Wednesday, December 26, 2012

mildly relevant: creativity, DIY.

this is probably one of the recurring themes in my posts, such as the last one about mornings ..

.. but, if only to become more effective in one's goals, there's a lot to be said for hacking one's own habits and inclinations, conscious or otherwise. there's a difference between working effectively at a fixed task (where considerations of time can be measured quantitatively) versus being prolific at a creative task, for example.

the more i think about it, the more they seem like different modes of thinking. it's therefore appropriate to consider ways of making these experiences more efficient and separately so ..!



Creativity in the Wild: Improving Creative Reasoning through Immersion in Natural Settings

Ruth Ann Atchley1David L. Strayer2*Paul Atchley1
1 Department of Psychology, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, United States of America, 2 Department of Psychology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States of America

... However, the impact of nature on higher-level tasks such as creative problem solving has not been explored. Here we show that four days of immersion in nature, and the corresponding disconnection from multi-media and technology, increases performance on a creativity, problem-solving task by a full 50% in a group of naive hikers. Our results demonstrate that there is a cognitive advantage to be realized if we spend time immersed in a natural setting. .



Creativity Happens When You Least Expect It

By Sian Beilock | Dec 07, 2012

... But not all tasks require working memory for success. In fact, sometimes people’s ability to think about information in new and unusual ways can actually be hampered when they wield too much brainpower. This means that what we think of as our optimal time of day, may not be optimal for everything.
Recent research confirms this idea. In a paper published last year in the journal Thinking and Reasoning, psychologist Mareike Wieth and her colleagues found that when people have to solve “insight problems” that require a high degree of creativity, solvers are much more successful when they tackle these problems at the time of day in which they are least alert.



i must say: the more i learn about the human brain, the more amazed i am at how it works ..!

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