How to Improve Your C reative Thinking
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Superorganizers
The science of creativityâand how to unlock it
by Alice Albrecht
December 9, 2022
â„ 11
Listen
Hi allâDan here. Today, we have a guest article from Alice Albrecht . Alice is one of the smartest and most experienced under-the-radar builders in AI. She did a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at Yale and then spent 10 years in AI before becoming a founder. Today, she runs re:collect , a startup building an AI-powered thought partner.
As part of her work at re:collect, Alice builds software tools to enhance human creativity. She has an extensive knowledge of the research literature on what creativity is and how humans can do it better, and that's exactly what she writes about for us in this article. It's a detailed and actionable guide to the science of creativity and how to unlock it. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Creativity is our greatest human asset. Beyond the personal joy of creative expression, creative thinking and problem-solving are key drivers of economic growth . Even though plenty of people may not think of themselves as âcreatives,â everyone has the ability to think creatively. In that sense, it should be one of the great equalizers, especially as advances in AI and cheaper compute lower the bar for getting from a creative idea to a final output.
Even with the best tools available to turn our creative ideas into something more tangible, though, we still need to provide the initial seed of an idea and be able to judge whether weâre heading in the right direction. Weâre still the creative directors of our own minds.
Given this innate capability, how can we improve our creative thinking? As a scientist and a builder, Iâve taken the approach of understanding âthe systemâ and then looking at ways we can augment it. Understanding your own cognition makes it easier to change it.
The science of creativity
Creativity is the ability to produce an artifact or an idea that is both novel and useful given a particular social context (some definitions also include valuable as a necessary requirement). Novelty is an interesting concept if we take the position of, say, a child. In creativity research, it can mean that an idea has sprung from a connection that has never been made or is new to an individual but may be otherwise widely known.
Researchers generally believe that creativity is a two-part process. The first is to generate candidate ideas and make novel connections between them, and the second is to narrow down to the most useful one. The generative step in this process is divergent thinking . Itâs the ability to recall, associate, and combine a diverse set of information in novel ways to generate creative ideas. Convergent thinking takes into account goals and constraints to ensure that a given idea is useful . This part of the process typically follows divergent thinking and acts as a way to narrow in on a specific idea.
If you've been part of a "brainstorming" exercise, you've participated in this type of thinking. You may also have seen these concepts reframed as â flaring and focusing â or â explore vs. exploit .â
As our minds begin this dance between divergent and convergent thinking, we first need to have learned some information about how the world works and have some ideas to pull from. We can call our pile of ideas and experience knowledge . This makes memory a critical component of creativity. Memory is a complicated topic, but at a high level, as information related to languageâor semantic informationâand information related to your sensesâor perceptual informationâcomes into our minds, it is encoded in episodes , or periods of time.
As a memory moves from short-term to long-term storage, whatâs represented in that memory is associated with existing memories (aka â schemas â), and your overall understanding of the world shifts slightly. If information is related to what you already know, attaching it to an existing part of your schema helps you understand that information more quickly because youâve already seen something like it before. For instance, after you read this article, what you know about creativity will have changed. The way memories are associated makes it possible to connect your ideas later. In fact, recent evidence shows that semantic memory structureâhow we relate language-based conceptsâis one of the biggest predictors of creativity.
While we can study the output of our minds' creative processes by measuring how well people do on different tests of creativity, understanding how our brains give rise to the creative experience helps us understand the process more deeply and fills in a critical component that is thus far missingâattention.
Using neuroimaging techniques, scientists can peek into the black box of our brains and study what happens when someone is generating new ideas. For a moment, letâs assume we are such scientists. If we were to put our research participant (letâs call her Delilah) inside an fMRI scanner and ask her to come up with as many creative uses for a shoe while riding in a boat as she could in one minute, we would observe a volley of activity between specific brain networks .
When Delilah is coming up with all of these different uses (i.e., divergent thinking), a network of brain regions called the "default network" is activated. In brain imaging studies, this network shows the highest activation during spontaneous, self-generated thoughtâincluding mind wandering, which is specifically not related to a task. Delilahâs task doesnât necessarily call for self-generated thought, given weâve asked her to come up with these uses, but perhaps a stray thought about how hungry she is occurs to her, and now sheâs thought of a way to use the shoe to catch fish.
Governing this process is a "control network" that allows us to think flexibly, inhibit outside distractions, and pull from our memory. The control network would help Delilah rule out using the shoe to walk down 5th Avenue, but by also engaging her attention, it could help keep the noise of the fMRI machine from distracting her. You can think of this network as supporting our convergent thinking, like a biological example of the adage, âConstraints breed creativity.â
Switching between the default and control networks is thought to be governed by a " salience network ," which helps us to engage each one effectively. Higher creative thinking scores are correlated with greater coupling between these networks. If Delilah comes up with a long and useful list of uses for that shoe, we should observe that she has a more integrated semantic memory structure that represents her knowledge and more dense connections between her default, control, and salience networks. Huzzah! Good work, Delilah.
