Your Brain: The Missing Manual

Creative Thinking Tools

Creative thinking tools are tricks that help you break out of the shackles of ordinary thinking. They short-circuit the highly efficient but somewhat single-minded patterns of automatic thought that rule your life.

Creative thinking tools are particularly useful when you need to solve lateral thinking problems (like the challenges described in the previous section) and when you're looking for a new way to attack an intractable problem. You can think of them as recipes designed to help you cook up new ideas. They aim to:

• Stimulate your creative side. If you generate enough new ideas, eventually one of them will make sense.

• Distract you from your biases. Games, role playing, and other tricks help you ease the focus away from yourself. That way, your instincts and opinions won't limit the alternatives you consider.

• Reframe the problem. Often, your brain traps a problem in a web of assumptions. By taking a radically different perspective, you can shake it free.

Note

Studies of improvising jazz musicians suggest that when you get creative, part of your prefrontal cortex shuts down. In other words, the executive centers of planning, judging, and control need to get out of the way when it's time for a creative jam session.

The Art of Provocation

The most creative problem solving begins when you challenge an existing assumption with a new idea. Unfortunately, it's all too easy to rule out an apparently absurd new direction before it gets off the ground. To check this habit, ...