The Power of Creative Intelligence: 10 ways to tap into your creative genius
The Power of Creative Intelligence: 10 ways to tap into your creative genius
Tony Buzan
10 ways to tap into your creative geniusDid you know the number of ideas it is possible for your brain to create is greater than the number of atoms in the known universe? Creativity is not just painting a picture or playing an instrument – it can be part of every decision you take! This book is full of fun games and tools to help you make the most of your own creativity. When you are creative, you are full of energy, enthusiasm, and ideas. Using the famous Mind Map techniques that he invented, Tony Buzan shows you how to learn from geniuses like Leonardo Da Vinci and the Beatles, so you can be:• Fluent – develop the speed and ease with which you come up with new and creative ideas.• Flexible – your ability to see things from different angles, including your ability to use all your senses in the creation of new ideas.• Original – At the heart of creative thinking, lies your power to produce ideas that are both unique and unusual.• Expansive – develop your ideas and push them to their limits.So go on – take a break from the norm!
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First published 2001
Copyright © Tony Buzan 2001
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is a registered trademark of the Buzan Group Original Mind Map concept © Tony Buzan
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Text illustrations by Alan Burton and Jennie Dooge
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Dedication (#ulink_7a46ceba-beae-535d-b041-41e40993d88d)
The Power of Creative Intelligence is fondly and warmly dedicated to Lesley and Teri Bias; my mum, Jean Buzan; Lorraine Gill, Vanda North, Nicky and Strilli Oppenheimer, Dr Petite Rao, Caroline Shott and Carole Tonkinson for their creativity, dedication and hard work in making this little book come true.
Contents
Cover (#uf5e8176b-16f2-55cc-ad22-80c006ff229d)
Title Page (#ue7f3a2cd-6e23-55fa-918d-a58039bd65a3)
Copyright (#ulink_d3c08a88-7964-563f-b93c-7d11fd913070)
Dedication (#ulink_7657b990-7969-5fa2-92d3-7950c5ddf362)
Chapter 1: Introduction – Beginning Your Creativity Journey
Chapter 2: Using Your Magical Left and Right Brains
Chapter 3: Infinite Creativity – Mapping Your Mind with Mind-Maps
Chapter 4: You the Creative Artist
Chapter 5: You the Creative Musician
Chapter 6: Creative Productivity – The Power of Volume and Speed
Chapter 7: Creative Flexibility and Originality
Chapter 8: Your Brain: The Ultimate ‘Association Machine’ – Expansive and Radiant Thinking
Chapter 9: You and Shakespeare – Poets Both!
Chapter 10: Only Kidding
Congratulations! (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Other Books By (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#ulink_d3e60e1e-d960-5f8c-a62f-a04f1ffe6ddc)
do you/did you/are you/would you?!
How creative do you think you are? To get some (probably surprising) idea of your own creativity, consider the following questions, and ask yourself:
1. Do you daydream? YES/NO
2. Do you plan menus and cook meals for yourself, your family or friends? YES/NO
3. Do you mix and match colours, fabrics and accessories when buying clothes to create your own unique style? YES/NO
4. Do you like many different kinds of music? YES/NO
5. Do you remember with pleasure, highlights of your life, including special times spent with friends, great sporting moments, outstanding holidays, any significant ‘disasters’ or triumphs in your life? YES/NO
6. Did you ask lots of questions when you were a child? YES/NO
7. Do you still ask lots of questions? YES/NO
8. Do you sometimes wonder at the complexity or beauty of things, and wish you could figure out how it works/was made/came about/came into your life? YES/NO
9. Do you have sexual fantasies? YES/NO
10. Do you have newspapers, magazines or books in your home that you have promised yourself you would read, but for which you have not yet managed to find the time? YES/NO
11. Are there other things in your life you have promised yourself you would do or accomplish, to which you have not yet got around? YES/NO
12. Are you moved or excited by superlative performances in the fields of music, sports, acting or the arts? YES/NO
13. Would you say ‘yes’, if I could wave a magic wand and suddenly:
make you a fit, flexible and superb dancer, able to ‘wow ’em’ at any dance function? YES/NO
gave you a voice equal to your favourite singer, able to sing virtually any song to your own satisfaction and to the pleasure and amazement of others? YES/NO
make you a competent artist, able to rattle off cartoons and sketches, landscapes and portraits, and able to sculpt so well that Michelangelo himself might consider you a worthy student? YES/NO
make you a great story and joke-teller, able to mesmerize and enchant people with your tales, and able to reduce them all to helpless laughter with your brilliant jokes? YES/NO
14 Are you alive?!! YES/NO
If you answered ‘YES’ to more than half these questions, then you are, by definition, Creative.
Just how creative will be revealed as you continue your journey through The Power of Creative Intelligence. But to give you some indication, let’s look at a couple of the questions that may have seemed a bit strange:
Do you have newspapers, magazines or books in your home that you have promised yourself you would read, but for which you have not yet managed to find the time?Over 95 per cent of people answer ‘YES’ to this question, thinking that it means that they are merely very good at procrastinating! They are – but they are also very creative! Think about it. Every day, for weeks, months or years, their brains have been creating the most fantastic excuses for not getting down to reading. It is irrelevant that their creativity is directed towards not doing something – it is still exceptional creativity, and is such a limitless power-source that it can sometimes go on for a lifetime!
Which brings us to the question:
Are you alive?This may seem somewhat obvious, but the question conceals a deep and meaningful truth. Every day of your life, if you are to survive that day, your amazing brain has to create tens of thousands of thoughts, actions and solutions to problems that, if it did not, would end your time on this earth. The mere fact that you are alive proves that you are abundantly creative.
Increasing and releasing the gigantic Creative Intelligence you possess is simply a matter of understanding how it works and how to develop it. This little book will show you how.
what is creative intelligence?
Your Creative Intelligence is your ability to come up with new ideas, to solve problems in original ways, and to stand head and shoulders above the crowd in terms of your imagination, your behaviour, and in your productivity.
Your Creative Intelligence includes a number of factors, all of which can be taught and developed so that you can increase your creativity. The Power of Creative Intelligence will introduce you to each one of these factors in turn, and will show you how to develop and enhance them. These factors include:
1 The Left/Right Brain. The ability to use, in conjunction with each other, the different skills of the left and right sides of your brain.
2 Note-making/Mind-Mapping®. The ability to ‘make your thoughts visible’ by getting them out of your head and on to paper, so that you can explore them more fully.
3 Fluency. The speed with which you can rattle off new ideas. Fluency is the measure of your creative productivity.
4 Flexibility. Your ability to produce different kinds of ideas, and to shift from one approach to another using a rich variety of strategies, constitutes your creative flexibility. Flexibility includes your ability to see things from different angles, to consider things from other points of view, to take old concepts and rearrange them in new ways, and to reverse pre-existing ideas. It also includes your ability to use all your senses when creating new ideas.
5 Originality. Originality is one of the essences of Creative Intelligence and creative thinking. It represents your ability to produce ideas that are yours alone – that are unusual, unique and ‘eccentric’ (i.e., ‘away from the centre’).
6 Expanding on Ideas. The good creative thinker takes a central idea and builds on it in all directions, developing, expanding, embroidering and generally elaborating the original thought.
