by a spike in brainwaves called gamma waves, the highest electrical frequency generated by the brain.
But what’s just as interesting, is what happens before the moment of insight. There is a surge of alpha waves at the back of the head. Now alpha waves are associated with closing areas of the brain down and the back of the brain mainly deals with visual processing. At least half the brain’s power is normally devoted directly or indirectly to vision.
As well as the part of the brain involved in visual processing closing down, there is a distinct change in the frontal lobes, which are the main areas of consciousness in the brain. They were almost going into sleep mode, which neuropsychologist, Rex Jung, calls “transient hypofrontality”.
Your brain wants to concentrate fully on the moment of insight, so it reduces both the amount of visual information that is processed and how much conscious thinking goes on. It’s as if at that moment you go into a sort of “creative trance”.
It’s why if you ever see someone at the point when they have an idea, they look down or stare into space or if they’re on a walk, they’ll suddenly stop when the idea occurs to them.
Of course if you haven’t experienced one of these “light bulb moments”, this may all seem a bit alien to you. But are you sure you haven’t?
Have you ever been doing a crossword puzzle and found yourself stuck on a particular crossword clue? You keep thinking about it, but it just won’t come. Finally, you give up. You stop thinking about it and move on to another clue, or go to make a cup of tea. Then suddenly, as if from nowhere, the answer to the clue you were stuck on just pops into your head.
When Archimedes had his famous moment of insight, he jumped out of his bath and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse, shouting “Eureka”. He hadn’t just got the answer to seven across, but it’s the same mental process that was at work.
Whether it’s just the answer to a crossword clue or something bigger, the experience of an idea coming out of nowhere still comes as a real surprise. Paul Simon described the moment Bridge Over Troubled Water came to him: “One minute it wasn’t there and the next minute the whole line was there. It was one of the shocking moments in my songwriting career.”
It’s no surprise then, that in Ancient Greece they didn’t actually believe individuals were creative. The Greeks believed that the muses were real. To them, they were goddesses who were considered the source of all knowledge, which were then invoked by the writer or artist.
And take the word “genius”. It actually comes from Ancient Rome and doesn’t refer to a gifted individual, but a guiding spirit. The achievements of exceptional people were seen as an indication of the presence of a particularly powerful “genius”. In fact, it was only during the Renaissance in the 14th century that creativity was first seen as the ability of a gifted “individual”.