Can science help reinvent the thinking cap? - The Globe and Mail

Benjamin Franklin was an innovation machine, cranking out game-changers like the odometer, bifocals and the lightning rod. Franklin also played a lot of checkers, which he praised as “not merely an idle amusement.”More related to this storyThe future of b ubicle cultureTwo unrelated facts? According to new advances in how we understand Hair weaving the neuroscience of creativity, maybe not.When it comes to the mechanics of creative thought, the brain is still very much a black box: Mundane stuff goes in, and sometimes brilliant stuff comes out (and more often it doesn’t). But, as author Jonah Lehrer recounts in his new bookImagine: How Creativity Works, brain imaging studies conducted by researchers at Northwestern and Drexel Universities have cracked open the box a little. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tracks changes in blood flow to give a very high-resolution picture of what’s happening in the brain during mental activity. On the down side, it’s slower than the speed of thoughts: Electroencephalography (EEG) captures brain activity in real-time, but at a fuzzier resolution. But by combining fMRI and EEG, the researchers have started to track the creative-problem-solving process as it happens.Presented with a problem, our left hemispheres seem to take immediate charge. For problems requiring brute analytical force, this works just fine. But for those requiring creative solutions, the left-brain gets stumped. That’s when the right hemisphere kicks in, unleashing a steady stream of novel dot-connections between all sorts of random data in its storehouse. For some reason, an abundance of alpha brain waves – a certain frequency of neural oscillation that, frankly, we don’t know much about – seems to help us dip into that connection stream. A lot of Weaving hair these free associations are dead ends, but the ones that aren’t? Eureka.What does all this mean for enhancing creative practice? More importantly: How will playing checkers help you come up with the next Instagram? The key seems to be increasing those alpha waves – they’re so closely related to insights that their presence on an EEG allows scientists to predict a test subject’s creative breakthrough before it happens. And alpha waves are heavily implicated in Remy hair relaxing activities. So, as backwards as it sounds, intense focus isn’t the way to come up with a creative solution to a problem. Relaxation is.3M, the Minnesota company behind innovative products such as masking tape and Post-It Notes, is famous for a work environment that encourages employees to regularly break their focus – and thereby crank those alpha waves. Go for a walk. Play a few rounds of pinball. Or even put your work to the side and get busy with a personal passion project. 3M even has a rule that staff spend 15 per cent of their day working on something that’s not, well, work.The 3M approach isn’t without its critics. Innovation consultant Chris Trimble, blogging for the Harvard Business Review, noted that coming up with new ideas is only half of the innovation battle: You need to implement those ideas, too. Mr. Trimble warned of the dangers of “generating a mountain of great ideas on paper that never become anything more than a mountain of great ideas on paper.” Then again, 3M currently has a mountain of more than 55,000 distinct products on the market, ranging from office supplies to bioanalytic materials. As Jonah Lehrer points out, that’s almost one product for every 3M employee. They must be doing something right, and other workplaces are taking notice.“You can’t tell people, ‘Just go innovate,’ ” says Debra Pickfield, owner of ThinkSpot, a meeting space-for-hire in Burlington, Ont., designed to foster innovative thinking .