7 Association. The creative thinker makes use of the fact that the human brain is a giant ‘Association Machine’. Having some intuitive knowledge of how this Association Machine works (and you will have some very explicit knowledge, having read this book!), creative thinkers are able to tap into this infinite resource to improve all aspects of their Creativity.
an overview of the power of creative intelligence
The Power of Creative Intelligence is designed to take you on a Grand Tour of Creativity, showing you how you can expand and increase the power of your Creative Thinking at each stage of your journey. The following chapters contain potted case histories and stories of individuals who have exemplified the qualities being discussed. There is also a Creativity Workout in each chapter, where you can try your hand at specific exercises designed to make you smarter. Each exercise, while developing the specific Creative Intelligence skill area for which it is designed, will (thanks to the way the brain is an infinitely expanding and inter-connecting association machine!) simultaneously develop the mental muscles of your other Creative Intelligence skill areas.
The chapters also explain how you can use Mind-Maps
to develop your Creative Intelligence, and give examples of those ultimate creativity-enhancing thinking tools, which I have spent my life developing. There are also many other diagrams and illustrations that use the principles of Creativity to help you improve yours.
Here is an overview of the rest of the book.
Chapter 2 – Using Your Magical Left and Right Brains
In this chapter I will take you on a supersonic flight over the past 50 years of research into this fascinating aspect of Creativity. You will discover new insights into the nature of Creative Intelligence, and will learn how to use these insights to develop dramatically your creative thinking.
Chapter 3 – Infinite Creativity – Mapping Your Mind with Mind-Maps
This chapter introduces you to the ultimate Creative Thinking tool, the Mind-Map
. I will show you how to become a master-user of what has been termed the ‘Swiss army knife for the brain’.
Chapter 4 – You the Creative Artist
Who said that you can’t draw? You can!
Here I will explore with you the reasons why over 99 per cent of people will claim that they can’t draw, and why they are mistaken. I will then introduce you to the two ultimate art teachers: Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Each of them worked out his own superbly simple and successful creativity methods that you can use to find the artist within you. You will also discover that, so far in your life, you have created millions of masterpieces of which you have been unaware!
Chapter 5 – You the Creative Musician
As with art, most people assume that they are not ‘musical’ and more than 95 per cent of us are convinced that we cannot sing a song in tune. As with art, this is not true.
In this chapter, I will explain to you why these false beliefs exist, how you can overcome them and how to release the naturally creative musician within you. You will discover that you have been singing well for most of your life, and that there are some extremely encouraging lessons you can learn from the birds!
Chapter 6 – Creative Productivity – The Power of Volume and Speed
Your creative productivity – the number or fluency of ideas you can generate in a given time – is a major factor in Creative Intelligence. In this chapter I will show you how you can increase your own productivity by following the methods used by the great creative geniuses.
Chapter 7 – Creative Flexibility and Originality
The prime reason people get stuck in their pursuit of creativity is that they have been taught to think in only one basic way. This becomes a hole out of which it is difficult to dig themselves. In this chapter I will show you many techniques for seeing with ‘fresh eyes’ – for looking at things from different angles and from many diverse points of view; techniques that all the great creative thinking geniuses used to trigger their world-transforming ideas.
How often do you hear people saying of a great creative genius that he or she is ‘one of a kind’; ‘a one off’; ‘unique’; ‘incomparable’? This quality of uniqueness is a cornerstone of creative thinking. I will demonstrate that you are already much more unique than you think, and will show you ways of developing your originality that will amaze both you and your friends.
Chapter 8 – Your Brain: The Ultimate ‘Association Machine’ – Expansive and Radiant Thinking
Creative Intelligence is based on your ability to make associations between many different thoughts and ideas. The average person makes far fewer associations than are possible. In this chapter I will guide you through an enthralling association game; as it progresses, you will increasingly realize new ways to develop your own powers of association, and will discover something amazing about your brain’s ability to make connections.
Chapter 9 – You and Shakespeare – Poets Both!
For many people poetry, like painting and music, is a ‘special art’ that is the precious privilege of only a very few gifted individuals. This is a romantic and false belief. You are a poet!
In Chapter 9 I will guide you back to your poetic soul, showing how you can apply all the lessons you have learnt so far from The Power of Creative Intelligence to produce your own poetry.
Chapter 10 – Only Kidding
Why is it that children are the best and fastest learners? Why is it that children are considered to be more creative than adults? Why do so many of the great artists (like Picasso, for example) try to ‘get back’ their childhood creativity?
In this chapter I will answer all those questions, and show you how to rediscover the child and the creative genius within you.
Throughout The Power of Creative Intelligence, you will have one other special guide: Leonardo da Vinci – voted the greatest Creative Genius of the last millennium!
Chapter Two (#ulink_3e2f0b14-42ee-5362-88d2-88e86086b0b5)
In this Chapter you will be given state-of-the-art information about your left and right brains, and how you can combine the two sides to multiply, phenomenally, your Creative Power.
We are going to go on a supersonic flight over the past 50 years of research on the brain. The journey starts in the laboratory of Professor Roger Sperry in California, and describes the research that won him a Nobel Prize in 1981, and which will make you delightfully aware of hidden creative capacities waiting to be unleashed by you.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Professor Sperry was investigating brainwave function. To explore different thinking activities and their effect on the brainwaves, Sperry and his colleagues asked the volunteers to perform different mental tasks, ranging from adding and subtracting numbers in their heads, through to reading poetry, reciting memorized lines, doodling, looking at different colours, drawing cubes, analysing logical problems and daydreaming.
Sperry had predicted that the brainwaves would be somewhat different for different activities, and he was correct. What he had not predicted – and this finding changed forever the way we think about the potential of the human brain and its ability to think creatively – was the following startling revelation: on average, the brain divided its activities very distinctly into ‘left brain’ (left cortex) activities and ‘right brain’ (right cortex) activities. This is the research that has become popularly known as the ‘left/right brain’ research.
The dominant division of labour was as follows:
Sperry also discovered that when the right cortex was active, the left tended to go into a relatively restful or meditative state. Similarly when the left cortex was active, the right became more relaxed and calm.
Furthermore, and this came as a real surprise (as well as a beacon of hope), every brain involved in this brainwave experiment was shown to have all the cortical skills in fine working order. In other words, at the basic physical, physiological and potential level, everybody had a massive range of intellectual, thinking and creative skills that they were obviously using only in part.
By the 1970s, these results had led to an explosion of further researches, studies and surveys around the nature of this untapped potential.
One obvious line of investigation (with which I was personally involved) was to survey people on what they thought about their own abilities, and then to check these perceived abilities/disabilities with their real brainwave-measured capacities.
Here is one survey for you to try yourself.
Left/Right Brain Self-check
Would you find it virtually impossible (almost genetically impossible) to calculate quickly and accurately, the proportion of interest to capital still owing on your mortgage, for example, or the area of your garden as a proportion of the total area of your house and garden? YES/NO
Would you find it virtually impossible to draw portraits that looked like the person being drawn, to paint landscapes, master dimension and perspective, understand the history of art and make realistic and abstract sculptures? YES/NO
Would you find it virtually impossible to compose music and songs, identify different classical composers by just a few notes from their works, dance to music in time, and sing songs where every note you sang was the note as it should have been sung? YES/NO
You will probably be relieved to know that over 90 per cent of people surveyed were confident that they were genetically incapable of accomplishments in these three vital areas of numerical, artistic and musical skills.
