Transcriber: Eunice Lo
Reviewer: Tanya Cushman Hello. Today's topic is "Art and
the Practical Science of Creativity." (Applause) Thank you, wow. I wanted to do my entire
speech in Japanese. However, my Japanese isn't very good. And probably, therefore,
I'm going to have to speak in English. (Applause) So the topic is "The Art
and Practical Science of Creativity." And for thousands of years
of human history, civilizations have believed
that creativity was pure art, that it had nothing to do with science, because science was, well,
you know, scientific or analytical, while creativity was magical. You know, the ancient Greeks believed that the human mind
wasn't even capable of creative thought, but that we were visited by Muses, those beautiful, creative goddesses who bestowed us with just
brief moments of brilliance. And I find the idea
of muses very romantic. If you have time to wait
for weeks or months for your muse to arrive, great. Great. But most of us need
creative solutions every day, and daily creativity, that doesn't sound like muses or magic, that sounds a lot more like science. And luckily, scientists and psychologists
have been hard at work on creativity, and I'm intensely interested in the ways that
their research and theories can translate into simple,
practical things that we can all do
to boost our creativity. And I've brought five
of those simple ideas along today. And this first one is so simple that the skeptical,
analytical part of your brain may try to reject it. And this idea is if you want to be extraordinary, try to stop being ordinary, right? Try to choose to be creative. And no, I am not kidding. And no, I am not making this up. I interviewed this legendary psychologist named Robert Sternberg, who had researched creativity and genius at Yale University for 30 years. And Dr. Sternberg said that the one thing all the creative people
he researched had in common, the one thing they had in common is that all of them,
at some point in their lives, they just chose to be creative. They just decided to be creative. And Dr. Sternberg says
this decision to chose creativity is an important, perhaps essential, step
on the path to creative confidence, because, he says, creative
is not typically the default setting for the adult human brain. But his findings on choosing creativity
is good news, really, because it means you all
have the power to choose. Today, right now,
before you leave the room, you have the power to choose creativity and maybe, just maybe, change your life. So that first one
about choosing creativity is a very powerful one, but I know it's also a bit intangible. So next up is this very concrete, actionable idea
about capturing your best ideas. Because, you know, scientists tell us that our short-term memory
lasts only 15 to 30 seconds, right? So content is streaming
across our brain all of the time, and the vast majority
of that content just floats away. It just escapes - right? - never written into long-term memory. But what if you had a capture device? What if you had some sort
of virtual butterfly net that would allow you to capture
the best of your ideas. And the good news is you get to pick
your own capture device. You know, I'm a digital immigrant,
so I still like paper, and so I pretty much always have some sort of little notebook
in my back pocket to capture those ideas. But for you digital natives, I'm sure there's an app for that, using some clever digital device
that you're already carrying around. But whether you use analog
or whether you use digital, you still have to try this because this idea of a capture device leverages something I would call
"the math of creative yield." Imagine that maybe right now you're capturing, say,
10 percent of the stuff, that content, the ideas
that flow across your brain. What if using a capture device, you could increase that
to, say, oh, I don't know, 90%? Think about that! Right? You would have nine times
as much material to work with when you sort through those ideas
to find your favorite solution. So pick your own favorite butterfly net and see how much you can increase
your own creative yield. So this third one kind of sneaks up on you because it seems like
it shouldn't work as well as it does, and this idea is that when you're working
on a tough challenge, do whatever you can to get
a little mental distance from the problem. Because research shows that people come up
with way more creative answers when they think the question
came from another country. And they're also more creative if they imagine that they themselves are a distant age - so if they're told
to think like a seven-year-old. And so any kind of mental distance can help you come up
with more creative ideas. So, could this work? I mean, I wasn't so sure myself until one day last year
I risked trying it. It was an important client workshop. The client was in the liquor industry, and we were trying to get them
to think creatively about bars and nightclubs, right? And I've been in hundreds
of IDEO client workshops, and to be honest, teams can be a little slow to get started, but not that day because I gave them a chance
to get a little mental distance. I said, imagine
