Hacking your brain for creativity

#brainhacking #neuroscience #brain #brainscience #personaldevelopment #creativity #innovation

© 2024 Zoryna O’Donnell

This article was first published by The Maverick Paradox Magazine on 21/04/2024

Whether or not we are thinking about ourselves as creative individuals, our brains are built for creativity. We all have this innate ability to produce original and unusual ideas, or to make something new or imaginative.

“I believe creativity is part of what it means to be human. We all have it. Most of us need to fulfil more of it,” said Dr Mark Runco, Director of Creativity Research and Programming at Southern Oregon University.

When we think about creativity, we often associate it with the arts first and foremost. Yet our everyday life provides plenty of opportunities for our creative expressions – from adapting our favourite recipes to the contents of our cupboards to uncommon uses of available tools in our garages and coming up with clever jokes to entertain our friends or kids.

Creativity is a whole brain process which involves cognition, emotion and conscious and unconscious processing. The Neuroscience of Creativity book by Dr Anna Abraham gives fascinating insights into the intricate workings of our creative minds and explains what happens in our brains when we operate in a creative mode as opposed to an uncreative mode.

In his article The Creative Brain, Dr Roger Beaty from the Cognitive Neuroscience of Creativity Laboratory(CNCL) at Penn State University examines the part of the brain that directs creative thinking and asks the million-dollar question: Can creativity be enhanced?

So far, research in psychology and neuroscience has made significant progress in our understanding of creativity and how the creative brain works. Among other things, it established that, at least short-term (i.e. state) creativity can be boosted by a number of strategies, or “brain hacks”. …

Please read the entire article here. [ https://themaverickparadox.com/hacking-your-brain-for-creativity/ ]

Image credit: geralt via Pixabay.