You will hopefully be pleased and encouraged to know that they were all wrong!
Subsequent research discovered that when people were trained – by good teachers – in those areas of skill that they had assumed to be weak, they suddenly became much stronger in those areas. It was very much like identifying a weak muscle group that was weak not because the muscles themselves were fundamentally incapable, but simply because they had not been used for a long time.
This was not all: in addition to everyone being able to develop areas that they had previously considered weak, another amazing finding soon began to emerge. With the new ‘mental muscle’ now in place, the other ‘mental muscles’ all began to improve their performance.
Thus, for example, if people who had been weak in imagery and art, were trained to be competent in that field, they suddenly became more skilled with words, more able to manipulate numbers and, generally, more creative. Similarly, if people who had been weak in numerical ability were trained to strengthen this area, their imagination and musical abilities also improved.
What appeared to be happening was that the left and right sides of the brain were having ‘conversations’ with each other. The left brain would receive information and send it over to the right brain, which would process the information in its own way, and then send it back to the left side, and so on. By this process the brain was synergetically building up information, and adding to its own intellectual and creative power by combining the different elements. By the early 1980s, the left/right brain paradigm was becoming known around the globe, and books were beginning to be written about this extraordinary discovery.
Then came the difficulties.
problem number 1
You may have heard that the left-brain activities were generally labelled as ‘intellectual’, ‘academic’, or ‘business’ activities, and that the right-brain activities were correspondingly labelled the ‘artistic’, ‘creative’, and ‘emotional’ activities.
However, if all this research is true, and if by using both sides of our brains our overall intelligence and creativity rises, then by definition the great creative geniuses must have been using the same mental process – and their whole brains. But if the above labelling of the right and left activities of the brain is correct, then academics and intellectuals such as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein would have been ‘left brained’, and musicians and artists such as Beethoven and Michelangelo would have been ‘right brained’ – in other words, they would not have been using all of their brains at all!
More research was obviously required to shed light on this growing controversy. I and a number of other passionately curious individuals began to gather data on the great creative geniuses, and to relate it to the left/right brain model.
What do you think we found? We discovered this about ‘left-brained’ Einstein:
Case History – Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was nominated as the greatest creative genius of the 20th century. However, he was a poor student, preferring daydreaming to studying, and was eventually expelled from school for being a ‘disruptive influence’.
As a teenager he became inspired by the imaginative side of mathematics and physics, and was equally interested by the work of Michelangelo, whom he studied in depth. These mutual interests encouraged him to play even further with his imagination, and he developed his now-famous ‘Creative Mind Games’ in which he posed himself an intriguing question, and then allowed his imagination to run riot.
In one of his most famous Creative Mind Games, Einstein imagined that he was on the surface of the sun, grabbing a sunbeam, and travelling directly away from the sun at the speed of light, to the very ends of the universe.
When he came to the ‘end’ of his journey, he noticed to his astonishment that he was roughly back where he had started. This was logically impossible: you don’t go in a straight line forever and end up where you started!
Einstein therefore took another imaginary sunbeam ride from another part of the sun’s surface, and again went on a straight-line journey to the end of the universe. Once again he ended up relatively near where he had started.
Slowly the truth dawned on him: his imagination had told him more truths than his logic. If you travel in straight lines ‘forever’ and continually return to the vicinity of where you started, then ‘forever’ must be at least two things: curved in some way, and possessing a boundary.
This was how Einstein came to one of his most profound insights: our universe is a curved and finite universe. He did not come to this giant creative realization by left-brain thinking alone, but by combining his knowledge of number, word, order, logic and analysis with his massive imagination, spatial awareness and ability to see the whole picture.
His insight was a perfect blending and conversation between both sides of his brain. It was a perfect ‘whole-brained’ creative realization.
The same turned out to be true, in reverse, for the ‘right-brained’ creative geniuses. Let us take, for example, the ‘ultimate’ right-brainer, Ludwig van Beethoven.
Case History – Ludwig van Beethoven
Beethoven is known for his turbulent, questioning and passionate spirit, for his desire for freedom from tyranny and censorship and for his ongoing fight for freedom of artistic expression. He is generally accepted as the ‘perfect’ example of the wild and untamed model of genius.
All of this is true, and fits in with the traditional interpretation of the right-brained creative genius. However, what has escaped most people’s attention is that Beethoven, like all other musicians, was also incredibly left-brained!
Consider the nature of music: it is written on lines, in sequence; it follows its own logic; and it is based on numbers. Music has often been described as the most pure form of mathematics there is (and it is interesting to note that many of the great mathematicians had music as their main hobby, and vice-versa).
As well as being passionately imaginative and rhythmical, Beethoven was also passionately meticulous. It was Beethoven who pioneered the use of the musical metronome, stating that it was a Godsend to him because it would now mean that every musician and conductor in the future would be able to play his music at precisely the right rhythm, with precisely the right emphasis, and at exactly the right mathematical tempo!
As with Einstein, Beethoven was neither right-brained or left-brained. He was completely and creatively whole-brained.
My research into the great creative geniuses confirmed that they all used the ‘whole brain’ – the full range of their cortical skills, where each skill supplemented and supported the others.
These findings shed light on the second big problem with the research and its assumptions.
problem number 2
The second problem was a major one. The left brain ‘intellectual’ activities tended to be labelled ‘male’ activities, and right brain ‘creative’, and ‘emotional’ activities came to be seen as ‘female’ activities. This was comprehensively and dangerously wrong!
These labels simply extended and ‘confirmed’ the centuries-old beliefs that:
academics, education and intellectuality involved only words, number and logic and not imagination, colour and rhythm
business was a place for strict order only
men were logical, rational individuals with no emotion, imagination or ‘colour’
women were irrational daydreamers
emotion was not based on associative logic
creativity and art were not ‘proper’ pursuits, and had no rationality or science behind them.
The tragedy of these misconceptions, which sadly are still common today and which The Power of Creative Intelligence will help to dispel, is that they blind the mind to the truth, and therefore diminish pleasure, experience and existence.
Unfortunately these misconceptions are especially prevalent in the arena of education. Because we assume that education has to be ‘left-brained’, we label those children who are energetic, imaginative, colourful, curious or given to excessive bouts of daydreaming as naughty, disruptive, hyperactive, slow or backward. We should instead be labelling them as potential creative geniuses just beginning to explore the range of their abilities!
Similarly many businesses have become stuck in the ‘left-brained’ rut, and as a result are destroying not only the synergy that comes from combining left-brain business practices with imagination and flair, but also their reputations and their bottom lines.
Consider also, in the context of this book, the global image of the artist. Surveys have shown that most people consider artists to be messy, untidy, dishevelled, weak in logic and memory, and lacking in structural and organizational skills.
Sadly millions of art students around the world try to live ‘up’ (it’s actually down!) to this ‘ideal’ vision of the artist. As a result they reject words, number, logic, order and structure, and create only passing images in their minds.
left/right brain thinking in the 21
century
As the Century of the Brain begins, we now realize that the creative brain is the whole brain. Furthermore, we realize that our earlier acknowledgement of our labelling mistakes has led us to an awareness that our creative potential is even greater than we had thought.
A simple question and comparison will make this clear.
If we have been using only half of the skills of the brain, at what percentage efficiency have we been operating?