Now that we have a high-level understanding of the components and the system underpinning creative thinking, we can start to unpack how we might affect our own creative systems for the better.
Build a good âmemory bankâ full of materials for creation
Memories are the materials needed for creative thinking. Consuming other people's ideas in conversation by reading or listening to them (like you're doing now!) stimulates creativity and deepens existing associations. To widen our divergent thinking funnel, we could try and seek out new ideas that are maximally different from our own, but this typically wonât work. Itâs actually better to make incremental steps outside your own filter bubble because new information must overlap somewhat with what you already know to be effectively associated and assimilated. Read voraciously and engage deeply with a wide variety of content to build a richer memory bank for you to tap.
Interact with your materials
Our minds are efficient in the sense that if something isnât used, itâs not worth expending the resources to keep it readily available. If you read a lot but never revisit or use that information later, some of it may get into your memory, but the connections between the ideas in what youâve just read and your existing knowledge will likely be weak and fade over time. Taking notes, making highlights, and revisiting that material when itâs related to what youâre currently thinking about is a good way to maintain and strengthen connections. I think of consuming your own writing later as akin to a conversation with yourself through time that re-activates and situates that information in a new world where you've had more experience.
Another good way to interact with your materials is to use them actively. As I illustrated in Delilahâs divergent thinking task, quickly making connections is one of the hallmarks of a highly creative person. These connections can happen spontaneously, often during a period of mind wandering, when our attention is less focused, or during an engaging conversation, when weâre focused but someone elseâs ideas are helping spark our own that we can share.
A great way to revisit your materials with intention is by connecting new ideas ( perhaps as youâre reading ) to existing ones. If the connections donât suddenly and easily emerge, however, there are a plethora of tools and methods, like Zettlekasten , people employ to intentionally build connections, hoping for creative ideas to bubble up over time. Unfortunately, many of the software tools people use to record and make these connections, like Roam and Obsidian, fail in predictable ways . We can overcome some of these shortcomings using machine learning techniques that mimic the system Iâve laid out above.
While you should certainly set up some sort of creative practice, you canât force it too much. Connecting ideas on a schedule cannot replicate the serendipity that occurs as our ideas collide with our everyday mundane-seeming experiences, and often creative ideas will only spark after some period of creative incubation .
Mind your mood
Our mental state has a large influence on our creativity. The complete picture is nuanced , but the best state for doing creative thought work depends on the type of work, your attentional state, your mood, and how engaged you can be. In terms of your mood, itâs helpful to be in a positive affective mental stateâe.g., happy and not anxious. This doesnât mean that if youâre feeling a bit down, you wonât have any creative thoughts, but it does mean that you should be investing in your emotional well-being .
Attention is the key
In a productivity-obsessed culture, itâs easy to think that if we just buckle down and focus, we can churn out more creative thought work. Counterintuitively, the more we try and force ourselves to focus, the narrower our thinking may become. Mind wandering is what allows us to explore, retrieve, and experiment with connecting our memories in different ways. So give yourself a break the next time you feel like you're "spacing out."
Far from being too unfocused, with modern technology, weâve fallen prey to an attention economy that keeps us hyper-focused and often stuck in the memory collection part of the creative thinking processâforgoing the necessary mind wandering. Itâs a delicate balance between staying focused on your creative thought work by letting your control network do its job and not missing out on a potentially useful novel conversation happening behind you in the coffee shop.
Finally, all the understanding in the world of how your beautiful mind produces creative thought wonât get you any closer to doing creative work. You simply need to do it often , with intention, but not too much. As my childhood hero, Miss Frizzle , would say, âTake chances, make mistakes, and get messy.â
Alice Albrecht is the founder and CEO of re:collect , a startup building an AI-powered thought partner. She has more than 10 years of experience leading and advising teams building AI/ML-powered products. She holds a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from Yale University.
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Read this next:
Superorganizers
Following the White-Hot Fire Inside of You In the Studio with Painter Brian Rutenberg
â„ 145 đ Mar 17, 2022 by Kieran OâHare
Superorganizers
The Fall of Roam I donât use Roam anymore. Why?
