What can a brick be used for? Well, there’s... | Claire Vo

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What can a brick be used for? Well, there’s building a house, breaking a window, holding down a pile of papers on a windy day, squashing a bug, paving a driveway, building a wall, as the legs of a small table … Now take a break and shift your eyes from left to right and back again for 30 seconds. If psychologist Elizabeth Shobe of Richard Stockton College of New Jersey and her colleagues are right, that ocular exercise spurred creative thinking, enabling you to come up with yet more uses for a brick.

There is no shortage of self-appointed experts on creativity (a quick search for ways to increase it turns up “clear your workspace” and “act on your instincts”). The snake-oil approaches are unfortunate, because there is pretty decent neuroscientific research on the brain basis for creativity. Above all, the studies show that creativity is not just a personality trait (and thus hard to change) but also a trainable skill.

Some of the most interesting work, for instance, has shown that an approach called psychological distancing can boost creativity. In psychological distancing, you construe a problem as not occurring to you in the here-and-now, as this Scientific Americanstory explains. Also helpful to creativity is anything that increases cross talk between the brain’s left and right hemispheres. That’s where shifty eyes come in.

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Begley, who’s rapidly shifting her eyes right now. (via newsweek)

Source newsweek

Reblogged from newsweek