The immediate answer would appear to be 50 per cent. This indicates that we have been making ourselves into half-wits! However, even this is an overestimation, as a simple example makes clear.
If I said to you that I wanted to measure your efficiency at running, and in Trial 1 I allowed you to use 100 per cent of your body, including arms and legs. Imagine how you would do if I videoed your running style and then examined it for mechanical efficiency. Most of us would score pretty highly.
Imagine now that in Trial 2 I allowed you only 50 per cent of your operating potential, and tied your right hand and foot together, behind your back. How would you do? You’d be flat on your face within a couple of seconds! Efficiency? Less than zero.
Why? Because the parts of your body are made to work together, and in so doing each part multiplies a thousand-fold the efficiency of the other.
It is the same with your brain. When you use only one side of your cortical skills, your creativity is nothing in comparison to what it can be. When you use both sides, your creative potential becomes infinite.
In the Creativity Workout that follows, and in the remaining chapters, I will explore methods of unleashing that infinite creative potential.
creativity workout
1. Use the Whole-brain Skills Set to Examine your Life
Check how many of your left-brain skills you normally use and nurture. Next do the same with your right-brain skills. Pay attention to any of those right or left-brain areas that you are neglecting and begin to exercise and strengthen them right away.
2. Education
If you have children, apply whole-brain thinking to their entire education, including school, social and home-life education. Try to help your children achieve a balanced education, in order that they may lead far more creative and fulfilled lives.
Not only that – apply the same principles to your own ongoing, life-long learning, so that you may lead a more creative and fulfilled life too.
3. Take Breaks
Surprisingly, whole-brain thinking demands that if you are going to be fully and truly creative, you must take regular breaks.
Think about it: where are you when you come up with those bursts of imagination, those solutions to problems, those great fantasies and daydreams? Most people’s answers include some or all of the following:
in the bath
in the shower
walking in the country
before going to sleep
while asleep
upon waking up
while listening to music
on a long-distance drive
while out running
while swimming
lying on the beach
when ‘idly’ doodling
In what state are your body and mind at such times? Relaxed, and often alone.
It is in these rest-periods that the two sides of your brain are able to converse and communicate with each other, and when the vast wellspring of your creativity is allowed to express itself.
If you don’t decide consciously to take these breaks, your brain will decide for you. Many ‘hard working’ (but not ‘smart working’) people report that, as the years go on, they become more stressed and their concentration begins to wander. This is actually a good thing, for it is their right brains insisting that a little bit of imagination and fantasy should be allowed in to balance an unbalanced state.
If you are in this situation and you continue to persist in pushing your left-brain-dominant lifestyle, your brain will make you take other kinds of breaks, ranging from losses of concentration, to mini-breakdowns in which you become unreasonably irascible, to full blown blow-outs where the only cure is … rest and relaxation!
Do it consciously. Give your brain and yourself a break. Your Creative Intelligence will love you for it.
4. Go for Long Walks or Rambles
The Romans had a special phrase, solvitas perambulum, which can be roughly translated as ‘solve it while you walk’. What they had realized, although obviously not in left/right-brain terms, was that if you take your brain for a walk, especially outside in the country, the steady rhythm of your limbs’ movement, the regular rhythm of your heart pumping more strongly, doses of oxygen-filled blood flowing into your brain, and the feast that your eyes, ears and other senses have while you walk, all contribute to creative thinking and problem solving.
If you have a creative task or problem upon which you are working, ‘Walk it Out’ and you’ll ‘Work it Out’!
5. Be Creative in your Everyday Life
Using a pen and paper, list those areas in your everyday life that you think are creative, and those that you think are not creative. When you have finished, read on.
The ideal answer to the above exercise is that all aspects of your daily life are intrinsically creative, and that all of them can be enhanced by applying more of the full range of your left and right-brain skills. Consider the following everyday activities; they are all dependent upon Creativity:
cooking
decorating
D.I.Y. and home improvements
photography
gardening
route finding and map reading
carpentry
flower arranging
budgeting for special events/expenses
relationships
gift wrapping
letter and message writing
setting a table
arranging house plants
looking after and training pets
planning holidays and special events
planning meetings
playing football, or any other sport
Each one of these activities can be made more interesting and creative by adding the ‘spices’ of the left and right-brain skills.
In this creative arena, little things can mean a lot. Gathering shells and driftwood from a beach and displaying them in your home, or using it for wood-turning; making patchwork quilts from a multitude of scraps of otherwise useless material; decorating your dinner table by putting a flower on each person’s plate and using shells from the beach from which to serve your salt and pepper; or finding new and different routes to get to work each week, are all things that take little effort, and which add immeasurably to the creative feel of your life.
Holiday times and seasonal celebrations especially, are wonderful opportunities for displaying your Creative Intelligence. Make it a Creative Feast with decorations, visual beauty and visual humour. Create your own cards and gifts to give to people, or plan a dinner party for your friends – the possibilities are endless!
6. Your Mastermind Group
All the great creative geniuses had heroes or heroines to whom they looked for inspiration. Alexander the Great had his tutor Aristotle; Julius Caesar had Alexander the Great; all the great geniuses of the Italian Renaissance had the examples of Classical antiquity; the Russian Empress Catherine the Great looked to Peter the Great for inspiration; Mohammed Ali had Sugar Ray Robinson; Isaac Newton had Socrates; Stephen Hawking had Isaac Newton, and so on, throughout the pantheon of genius.
The technique the creative greats used was to hold imaginary conversations with their heroes, asking them for ‘thoughts’ and inspiration. This Creative Thinking technique can be used for pursuing mighty scientific and cultural goals, and it can also be used by everyone in their normal daily lives.
I have personally found this technique exceptionally valuable in my life, and have used it successfully for over 20 years. It has allowed me to be especially creative whenever I have encountered any major opportunity or problem. The way I use this technique is as follows: when confronted with a situation which requires help from my Mastermind Group of heroes and heroines, I select the ones who are most appropriate for the given situation and I then imagine what advice each would give me in order to take greatest advantage of the situation. I select my heroes and heroines for their unique creative approaches, for their energy and for their astonishing success, knowing that all of this will ‘feed in’ to me and my own Creative Thinking processes.
Members of my Mastermind Group on whom I regularly call for help are:
Our Creativity guide Leonardo da Vinci, for his boundless Creativity and inventiveness.
Queen Elizabeth I, for her ability to overcome astonishing odds, to be very flexible while at the same time being steadfast, and to learn with incredible rapidity.
Buddha, for his deep exploration of the self, and for his ability to withstand the utmost suffering and deprivation.
Mohammed Ali, for his astonishing originality and creativity, combined with his representation and defence of a minority group.
Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of the Japanese martial art of Aikido. In this art, the Aikido student is taught to turn any violence into tranquillity, while simultaneously remaining steadfast.
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Tony Buzan
10 ways to tap into your creative geniusDid you know the number of ideas it is possible for your brain to create is greater than the number of atoms in the known universe? Creativity is not just painting a picture or playing an instrument – it can be part of every decision you take! This book is full of fun games and tools to help you make the most of your own creativity. When you are creative, you are full of energy, enthusiasm, and ideas. Using the famous Mind Map techniques that he invented, Tony Buzan shows you how to learn from geniuses like Leonardo Da Vinci and the Beatles, so you can be:• Fluent – develop the speed and ease with which you come up with new and creative ideas.• Flexible – your ability to see things from different angles, including your ability to use all your senses in the creation of new ideas.• Original – At the heart of creative thinking, lies your power to produce ideas that are both unique and unusual.• Expansive – develop your ideas and push them to their limits.So go on – take a break from the norm!
