скачать книгу бесплатно
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
