3 tools to become more creative | Balder Onarheim | TEDxCopenhagenSalon

my talk today will be about relearning creativity and as you've seen from the other talks of course I can't teach you anything in 20 minutes so what I'll try to do is I'll try to give you three very concrete tools that you can go home and use to try to become a bit more creative person the first thing I need to know from the audience is of course do you find yourself creative so I want you all to close your eyes and keep your eyes closed if you feel like a creative person raise your hand so I can see okay and then keep your hand up a lot of people try to take it down and open your eyes again wow this is a real great audience okay so that will amplify one of my points one of the thing I normally see in audiences when I do this is people tend to take their hand down when I ask them to open their eyes and that brings me to my first question of this talk and that is please yeah why creativity why should any adult person want to be creative first creativity has kind of a bad reputation and when I say I'm an creativity expert created a researcher people tend to say also work with dance and music and this to me as sort of a myth about creativity and one of the reason why I see people don't dare to claim them self as credits and there are a lot of ways of understanding creativity you normally you talk about the either the creative person the creative press so the situation or in the creative process wholly creative product there are a lot of different ways from the Sun and creativity today I'll talk about the creative person meaning your creative abilities and not talk about the creative person then this is what normally people sees on their eyelids it's Pablo Picasso but I have a very different take on creativity a very different type of creativity that I find as important and as interesting and that is the blood pootin creativity because Putin is to me a brilliant example of a world leader who is extremely good at using different ways of thinking to achieve his goals I won't get political here so I'll leave it there but luckily I'm not on the one seeing these type of creative skills as seemingly importantly as the more creative in a classical sense the more artistic domains and one of my favorite studies was back in 2010 IBM did a big study where they asked 100 1600 CEOs in more than 60 countries around the world whether these CEOs were prepared for the future and actually less than half of the CEOs they asked felt that they themselves and their companies were actually ready for the future and then when asked what they could do better in their company to actually prepare for the future creativity came out on top so in more than 60 countries these 16 hundred CEOs agree that creativity was actually what they needed to make their company resilient for the future in another study that I really like LinkedIn they have this thing every year they publish a list of the most common words people use to describe himself and in 2012 creative was the most commonly used word in LinkedIn when people described himself in the profiles 2013 did drop to I think third but responsible been on one but it's still up there so people still want to perceive himself as creative and this view on creativity to me changes the whole discourse about how we can actually train creativity because to me we have to start seeing creativity as a fundamental human skill it's something that we were born with that we all need and that is actually the key to success in any domain any way of life any way of living I think normally I would say that creativity is as important as an engineer for as an artist and I love this because I seen out of nodding here so people seem to agree you get the point creativity support and after one of these talks I gave this old engineer came up to me and he said well I really like to talk very interesting especially the point about like everyone should be creative I think that's such a brilliant point but you know you should also remember to mention that some of us still have to do the serious stuff so the rest we can be credible and and that was after listening to me for 45 minutes only talk about my creativity is important to teachers engineering schools so to make my point as clear as possible in my appoint of view when I talk about training creativity it's not about art it's about success in any aspect of life that being work private life sex cooking wherever being a scientist I always have this need to define exactly what I'm talking about so I'll give you one of the many many definitions of creativity with a very cliche example so when I grew up this was a cell phone and this was a computer and young me these two things were radically separate they were both technology they bowled around on batteries the batteries could last for weeks and weeks despite the normal phones today and it when when Apple introduced the iPhone I was conceptually shocked because the two things cell phone and computer had so little in common that the scene the two things put together as one thing was to me really new and it was really useful I loved having this new thing I just never thought about it because it was two separate things and what I wanted to pay attention to here is actually the conceptual difference between the original components because in my line of research we see creativity as being the ability to take two or more concepts concepts or conceptual understandings and put them together in something new that fulfills being novel as in new and also being useful for some kind of context but why is this something we have to relearn why don't they talk about learning creativity and I'll give you a very very simple example it might be a bit Cara kated but some of you or most of you are probably seen this before it's called the nine dot puzzle the challenge is linked all the nine dots using four straight lines or fewer without lifting the pen and without tracing the same line more than once so I'll give you 15 seconds only ten minutes the embarrassing thing is kids have no problem with this kids do this right away and I'll start by showing you why it's so hard for adults to solve this so if you look at the person trying to solve this on paper on paper this will be the solving strategy or will it let's see oh yeah so you start in one corner you go to another corner and you'll continue doing that until you realize I'm almost out of lines and then you'll cross 45 degrees and realizing you roll out and it still hasn't gone through all the non dots and the creative solution to this the adult solution is that you have to realize that you don't have to stop in the dot and by realizing this you can actually solve it so the reason why this is a puzzle is because we put rules into it that are not there the only person who told you that that line should connect two dots and stop there is some teacher in math in a math class back in the days but this still sticks so the adult solution the adult creative solution is like this and I normally use this to warm up when I work with kids and I remember the first time I did it one of the pupils in the class about six-year-old when seeing this he said well I can solve it with three straight lines and you know adult arrogant me will be like oh you're so cute huh yeah come on and show me and he did this and it's a completely fine solution I also seen kids folding the paper around so you can sort of do it with one straight line just going around the paper in circles which is also still fine but in the same class and other people said well I can access old with one straight line and I had already been shot one so I was okay maybe you can he welcome to the and hit list and it's still the completely fine solution it's just embarrassing that we didn't think about it because we have this idea of there being a relationship between the thickness of the line and the size of a point right making this a really challenging task for adults very simple task for kids so something happened along the way and it's consensus consensus