Copyright (#ulink_d3bfbf07-2d69-5ce2-b1d4-38bc2e629503)
Thorsons
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
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First published 2001
Copyright © Tony Buzan 2001
Mind Maps
is a registered trademark of the Buzan Group Original Mind Map concept © Tony Buzan
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Plate section illustrations by Alan and Emily Burton
Text illustrations by Alan Burton and Jennie Dooge
Tony Buzan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Ebook Edition © MAY 2017 ISBN: 9780007499526
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Dedication (#ulink_7a46ceba-beae-535d-b041-41e40993d88d)
The Power of Creative Intelligence is fondly and warmly dedicated to Lesley and Teri Bias; my mum, Jean Buzan; Lorraine Gill, Vanda North, Nicky and Strilli Oppenheimer, Dr Petite Rao, Caroline Shott and Carole Tonkinson for their creativity, dedication and hard work in making this little book come true.
Contents
Cover (#uf5e8176b-16f2-55cc-ad22-80c006ff229d)
Title Page (#ue7f3a2cd-6e23-55fa-918d-a58039bd65a3)
Copyright (#ulink_d3c08a88-7964-563f-b93c-7d11fd913070)
Dedication (#ulink_7657b990-7969-5fa2-92d3-7950c5ddf362)
Chapter 1: Introduction – Beginning Your Creativity Journey
Chapter 2: Using Your Magical Left and Right Brains
Chapter 3: Infinite Creativity – Mapping Your Mind with Mind-Maps
Chapter 4: You the Creative Artist
Chapter 5: You the Creative Musician
Chapter 6: Creative Productivity – The Power of Volume and Speed
Chapter 7: Creative Flexibility and Originality
Chapter 8: Your Brain: The Ultimate ‘Association Machine’ – Expansive and Radiant Thinking
Chapter 9: You and Shakespeare – Poets Both!
Chapter 10: Only Kidding
Congratulations! (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Other Books By (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#ulink_d3e60e1e-d960-5f8c-a62f-a04f1ffe6ddc)
do you/did you/are you/would you?!
How creative do you think you are? To get some (probably surprising) idea of your own creativity, consider the following questions, and ask yourself:
1. Do you daydream? YES/NO
2. Do you plan menus and cook meals for yourself, your family or friends? YES/NO
3. Do you mix and match colours, fabrics and accessories when buying clothes to create your own unique style? YES/NO
4. Do you like many different kinds of music? YES/NO
5. Do you remember with pleasure, highlights of your life, including special times spent with friends, great sporting moments, outstanding holidays, any significant ‘disasters’ or triumphs in your life? YES/NO
6. Did you ask lots of questions when you were a child? YES/NO
7. Do you still ask lots of questions? YES/NO
8. Do you sometimes wonder at the complexity or beauty of things, and wish you could figure out how it works/was made/came about/came into your life? YES/NO
9. Do you have sexual fantasies? YES/NO
10. Do you have newspapers, magazines or books in your home that you have promised yourself you would read, but for which you have not yet managed to find the time? YES/NO
11. Are there other things in your life you have promised yourself you would do or accomplish, to which you have not yet got around? YES/NO
12. Are you moved or excited by superlative performances in the fields of music, sports, acting or the arts? YES/NO
13. Would you say ‘yes’, if I could wave a magic wand and suddenly:
make you a fit, flexible and superb dancer, able to ‘wow ’em’ at any dance function? YES/NO
gave you a voice equal to your favourite singer, able to sing virtually any song to your own satisfaction and to the pleasure and amazement of others? YES/NO
make you a competent artist, able to rattle off cartoons and sketches, landscapes and portraits, and able to sculpt so well that Michelangelo himself might consider you a worthy student? YES/NO
make you a great story and joke-teller, able to mesmerize and enchant people with your tales, and able to reduce them all to helpless laughter with your brilliant jokes? YES/NO
14 Are you alive?!! YES/NO
If you answered ‘YES’ to more than half these questions, then you are, by definition, Creative.
Just how creative will be revealed as you continue your journey through The Power of Creative Intelligence. But to give you some indication, let’s look at a couple of the questions that may have seemed a bit strange:
Do you have newspapers, magazines or books in your home that you have promised yourself you would read, but for which you have not yet managed to find the time?Over 95 per cent of people answer ‘YES’ to this question, thinking that it means that they are merely very good at procrastinating! They are – but they are also very creative! Think about it. Every day, for weeks, months or years, their brains have been creating the most fantastic excuses for not getting down to reading. It is irrelevant that their creativity is directed towards not doing something – it is still exceptional creativity, and is such a limitless power-source that it can sometimes go on for a lifetime!
Which brings us to the question:
Are you alive?This may seem somewhat obvious, but the question conceals a deep and meaningful truth. Every day of your life, if you are to survive that day, your amazing brain has to create tens of thousands of thoughts, actions and solutions to problems that, if it did not, would end your time on this earth. The mere fact that you are alive proves that you are abundantly creative.
Increasing and releasing the gigantic Creative Intelligence you possess is simply a matter of understanding how it works and how to develop it. This little book will show you how.
what is creative intelligence?
Your Creative Intelligence is your ability to come up with new ideas, to solve problems in original ways, and to stand head and shoulders above the crowd in terms of your imagination, your behaviour, and in your productivity.
Your Creative Intelligence includes a number of factors, all of which can be taught and developed so that you can increase your creativity. The Power of Creative Intelligence will introduce you to each one of these factors in turn, and will show you how to develop and enhance them. These factors include:
1 The Left/Right Brain. The ability to use, in conjunction with each other, the different skills of the left and right sides of your brain.
2 Note-making/Mind-Mapping®. The ability to ‘make your thoughts visible’ by getting them out of your head and on to paper, so that you can explore them more fully.
3 Fluency. The speed with which you can rattle off new ideas. Fluency is the measure of your creative productivity.
4 Flexibility. Your ability to produce different kinds of ideas, and to shift from one approach to another using a rich variety of strategies, constitutes your creative flexibility. Flexibility includes your ability to see things from different angles, to consider things from other points of view, to take old concepts and rearrange them in new ways, and to reverse pre-existing ideas. It also includes your ability to use all your senses when creating new ideas.
5 Originality. Originality is one of the essences of Creative Intelligence and creative thinking. It represents your ability to produce ideas that are yours alone – that are unusual, unique and ‘eccentric’ (i.e., ‘away from the centre’).
6 Expanding on Ideas. The good creative thinker takes a central idea and builds on it in all directions, developing, expanding, embroidering and generally elaborating the original thought.
7 Association. The creative thinker makes use of the fact that the human brain is a giant ‘Association Machine’. Having some intuitive knowledge of how this Association Machine works (and you will have some very explicit knowledge, having read this book!), creative thinkers are able to tap into this infinite resource to improve all aspects of their Creativity.
an overview of the power of creative intelligence
The Power of Creative Intelligence is designed to take you on a Grand Tour of Creativity, showing you how you can expand and increase the power of your Creative Thinking at each stage of your journey. The following chapters contain potted case histories and stories of individuals who have exemplified the qualities being discussed. There is also a Creativity Workout in each chapter, where you can try your hand at specific exercises designed to make you smarter. Each exercise, while developing the specific Creative Intelligence skill area for which it is designed, will (thanks to the way the brain is an infinitely expanding and inter-connecting association machine!) simultaneously develop the mental muscles of your other Creative Intelligence skill areas.