it's 10 years into the future - you know, a distant time, right? - and imagine you've
just turned 21 years old - you know, a distant age. And wow! This team was amazing. They came up with
dozens of ideas right away. I mean, immediately,
they imagined a zero-gravity bar in which there was
a different room for every planet. And they started thinking of this idea
of a nightclub with moveable walls, so it's small and cozy
at the beginning of the evening when people start arriving, and then it grows
to become this giant space when you got the pulsing crowd at 2 am. And so powered by this mental distance, my team that day
actually glowed with energy. They just came up
with so many creative ideas. So next time you're facing
a tough challenge, see - try getting
a little mental distance, and see if doesn't help you
generate some fresh, new ideas. So the fourth idea from the intersection
of science and creativity is about switching off self-critique, and it comes from a brilliant
researcher and surgeon at Johns Hopkins University named Charles Limb. And I hope you've seen
Dr. Limb's great Ted Talk, in which he takes jazz musicians and he puts them into a fMRI machine to see what happens to their brains
when they're creating music in real time. So as soon as he puts them in there and they switch from playing
the memorized music - the ones that require no creativity - to the more creative mode of jazz improv, as soon as they do that,
two things happen. First, a region of the brain
associated with creativity lights up - no surprise there, right? But at the same time, a region of the brain
associated with self-critique, it gets deactivated. It goes quiet during
the period of jazz improv. And I'm not a jazz musician, but as soon as I heard
about Dr. Limb's discovery, it occurred to me
that I thought I was recognizing a familiar pattern
from the business world. Ever give a speech or a presentation, and afterwards, a friend of yours says, "Well, how'd it go?" and you have no idea? You're not being evasive;
you have no idea. And the reason that is,
you know, my theory at least - which I would love to have Dr. Limb test - my theory is that your brain
is helping you out. You know, that you're
risking embarrassment, sharing new ideas with a bunch of people and your brain says, "Look, I'll switch off self-critique here
to help you get through this." And if your brain
can switch it off subconsciously, I bet you can switch it off consciously. I bet you can say to yourself, "Yes, I am taking
a little personal risk here, but I still have got to try this. I am going to switch off self-critique
and take a creative leap." Right? And so, none of these
have been hard, right? You'd have to say those are pretty easy, but this is the easiest one of all because here is a way you can boost
your personal creativity without even getting out of bed. If you've read any of the work
of Jonah Lehrer, that wonderful,
brilliant neuroscience writer, now most famous for his book "Imagine." Jona Lehrer talks
about the frontal cortex, sometimes called
the executive center of the brain, which is really good
at helping you act like a grown up but not really so good about creativity. It actually gets in the way of creativity. In fact, many kids - around the fourth grade,
they see a drop in creativity, and that's exactly at the time that the frontal cortex
is growing in size, in influence, and starting to say, "I'm in charge." But there's still
a daily window of opportunity because that bossy frontal cortex, it goes to sleep at night, which is why you have
those wonderful, creative dreams, and like some people you may know, a little bit slow to wake up
in the morning. So if you can re-purpose
that snooze button on your alarm clock, you might even want to rename it. Because if you can start thinking
of that as the "muse button," you can take good advantage of those first
precious moments of the day. So tomorrow, when the alarm clock rings, press that "muse button," and then do not go back to sleep, right? Do not jump out of bed,
as I suspect some of you do, but instead, let your mind wander
in a state of relaxed attention, working in an unfocused way on some problem
you've been wrestling with, and see if you don't suddenly
have some new ideas on that problem. Now, I've been working
on all five of these things. You know, I chose
to work in a creative field. You know, I started capturing
as many ideas as I could. I've practiced at the art
of getting mental distance. I've learned to switch off self-critique. And then, on March 15th of this year, my alarm clock rang at 6 am, and I pushed that muse button, and I let my mind, let me say that again, my mind wander, and, I swear, what happened next is that my brain spontaneously generated both an introduction
and a pretty complete outline of a talk I was dreaming
of giving someday. So I reached for a pad of paper,
which I always have nearby, and wrote some notes about those ideas. And those ideas really did become a talk, opening up a whole new adventure for me. In fact, those notes
from the snooze button on March 15th, became the talk you heard just now. (Laughter) So let the practical science of creativity help you unleash your own
unique creative potential. Thank you very much. (Applause)
