Simple ways to encourage creative thinking

“Write drunk, revise sober.” I read that in Andy Hunt's Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware, in the chapter on stimulating creative thinking. The human brain has two hemispheres, left and right [1]. They are responsible for different activities and work somewhat differently. The left hemisphere is more concerned with verbal, analytical, abstract and logical tasks. The way it works is like synchronous processing in computing. You submit a task, wait for it to be processed, get the result, submit the next task, wait for it, get the result, and so on [2]. The right hemisphere is nonverbal. It recognizes whole patterns and uses analogies to see relationships between things. It works intuitively, producing insights from incomplete patterns. That is more like asynchronous processing. You submit a task and move on without waiting. The result arrives sometime later.

We can direct the left hemisphere in command-and-control mode. The right hemisphere works in the opposite way, outside our full control. When we keep the left hemisphere busy, as most of us do for most of our working hours with what we call analytical work, we suppress the activity of the right hemisphere. Sometimes I'll work hard on a problem and get nowhere, and the solution will come to me out of the blue at a completely unrelated moment, say when I'm at home in the bath. At that point the left hemisphere was free to stand down and the right hemisphere could take over. The right hemisphere is crucial to intuition and creative thinking, but we cannot direct it like the left. You can't simply decide to start thinking creatively from now on. There are, however, a few ways to quiet the left hemisphere and give the right room to work. Writing drunk and revising sober is only one of them. Here are a few things that stimulate my own creative thinking.

Monotonous, undemanding physical activity

Do you know the difference between a maze and a labyrinth? In a maze you have to find a way out. A labyrinth leads you out by itself. The lovely thing about a labyrinth is that once you're inside, you never need to think about how to get out. While you walk through it, the left hemisphere has nothing to do and the right can get to work. It is hardly surprising that labyrinths were built near centers of learning such as monasteries. They allowed the scholars of the day to contemplate [3.]. I haven't tried a labyrinth, but walking works reliably for me and I can switch off my left hemisphere with any monotonous, undemanding physical activity. I want to stress that it has to be both monotonous and undemanding, physically and mentally, such as raking leaves or mowing the lawn. In my experience, as soon as the activity becomes demanding, like running at a higher heart rate, the left hemisphere takes over again.

Make the most of your best hour

We all have a time of day when we feel sharpest. Some of us are early birds and others are night owls. Arrange your activities to suit that time. I'm an early bird and I've noticed that most of my ideas have come in the morning while walking from my workout to work. My mind can switch off because I don't need the left hemisphere. It may help that I read on public transport on my way to exercise. Ideas take shape during the walk and may be influenced by what I read. That's why it helps to be ready to make notes, as I'll explain below.

Another creative activity

Doing something else creative is a great stimulus. A lot of things have occurred to me or come about as by-products of a hackathon. I took an idea I'd already written down, got to work on it, and when another idea came to me I wrote that one down too. For me, another creative activity is the trigger. It's hard to think creatively without doing anything creative. Sitting in front of the television won't give you ideas.

Always be ready

Since the right hemisphere, and with it intuition and creativity, works more or less at random, you need to capture ideas and thoughts as they occur. I carry my phone in place of a paper notebook and pencil. All my devices are from Apple, so I write everything in Notes and it syncs across them through iCloud. If something interesting occurs to me on my walk to work, I put it in my phone. By the time I get to work, it's on my computer and I can come back to it whenever I want. That's how I made the notes for this article and gathered material for many others on this blog. I often jot down things that seem trivial at the time, then connect them and develop them further. I believe they would be lost forever in the stream of my thoughts if I didn't write them down. Another tool may suit you better. Evernote is an option. Whatever you choose, keep it with you so you can make a note at any moment.

References to Pragmatic Thinking and Learning

[1.] Left and right brain are merely symbolic terms used in psychology. Page 70, “Left brain vs. Right brain.”

[2.] “Characteristics of L-mode Processing,” page 71.

[3.] “Harvest R-Mode cues,” page 112.