The chapters also explain how you can use Mind-Maps
to develop your Creative Intelligence, and give examples of those ultimate creativity-enhancing thinking tools, which I have spent my life developing. There are also many other diagrams and illustrations that use the principles of Creativity to help you improve yours.
Here is an overview of the rest of the book.
Chapter 2 – Using Your Magical Left and Right Brains
In this chapter I will take you on a supersonic flight over the past 50 years of research into this fascinating aspect of Creativity. You will discover new insights into the nature of Creative Intelligence, and will learn how to use these insights to develop dramatically your creative thinking.
Chapter 3 – Infinite Creativity – Mapping Your Mind with Mind-Maps
This chapter introduces you to the ultimate Creative Thinking tool, the Mind-Map
. I will show you how to become a master-user of what has been termed the ‘Swiss army knife for the brain’.
Chapter 4 – You the Creative Artist
Who said that you can’t draw? You can!
Here I will explore with you the reasons why over 99 per cent of people will claim that they can’t draw, and why they are mistaken. I will then introduce you to the two ultimate art teachers: Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Each of them worked out his own superbly simple and successful creativity methods that you can use to find the artist within you. You will also discover that, so far in your life, you have created millions of masterpieces of which you have been unaware!
Chapter 5 – You the Creative Musician
As with art, most people assume that they are not ‘musical’ and more than 95 per cent of us are convinced that we cannot sing a song in tune. As with art, this is not true.
In this chapter, I will explain to you why these false beliefs exist, how you can overcome them and how to release the naturally creative musician within you. You will discover that you have been singing well for most of your life, and that there are some extremely encouraging lessons you can learn from the birds!
Chapter 6 – Creative Productivity – The Power of Volume and Speed
Your creative productivity – the number or fluency of ideas you can generate in a given time – is a major factor in Creative Intelligence. In this chapter I will show you how you can increase your own productivity by following the methods used by the great creative geniuses.
Chapter 7 – Creative Flexibility and Originality
The prime reason people get stuck in their pursuit of creativity is that they have been taught to think in only one basic way. This becomes a hole out of which it is difficult to dig themselves. In this chapter I will show you many techniques for seeing with ‘fresh eyes’ – for looking at things from different angles and from many diverse points of view; techniques that all the great creative thinking geniuses used to trigger their world-transforming ideas.
How often do you hear people saying of a great creative genius that he or she is ‘one of a kind’; ‘a one off’; ‘unique’; ‘incomparable’? This quality of uniqueness is a cornerstone of creative thinking. I will demonstrate that you are already much more unique than you think, and will show you ways of developing your originality that will amaze both you and your friends.
Chapter 8 – Your Brain: The Ultimate ‘Association Machine’ – Expansive and Radiant Thinking
Creative Intelligence is based on your ability to make associations between many different thoughts and ideas. The average person makes far fewer associations than are possible. In this chapter I will guide you through an enthralling association game; as it progresses, you will increasingly realize new ways to develop your own powers of association, and will discover something amazing about your brain’s ability to make connections.
Chapter 9 – You and Shakespeare – Poets Both!
For many people poetry, like painting and music, is a ‘special art’ that is the precious privilege of only a very few gifted individuals. This is a romantic and false belief. You are a poet!
In Chapter 9 I will guide you back to your poetic soul, showing how you can apply all the lessons you have learnt so far from The Power of Creative Intelligence to produce your own poetry.
Chapter 10 – Only Kidding
Why is it that children are the best and fastest learners? Why is it that children are considered to be more creative than adults? Why do so many of the great artists (like Picasso, for example) try to ‘get back’ their childhood creativity?
In this chapter I will answer all those questions, and show you how to rediscover the child and the creative genius within you.
Throughout The Power of Creative Intelligence, you will have one other special guide: Leonardo da Vinci – voted the greatest Creative Genius of the last millennium!
Chapter Two (#ulink_3e2f0b14-42ee-5362-88d2-88e86086b0b5)
In this Chapter you will be given state-of-the-art information about your left and right brains, and how you can combine the two sides to multiply, phenomenally, your Creative Power.
We are going to go on a supersonic flight over the past 50 years of research on the brain. The journey starts in the laboratory of Professor Roger Sperry in California, and describes the research that won him a Nobel Prize in 1981, and which will make you delightfully aware of hidden creative capacities waiting to be unleashed by you.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Professor Sperry was investigating brainwave function. To explore different thinking activities and their effect on the brainwaves, Sperry and his colleagues asked the volunteers to perform different mental tasks, ranging from adding and subtracting numbers in their heads, through to reading poetry, reciting memorized lines, doodling, looking at different colours, drawing cubes, analysing logical problems and daydreaming.
Sperry had predicted that the brainwaves would be somewhat different for different activities, and he was correct. What he had not predicted – and this finding changed forever the way we think about the potential of the human brain and its ability to think creatively – was the following startling revelation: on average, the brain divided its activities very distinctly into ‘left brain’ (left cortex) activities and ‘right brain’ (right cortex) activities. This is the research that has become popularly known as the ‘left/right brain’ research.
The dominant division of labour was as follows:
Sperry also discovered that when the right cortex was active, the left tended to go into a relatively restful or meditative state. Similarly when the left cortex was active, the right became more relaxed and calm.
Furthermore, and this came as a real surprise (as well as a beacon of hope), every brain involved in this brainwave experiment was shown to have all the cortical skills in fine working order. In other words, at the basic physical, physiological and potential level, everybody had a massive range of intellectual, thinking and creative skills that they were obviously using only in part.
By the 1970s, these results had led to an explosion of further researches, studies and surveys around the nature of this untapped potential.
One obvious line of investigation (with which I was personally involved) was to survey people on what they thought about their own abilities, and then to check these perceived abilities/disabilities with their real brainwave-measured capacities.
Here is one survey for you to try yourself.
Left/Right Brain Self-check
Would you find it virtually impossible (almost genetically impossible) to calculate quickly and accurately, the proportion of interest to capital still owing on your mortgage, for example, or the area of your garden as a proportion of the total area of your house and garden? YES/NO
Would you find it virtually impossible to draw portraits that looked like the person being drawn, to paint landscapes, master dimension and perspective, understand the history of art and make realistic and abstract sculptures? YES/NO
Would you find it virtually impossible to compose music and songs, identify different classical composers by just a few notes from their works, dance to music in time, and sing songs where every note you sang was the note as it should have been sung? YES/NO
You will probably be relieved to know that over 90 per cent of people surveyed were confident that they were genetically incapable of accomplishments in these three vital areas of numerical, artistic and musical skills.
You will hopefully be pleased and encouraged to know that they were all wrong!
Subsequent research discovered that when people were trained – by good teachers – in those areas of skill that they had assumed to be weak, they suddenly became much stronger in those areas. It was very much like identifying a weak muscle group that was weak not because the muscles themselves were fundamentally incapable, but simply because they had not been used for a long time.
