Tag: capturing

Fostering Creativity #1

The conventional system of schooling is sometimes seen as “stifling” of creativity. The pre-school, kindergarten and early school years are often the only ages where there is an attempt to provide a creativity-friendly, rich, imagination-fostering environment for young children.

Researchers see the importance of fostering creativity because technology is advancing our society at an unprecedented rate. Creative problem solving will be needed to cope with challenges as they arise. Creativity also helps students identify problems where others have failed to do so, in order to discover a solution.

Capture Creativity #1

Creativity requires a challenge to start a flow of new ideas, then a way to capture them.
New ideas are fleeting. You need to write them down quickly or they can be gone in a flash. Sometimes, a catchy title for an article, a name brand, a melody, a food recipe, a room arrangement pops into our heads but by the time we get back home to write down the thought – it is gone. The most distinguishing characteristic of “creative” people from “regular” folks, is that creative people have learned ways to pay attention to and preserve some of the fleeting ideas that occur to them. They have capturing skills.

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Challenge Creativity

Everyone has creative abilities that operate all the time. You can enhance your creativity by surrounding yourself with diverse stimuli that is changed regularly. Diverse and changing stimuli promote creativity because they get multiple behaviors competing with each other.

To boost your creative output, capture your new ideas as they occur, challenge yourself in order to get ideas competing, broaden your training so that many new repertoires of behavior will be available to compete, and surround yourself as much as possible with diverse and ever-changing stimuli. Anyone can master creative strategies. They are the only things that stand between you and the most creative people in history.

aMUSE yourself

salvadore dali

Salvador Dali, the great surrealist, used to grab ideas for paintings from the very fertile semi-sleep state we call the hypnagogic state. He’d lie on a sofa and hold a spoon in one hand, balancing it on the edge of a glass placed on the floor. Just as he’d drift off to sleep, he’d release the spoon, and the sound of the spoon hitting the glass would awaken him. Immediately, he’d sketch the bizarre hypnagogic images he was seeing.

We all have bizarre perceptual experiences in those moments before we fall fully asleep. Dali simply developed a way to seize some of them. Capturing skills can be taught to people of all ages and in all occupations. Teachers, parents, and managers can boost the creative output of a group simply by providing some simple training and the right materials.