â„ 198 Feb 12, 2022 by Dan Shipper
Superorganizers
How Josh Kaufman Does Research The author of The Personal MBA shares his process for finding answers hiding in plain sight â„ 184 đ Aug 20, 2020
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Subscribe. About. Foundersâ Letter. Publications. Collections. Contact Us. Become a Sponsor. Login. Superorganizers. The science of creativityâand how to unlock it. by Alice Albrecht. December 9, 2022. â„ 11. Listen. Hi allâDan here. Today, we have a guest article from Alice Albrecht . Alice is one of the smartest and most experienced under-the-radar builders in AI. She did a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at Yale and then spent 10 years in AI before becoming a founder. Today, she runs re:collect , a startup building an AI-powered thought partner. As part of her work at re:collect, Alice builds software tools to enhance human creativity. She has an extensive knowledge of the research literature on what creativity is and how humans can do it better, and that's exactly what she writes about for us in this article. It's a detailed and actionable guide to the science of creativity and how to unlock it. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Creativity is our greatest human asset. Beyond the personal joy of creative expression, creative thinking and problem-solving are key drivers of economic growth . Even though plenty of people may not think of themselves as âcreatives,â everyone has the ability to think creatively. In that sense, it should be one of the great equalizers, especially as advances in AI and cheaper compute lower the bar for getting from a creative idea to a final output. Even with the best tools available to turn our creative ideas into something more tangible, though, we still need to provide the initial seed of an idea and be able to judge whether weâre heading in the right direction. Weâre still the creative directors of our own minds. Given this innate capability, how can we improve our creative thinking? As a scientist and a builder, Iâve taken the approach of understanding âthe systemâ and then looking at ways we can augment it. Understanding your own cognition makes it easier to change it. The science of creativity. Creativity is the ability to produce an artifact or an idea that is both novel and useful given a particular social context (some definitions also include valuable as a necessary requirement). Novelty is an interesting concept if we take the position of, say, a child. In creativity research, it can mean that an idea has sprung from a connection that has never been made or is new to an individual but may be otherwise widely known. Researchers generally believe that creativity is a two-part process. The first is to generate candidate ideas and make novel connections between them, and the second is to narrow down to the most useful one. The generative step in this process is divergent thinking . Itâs the ability to recall, associate, and combine a diverse set of information in novel ways to generate creative ideas. Convergent thinking takes into account goals and constraints to ensure that a given idea is useful . This part of the process typically follows divergent thinking and acts as a way to narrow in on a specific idea. If you've been part of a "brainstorming" exercise, you've participated in this type of thinking. You may also have seen these concepts reframed as â flaring and focusing â or â explore vs. exploit .â As our minds begin this dance between divergent and convergent thinking, we first need to have learned some information about how the world works and have some ideas to pull from. We can call our pile of ideas and experience knowledge . This makes memory a critical component of creativity. Memory is a complicated topic, but at a high level, as information related to languageâor semantic informationâand information related to your sensesâor perceptual informationâcomes into our minds, it is encoded in episodes , or periods of time. As a memory moves from short-term to long-term storage, whatâs represented in that memory is associated with existing memories (aka â schemas â), and your overall understanding of the world shifts slightly. If information is related to what you already know, attaching it to an existing part of your schema helps you understand that information more quickly because youâve already seen something like it before. For instance, after you read this article, what you know about creativity will have changed. The way memories are associated makes it possible to connect your ideas later. In fact, recent evidence shows that semantic memory structureâhow we relate language-based conceptsâis one of the biggest predictors of creativity. While we can study the output of our minds' creative processes by measuring how well people do on different tests of creativity, understanding how our brains give rise to the creative experience helps us understand the process more deeply and fills in a critical component that is thus far missingâattention. Using neuroimaging techniques, scientists can peek into the black box of our brains and study what happens when someone is generating new ideas. For a moment, letâs assume we are such scientists. If we were to put our research participant (letâs call her Delilah) inside an fMRI scanner and ask her to come up with as many creative uses for a shoe while riding in a boat as she could in one minute, we would observe a volley of activity between specific brain networks . When Delilah is coming up with all of these different uses (i.e., divergent thinking), a network of brain regions called the "default network" is activated. In brain imaging studies, this network shows the highest activation during spontaneous, self-generated thoughtâincluding mind wandering, which is specifically not related to a task. Delilahâs task doesnât necessarily call for self-generated thought, given weâve asked her to come up with these uses, but perhaps a stray thought about how hungry she is occurs to her, and now sheâs thought of a way to use the shoe to catch fish. Governing this process is a "control network" that allows us to think flexibly, inhibit outside distractions, and pull from our memory. The control network would help Delilah rule out using the shoe to walk down 5th Avenue, but by also engaging her attention, it could help keep the noise of the fMRI machine from distracting her. You can think of this network as supporting our convergent thinking, like a biological example of the adage, âConstraints breed creativity.