This was not all: in addition to everyone being able to develop areas that they had previously considered weak, another amazing finding soon began to emerge. With the new ‘mental muscle’ now in place, the other ‘mental muscles’ all began to improve their performance.
Thus, for example, if people who had been weak in imagery and art, were trained to be competent in that field, they suddenly became more skilled with words, more able to manipulate numbers and, generally, more creative. Similarly, if people who had been weak in numerical ability were trained to strengthen this area, their imagination and musical abilities also improved.
What appeared to be happening was that the left and right sides of the brain were having ‘conversations’ with each other. The left brain would receive information and send it over to the right brain, which would process the information in its own way, and then send it back to the left side, and so on. By this process the brain was synergetically building up information, and adding to its own intellectual and creative power by combining the different elements. By the early 1980s, the left/right brain paradigm was becoming known around the globe, and books were beginning to be written about this extraordinary discovery.
Then came the difficulties.
problem number 1
You may have heard that the left-brain activities were generally labelled as ‘intellectual’, ‘academic’, or ‘business’ activities, and that the right-brain activities were correspondingly labelled the ‘artistic’, ‘creative’, and ‘emotional’ activities.
However, if all this research is true, and if by using both sides of our brains our overall intelligence and creativity rises, then by definition the great creative geniuses must have been using the same mental process – and their whole brains. But if the above labelling of the right and left activities of the brain is correct, then academics and intellectuals such as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein would have been ‘left brained’, and musicians and artists such as Beethoven and Michelangelo would have been ‘right brained’ – in other words, they would not have been using all of their brains at all!
More research was obviously required to shed light on this growing controversy. I and a number of other passionately curious individuals began to gather data on the great creative geniuses, and to relate it to the left/right brain model.
What do you think we found? We discovered this about ‘left-brained’ Einstein:
Case History – Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was nominated as the greatest creative genius of the 20th century. However, he was a poor student, preferring daydreaming to studying, and was eventually expelled from school for being a ‘disruptive influence’.
As a teenager he became inspired by the imaginative side of mathematics and physics, and was equally interested by the work of Michelangelo, whom he studied in depth. These mutual interests encouraged him to play even further with his imagination, and he developed his now-famous ‘Creative Mind Games’ in which he posed himself an intriguing question, and then allowed his imagination to run riot.
In one of his most famous Creative Mind Games, Einstein imagined that he was on the surface of the sun, grabbing a sunbeam, and travelling directly away from the sun at the speed of light, to the very ends of the universe.
When he came to the ‘end’ of his journey, he noticed to his astonishment that he was roughly back where he had started. This was logically impossible: you don’t go in a straight line forever and end up where you started!
Einstein therefore took another imaginary sunbeam ride from another part of the sun’s surface, and again went on a straight-line journey to the end of the universe. Once again he ended up relatively near where he had started.
Slowly the truth dawned on him: his imagination had told him more truths than his logic. If you travel in straight lines ‘forever’ and continually return to the vicinity of where you started, then ‘forever’ must be at least two things: curved in some way, and possessing a boundary.
This was how Einstein came to one of his most profound insights: our universe is a curved and finite universe. He did not come to this giant creative realization by left-brain thinking alone, but by combining his knowledge of number, word, order, logic and analysis with his massive imagination, spatial awareness and ability to see the whole picture.
His insight was a perfect blending and conversation between both sides of his brain. It was a perfect ‘whole-brained’ creative realization.
The same turned out to be true, in reverse, for the ‘right-brained’ creative geniuses. Let us take, for example, the ‘ultimate’ right-brainer, Ludwig van Beethoven.
Case History – Ludwig van Beethoven
Beethoven is known for his turbulent, questioning and passionate spirit, for his desire for freedom from tyranny and censorship and for his ongoing fight for freedom of artistic expression. He is generally accepted as the ‘perfect’ example of the wild and untamed model of genius.
All of this is true, and fits in with the traditional interpretation of the right-brained creative genius. However, what has escaped most people’s attention is that Beethoven, like all other musicians, was also incredibly left-brained!
Consider the nature of music: it is written on lines, in sequence; it follows its own logic; and it is based on numbers. Music has often been described as the most pure form of mathematics there is (and it is interesting to note that many of the great mathematicians had music as their main hobby, and vice-versa).
As well as being passionately imaginative and rhythmical, Beethoven was also passionately meticulous. It was Beethoven who pioneered the use of the musical metronome, stating that it was a Godsend to him because it would now mean that every musician and conductor in the future would be able to play his music at precisely the right rhythm, with precisely the right emphasis, and at exactly the right mathematical tempo!
As with Einstein, Beethoven was neither right-brained or left-brained. He was completely and creatively whole-brained.
My research into the great creative geniuses confirmed that they all used the ‘whole brain’ – the full range of their cortical skills, where each skill supplemented and supported the others.
These findings shed light on the second big problem with the research and its assumptions.
problem number 2
The second problem was a major one. The left brain ‘intellectual’ activities tended to be labelled ‘male’ activities, and right brain ‘creative’, and ‘emotional’ activities came to be seen as ‘female’ activities. This was comprehensively and dangerously wrong!
These labels simply extended and ‘confirmed’ the centuries-old beliefs that:
academics, education and intellectuality involved only words, number and logic and not imagination, colour and rhythm
business was a place for strict order only
men were logical, rational individuals with no emotion, imagination or ‘colour’
women were irrational daydreamers
emotion was not based on associative logic
creativity and art were not ‘proper’ pursuits, and had no rationality or science behind them.
The tragedy of these misconceptions, which sadly are still common today and which The Power of Creative Intelligence will help to dispel, is that they blind the mind to the truth, and therefore diminish pleasure, experience and existence.
Unfortunately these misconceptions are especially prevalent in the arena of education. Because we assume that education has to be ‘left-brained’, we label those children who are energetic, imaginative, colourful, curious or given to excessive bouts of daydreaming as naughty, disruptive, hyperactive, slow or backward. We should instead be labelling them as potential creative geniuses just beginning to explore the range of their abilities!
Similarly many businesses have become stuck in the ‘left-brained’ rut, and as a result are destroying not only the synergy that comes from combining left-brain business practices with imagination and flair, but also their reputations and their bottom lines.
Consider also, in the context of this book, the global image of the artist. Surveys have shown that most people consider artists to be messy, untidy, dishevelled, weak in logic and memory, and lacking in structural and organizational skills.
Sadly millions of art students around the world try to live ‘up’ (it’s actually down!) to this ‘ideal’ vision of the artist. As a result they reject words, number, logic, order and structure, and create only passing images in their minds.
left/right brain thinking in the 21
century
As the Century of the Brain begins, we now realize that the creative brain is the whole brain. Furthermore, we realize that our earlier acknowledgement of our labelling mistakes has led us to an awareness that our creative potential is even greater than we had thought.
A simple question and comparison will make this clear.
If we have been using only half of the skills of the brain, at what percentage efficiency have we been operating?
The immediate answer would appear to be 50 per cent. This indicates that we have been making ourselves into half-wits! However, even this is an overestimation, as a simple example makes clear.
If I said to you that I wanted to measure your efficiency at running, and in Trial 1 I allowed you to use 100 per cent of your body, including arms and legs. Imagine how you would do if I videoed your running style and then examined it for mechanical efficiency. Most of us would score pretty highly.
