![]() Yet research led by psychologist Paul Paulus, PhD, of the University of Texas at Arlington, points to the surprising effectiveness of group "brainwriting," in which group members write their ideas on paper and pass them to others in the group who then add their own ideas to the list. Instead of working together to generate great ideas, group members often fail to share their ideas for fear of rejection. Plucker notes that much psychological research has shown that we overestimate the success of group brainstorming. Eight hours later, when participants returned for retesting, those who had slept during the break were more than twice as likely to figure out a simpler way to solve the problem than those who had not slept.Ĭollaborate-in writing. Researchers at the University of Lübeck in Germany trained participants to solve a long, tedious math problem. ![]() 6,972) also shows just how powerful sleep may be in helping people solve problems. "We're in a different biochemical state when we're dreaming, and that's why I think dreams can be so helpful anytime we're stuck in our usual mode of thinking," Barrett says.Ī 2004 study in Nature (Vol. 2), half of the participants reported having dreams that addressed their chosen problems, and a quarter came up with solutions in their dreams. In the study, published in Dreaming (Vol. In a 1993 study at Harvard Medical School, psychologist Deidre Barrett, PhD, asked her students to imagine a problem they were trying to solve before going to sleep and found that they were able to come up with novel solutions in their dreams. For instance, creativity researchers suggest you: Many practices that lead to better overall well-being also boost innovative thinking. Eight months later, the employees had increased their rate of new idea generation by 55 percent-a feat that led to more than $600,000 in new revenue and a savings of about $3.5 million through innovative cost reductions. Seventy-four city employees from Orange County, Calif., participated in creativity training seminars consisting of games and exercises developed by Epstein to strengthen their proficiency in these four skill sets. 1), found that working on these four areas enhances creativity. You can also keep your thoughts lively by taking a trip to an art museum or attending an opera-anything that stimulates new thinking.Ī study last year in the Creativity Research Journal (Vol. Regular dinners with diverse and interesting friends and a work space festooned with out-of-the-ordinary objects will help you develop more original ideas, Epstein says. Surround yourself with interesting things and people. "You'll do better in psychology and life if you broaden your knowledge." "Ask for permission to sit in on lectures for a class on 12th century architecture and take notes," he suggests. This makes more diverse knowledge available for interconnection, he says, which is the basis for all creative thought. Take a class outside psychology or read journals in unrelated fields, suggests Epstein. This causes old ideas to compete, which helps generate new ones.īroaden your knowledge. Take on projects that don't necessarily have a solution-such as trying to figure out how to make your dog fly or how to build a perfect model of the brain. Keep an idea notebook or voice recorder with you, type in new thoughts on your laptop or write ideas down on a napkin. "Making it one helps you become more productive."Ĭapture your new ideas. "As strange as it sounds, creativity can become a habit," says creativity researcher Jonathan Plucker, PhD, a psychology professor at Indiana University. Instead, he says, creativity is something that anyone can cultivate.Įpstein, a visiting scholar at the University of California, San Diego, has conducted research showing that strengthening four core skill sets leads to an increase in novel ideas. Collaborating with other researchers, finding a subfield that excites you, maneuvering your way through an unexpected set of findings, and balancing the demands of your work and home life all require creative problem-solving.ĭespite the widely held belief that some people just aren't endowed with the creativity gene, "There's not really any evidence that one person is inherently more creative than another," Epstein says. ![]() Yet it's almost impossible to conquer any graduate school activity without at least some innovative thinking. It's detrimental to creative expression," says Epstein, author of "The Big Book of Creativity Games" (McGraw-Hill, 2000). "When you're in graduate school, there are so many constraints on you. Unfortunately, graduate school has both in spades, and that can sap the inspiration of even the most imaginative students. Stress is a well-known creativity killer, says psychologist Robert Epstein, PhD.
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