â Switching between the default and control networks is thought to be governed by a " salience network ," which helps us to engage each one effectively. Higher creative thinking scores are correlated with greater coupling between these networks. If Delilah comes up with a long and useful list of uses for that shoe, we should observe that she has a more integrated semantic memory structure that represents her knowledge and more dense connections between her default, control, and salience networks. Huzzah! Good work, Delilah. Now that we have a high-level understanding of the components and the system underpinning creative thinking, we can start to unpack how we might affect our own creative systems for the better. Build a good âmemory bankâ full of materials for creation. Memories are the materials needed for creative thinking. Consuming other people's ideas in conversation by reading or listening to them (like you're doing now!) stimulates creativity and deepens existing associations. To widen our divergent thinking funnel, we could try and seek out new ideas that are maximally different from our own, but this typically wonât work. Itâs actually better to make incremental steps outside your own filter bubble because new information must overlap somewhat with what you already know to be effectively associated and assimilated. Read voraciously and engage deeply with a wide variety of content to build a richer memory bank for you to tap. Interact with your materials. Our minds are efficient in the sense that if something isnât used, itâs not worth expending the resources to keep it readily available. If you read a lot but never revisit or use that information later, some of it may get into your memory, but the connections between the ideas in what youâve just read and your existing knowledge will likely be weak and fade over time. Taking notes, making highlights, and revisiting that material when itâs related to what youâre currently thinking about is a good way to maintain and strengthen connections. I think of consuming your own writing later as akin to a conversation with yourself through time that re-activates and situates that information in a new world where you've had more experience. Another good way to interact with your materials is to use them actively. As I illustrated in Delilahâs divergent thinking task, quickly making connections is one of the hallmarks of a highly creative person. These connections can happen spontaneously, often during a period of mind wandering, when our attention is less focused, or during an engaging conversation, when weâre focused but someone elseâs ideas are helping spark our own that we can share. A great way to revisit your materials with intention is by connecting new ideas ( perhaps as youâre reading ) to existing ones. If the connections donât suddenly and easily emerge, however, there are a plethora of tools and methods, like Zettlekasten , people employ to intentionally build connections, hoping for creative ideas to bubble up over time. Unfortunately, many of the software tools people use to record and make these connections, like Roam and Obsidian, fail in predictable ways . We can overcome some of these shortcomings using machine learning techniques that mimic the system Iâve laid out above. While you should certainly set up some sort of creative practice, you canât force it too much. Connecting ideas on a schedule cannot replicate the serendipity that occurs as our ideas collide with our everyday mundane-seeming experiences, and often creative ideas will only spark after some period of creative incubation . Mind your mood. Our mental state has a large influence on our creativity. The complete picture is nuanced , but the best state for doing creative thought work depends on the type of work, your attentional state, your mood, and how engaged you can be. In terms of your mood, itâs helpful to be in a positive affective mental stateâe.g., happy and not anxious. This doesnât mean that if youâre feeling a bit down, you wonât have any creative thoughts, but it does mean that you should be investing in your emotional well-being . Attention is the key. In a productivity-obsessed culture, itâs easy to think that if we just buckle down and focus, we can churn out more creative thought work. Counterintuitively, the more we try and force ourselves to focus, the narrower our thinking may become. Mind wandering is what allows us to explore, retrieve, and experiment with connecting our memories in different ways. So give yourself a break the next time you feel like you're "spacing out." Far from being too unfocused, with modern technology, weâve fallen prey to an attention economy that keeps us hyper-focused and often stuck in the memory collection part of the creative thinking processâforgoing the necessary mind wandering. Itâs a delicate balance between staying focused on your creative thought work by letting your control network do its job and not missing out on a potentially useful novel conversation happening behind you in the coffee shop. Finally, all the understanding in the world of how your beautiful mind produces creative thought wonât get you any closer to doing creative work. You simply need to do it often , with intention, but not too much. As my childhood hero, Miss Frizzle , would say, âTake chances, make mistakes, and get messy.â Alice Albrecht is the founder and CEO of re:collect , a startup building an AI-powered thought partner. She has more than 10 years of experience leading and advising teams building AI/ML-powered products. She holds a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from Yale University. What did you think of this post? Amazing. Good. Meh. Bad. login. sign up. Like this? Become a subscriber. Subscribe â. Or, learn more . Read this next: Superorganizers. Following the White-Hot Fire Inside of You In the Studio with Painter Brian Rutenberg. â„ 145 đ Mar 17, 2022 by Kieran OâHare. Superorganizers. The Fall of Roam I donât use Roam anymore. Why? â„ 198 Feb 12, 2022 by Dan Shipper. Superorganizers. How Josh Kaufman Does Research The author of The Personal MBA shares his process for finding answers hiding in plain sight â„ 184 đ Aug 20, 2020. Comments. login. Sign up! Thanks for reading Every! Sign up for our daily email featuring the most interesting thinking (and thinkers) in tech. Subscribe. Already a subscriber? Login. Contact Us · Become a Sponsor · Search · Terms. ©2022 Every Media, Inc.