Imagine now that in Trial 2 I allowed you only 50 per cent of your operating potential, and tied your right hand and foot together, behind your back. How would you do? You’d be flat on your face within a couple of seconds! Efficiency? Less than zero.
Why? Because the parts of your body are made to work together, and in so doing each part multiplies a thousand-fold the efficiency of the other.
It is the same with your brain. When you use only one side of your cortical skills, your creativity is nothing in comparison to what it can be. When you use both sides, your creative potential becomes infinite.
In the Creativity Workout that follows, and in the remaining chapters, I will explore methods of unleashing that infinite creative potential.
creativity workout
1. Use the Whole-brain Skills Set to Examine your Life
Check how many of your left-brain skills you normally use and nurture. Next do the same with your right-brain skills. Pay attention to any of those right or left-brain areas that you are neglecting and begin to exercise and strengthen them right away.
2. Education
If you have children, apply whole-brain thinking to their entire education, including school, social and home-life education. Try to help your children achieve a balanced education, in order that they may lead far more creative and fulfilled lives.
Not only that – apply the same principles to your own ongoing, life-long learning, so that you may lead a more creative and fulfilled life too.
3. Take Breaks
Surprisingly, whole-brain thinking demands that if you are going to be fully and truly creative, you must take regular breaks.
Think about it: where are you when you come up with those bursts of imagination, those solutions to problems, those great fantasies and daydreams? Most people’s answers include some or all of the following:
in the bath
in the shower
walking in the country
before going to sleep
while asleep
upon waking up
while listening to music
on a long-distance drive
while out running
while swimming
lying on the beach
when ‘idly’ doodling
In what state are your body and mind at such times? Relaxed, and often alone.
It is in these rest-periods that the two sides of your brain are able to converse and communicate with each other, and when the vast wellspring of your creativity is allowed to express itself.
If you don’t decide consciously to take these breaks, your brain will decide for you. Many ‘hard working’ (but not ‘smart working’) people report that, as the years go on, they become more stressed and their concentration begins to wander. This is actually a good thing, for it is their right brains insisting that a little bit of imagination and fantasy should be allowed in to balance an unbalanced state.
If you are in this situation and you continue to persist in pushing your left-brain-dominant lifestyle, your brain will make you take other kinds of breaks, ranging from losses of concentration, to mini-breakdowns in which you become unreasonably irascible, to full blown blow-outs where the only cure is … rest and relaxation!
Do it consciously. Give your brain and yourself a break. Your Creative Intelligence will love you for it.
4. Go for Long Walks or Rambles
The Romans had a special phrase, solvitas perambulum, which can be roughly translated as ‘solve it while you walk’. What they had realized, although obviously not in left/right-brain terms, was that if you take your brain for a walk, especially outside in the country, the steady rhythm of your limbs’ movement, the regular rhythm of your heart pumping more strongly, doses of oxygen-filled blood flowing into your brain, and the feast that your eyes, ears and other senses have while you walk, all contribute to creative thinking and problem solving.
If you have a creative task or problem upon which you are working, ‘Walk it Out’ and you’ll ‘Work it Out’!
5. Be Creative in your Everyday Life
Using a pen and paper, list those areas in your everyday life that you think are creative, and those that you think are not creative. When you have finished, read on.
The ideal answer to the above exercise is that all aspects of your daily life are intrinsically creative, and that all of them can be enhanced by applying more of the full range of your left and right-brain skills. Consider the following everyday activities; they are all dependent upon Creativity:
cooking
decorating
D.I.Y. and home improvements
photography
gardening
route finding and map reading
carpentry
flower arranging
budgeting for special events/expenses
relationships
gift wrapping
letter and message writing
setting a table
arranging house plants
looking after and training pets
planning holidays and special events
planning meetings
playing football, or any other sport
Each one of these activities can be made more interesting and creative by adding the ‘spices’ of the left and right-brain skills.
In this creative arena, little things can mean a lot. Gathering shells and driftwood from a beach and displaying them in your home, or using it for wood-turning; making patchwork quilts from a multitude of scraps of otherwise useless material; decorating your dinner table by putting a flower on each person’s plate and using shells from the beach from which to serve your salt and pepper; or finding new and different routes to get to work each week, are all things that take little effort, and which add immeasurably to the creative feel of your life.
Holiday times and seasonal celebrations especially, are wonderful opportunities for displaying your Creative Intelligence. Make it a Creative Feast with decorations, visual beauty and visual humour. Create your own cards and gifts to give to people, or plan a dinner party for your friends – the possibilities are endless!
6. Your Mastermind Group
All the great creative geniuses had heroes or heroines to whom they looked for inspiration. Alexander the Great had his tutor Aristotle; Julius Caesar had Alexander the Great; all the great geniuses of the Italian Renaissance had the examples of Classical antiquity; the Russian Empress Catherine the Great looked to Peter the Great for inspiration; Mohammed Ali had Sugar Ray Robinson; Isaac Newton had Socrates; Stephen Hawking had Isaac Newton, and so on, throughout the pantheon of genius.
The technique the creative greats used was to hold imaginary conversations with their heroes, asking them for ‘thoughts’ and inspiration. This Creative Thinking technique can be used for pursuing mighty scientific and cultural goals, and it can also be used by everyone in their normal daily lives.
I have personally found this technique exceptionally valuable in my life, and have used it successfully for over 20 years. It has allowed me to be especially creative whenever I have encountered any major opportunity or problem. The way I use this technique is as follows: when confronted with a situation which requires help from my Mastermind Group of heroes and heroines, I select the ones who are most appropriate for the given situation and I then imagine what advice each would give me in order to take greatest advantage of the situation. I select my heroes and heroines for their unique creative approaches, for their energy and for their astonishing success, knowing that all of this will ‘feed in’ to me and my own Creative Thinking processes.
Members of my Mastermind Group on whom I regularly call for help are:
Our Creativity guide Leonardo da Vinci, for his boundless Creativity and inventiveness.
Queen Elizabeth I, for her ability to overcome astonishing odds, to be very flexible while at the same time being steadfast, and to learn with incredible rapidity.
Buddha, for his deep exploration of the self, and for his ability to withstand the utmost suffering and deprivation.
Mohammed Ali, for his astonishing originality and creativity, combined with his representation and defence of a minority group.
Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of the Japanese martial art of Aikido. In this art, the Aikido student is taught to turn any violence into tranquillity, while simultaneously remaining steadfast.
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Тони Бьюзен
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Общая психология
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: 10 ways to tap into your creative geniusDid you know the number of ideas it is possible for your brain to create is greater than the number of atoms in the known universe? Creativity is not just painting a picture or playing an instrument – it can be part of every decision you take! This book is full of fun games and tools to help you make the most of your own creativity. When you are creative, you are full of energy, enthusiasm, and ideas. Using the famous Mind Map techniques that he invented, Tony Buzan shows you how to learn from geniuses like Leonardo Da Vinci and the Beatles, so you can be:• Fluent – develop the speed and ease with which you come up with new and creative ideas.• Flexible – your ability to see things from different angles, including your ability to use all your senses in the creation of new ideas.• Original – At the heart of creative thinking, lies your power to produce ideas that are both unique and unusual.• Expansive – develop your ideas and push them to their limits.So go on – take a break from the norm!