more or less and a lot of different creativity research trends that people get less creative when they grow up so basically it looks something like this you probably some you've seen the famous Ken Robinson talk if you haven't you should this it said so he talked about this for 40 minutes and it's more or less very well accepted another thing that is to me as a as an expert even more scary is there there also done a lot of studies on the relationship between expertise and creativity within that same domain so extremely simplified you have some kind of learning curve within the domain the dotted line here represents the 10,000 hour line which is of course expertise line and what these studies show is something like that so you can be very creative and you're entering your domain because you don't have all the rules of the domain then your creativity in domain more or less progresses alongside your expertise but right before you have your 10,000 hours then your creativity within the same domain starts going that so it's something about not knowing too much within your own expertise if you want to be able to perform credibly this is quite challenging so there are a lot of explanations for exactly what happens as we grow up and various explanations for why we lose our creativity I mainly focus on one which I think is the one that is easiest to Train and we are working with train with students and as our associative limitations bring you back to the example about the iPhone when I talk about the conceptual distance as in our associations back in the days a cellphone computer were very far associations nowadays they're considered more or less the same thing but as we grow up we get more and more boxes more and more frames making it really hard for us to connect things that aren't put in the same box by someone else so what a lot of creativity training is about is actually improving the brain's ability to find different pieces of information that seemed to be irrelevant at the time it's that simple so I'll give you three very quick tools for how you can train your SSA associated Network the first one is continuous practice this is something you can do every day the second one is a way to use your sleep as a creative technique and the third one is a right now solution if you're stuck with a creative problem what can you do to get the next step so let's start with the continuous practice thing I'll do this when I brush my teeth every night and I want to give an example this I want you all to look at the toothbrush and think of three random words quickly three random words and then try to analyze how random word those words really maybe it was like dog by cycle shirt water traveling something you've seen within the last couple of hours at least or maybe just related to what you're looking at right now so what I do when I brush my teeth is I challenge myself to think of random words that are actually random so if the starting word would be toothbrush what would be around the word someone what camel yeah that's that's great okay I yeah I would think about the brush and yeah but still it's pretty far car tire could be another one but what I do is basically I try to come up with a new completely random word as quick as possible a word that has nothing to do with the previous word I was thinking about then and I keep doing that and I can feel like almost every week I get better at it so this ability to for randomness there was originally done a really cool neural imaging study of hip-hop artists who are good with improvising words and those guys blew any created to test away because their ability to randomly pick some words and then connect them something else and they come up with something that no one else thought of is actually a very important part of being credit so very simply as often as you can try to challenge yourself come up with random words it's an important part of credit the training the second tool is a bit more technical to explain it is very simple to do so what you see up here is a very simplified version of how we sleep and what is trying to say is from we fall asleep we go into deep sleep and then about every 90 minutes we are in in what is called rapid eye movement sleep or just dream sleep so above the red line here that's where you have your dreams as you probably all remember in your dreams you don't apply too many rules right so you can be in Italy over here and then walk into Spain and sort of no one else would notice that I'm still in the same room so you don't apply the same rules which are the rules that destroys our creativity so if we can manage to use our dream sleep to be creative it's actually a way to work around all these rules we use when we're awake so how do you prime your sleep how do you prime what you dream out in one of my favorites that is did with Tetris so they had people playing Tetris right before they fell asleep and then they woke them up in dream sleep and as the motive dreamt about and almost every participant had some element of Tetris in their sleep so family members fall into place or something that resembled ceteris and the way you can use this to try to be more creative is very simple right before you fall asleep try to think about the problem you want to solve try to think about all information would need to solve it but of course you should not try to solve it because then you will not fall to sleep we all know that feeling and then the chance of you actually dreaming about this without all the normal constraints improves and then try to make sure that you wake up after some kind of 90 minute cycle so it could be six hours and a half hours 9 hours of sleep so the chance of waking up in your dream sleep is bigger and then in the morning take notes did I dream about anything related to my problem and no matter how far-fetched it seems when you wake up try to note it down because it will give you some new thoughts about whatever problem you're working up we can't always go to sleep when we want to solve problems so the last technique of today as randomness as I said we are terrible at randomness if I ask for random bird it will has a root it will be related to something so what this technique is about as if you're stuck with a problem you can't find a way to solve it introducing randomness I use Wikipedia they have a random article button and then what you get is a completely unexpected piece of information and then what you do is you challenge yourself I have a problem I have this random piece of information probably never heard about it before can I in some way force that information into my problem one very concrete examples this we were working on a project with very struggle with the production technology and then I did this and up came a list of Russian boxers in 105 kilogram category and one of their names reminded me of an old teacher who told me about this very specific old production method that I hadn't thought about in long time that we could actually use to solve a problem so this sort of extremely weird link I would never have thought of if I hadn't looked at random capito as I said I can't promise you guys to be more creative right now than you are 20 minutes ago what I want you to promise me is that every single person here will try one of the three following things this is not hard this is the 70% go home and try one of these for itself either practice while you brush your teeth tonight random words or before you go to bed tonight think about some kind of creative challenge and try to wake up after six seven and a half online hours or next time you start to recruit a problem press the random button on Wikipedia and you'll get some inspiration thank you so much for listening it was a joy thanks

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 748,570

Rating: 4.8620811 out of 5

Keywords: Humanities, English, ted talks, Culture, TEDxTalks, Neuroscience, tedx talks, tedx talk, Psychology, tedx, Denmark, ted, ted talk, ted x

Id: g-YScywp6AU

Length: 17min 49sec (1069 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 20 2015