Innovation Blog
Innovation in Your Brain
This month we’re spotlighting an excellent documentary shown recently on the BBC that included the latest research on how creativity happens inside your brain.
The Horizon programme was primarily an exploration of the physical processes going on inside a human brain that lead to the creativity that sets us humans apart as a species. By conducting experiments with subjects engaged in creative activity the scientists have been able to unravel what’s going on and therefore provide insights into why some of the processes we use here at Innovation Age yield the positive results that they do.
The first insight that the show provided is that creativity and intelligence result from different wiring inside the brain. Intelligence results from quick and direct connections between neurons allowing the fastest possible arrival at a conclusion. Creativity by contrast is the result of slower, more meandering connections that can result in more interesting destinations, including of course brand new insight. This is great news for us in the real world because it means we’re all capable of generating new thoughts, not just those who are good at passing exams, and what’s more there are things that we can do to encourage these connections.
It’s possible to develop these meandering connections, in effect to train your brain to be more creative. Presenting the brain with new things causes it to create new connections, getting it used to the processes required to come up with new ideas. Again this is good news for those of us trying to innovate because something as simple as taking a new route to work or listening to a new album can help stimulate our creativity.
One particular part of the brain plays a very important role in stimulating or suppressing innovation – the frontal lobes. It is this area of our brain that give us some of the higher order capabilities unique to humans such as self-awareness and the ability to predict future consequences of current actions. The important thing for creativity to thrive is that activity in the frontal lobes needs to be suppressed and, while some “creative types” naturally have lower frontal lobe activity, there are things that we can all do to help release our inner creativity:
- Including activities such as ice-breakers and games as part of idea generation can help us lose our inhibitions so stimulates creativity.
- Undertaking mundane tasks can reduce the need for forward-planning and so can similarly increase the capacity for spontaneous insight.
So, it’s good to know that science backs our belief here at Innovation Age that innovation is not just the preserve of a chosen few but that there are techniques we can all use in our daily lives to improve our own creativity.
By Brian Carrington, March 2013
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