Light Your Creative Spark

Sudden ah ha insights are an ultimate source of creativity. Imagine if YOU could learn to summon them at will.

What happens in your mind when you get a sudden ah ha creative insight? When a light bulb seems to go off in your mind, and you suddenly just know the answer to a question or problem?

Such creative insight almost always comes suddenly, according to psychologist Jonathan Schooler of the University of Pittsburgh.

When you solve a problem in a methodical way, you usually know whether or not you’re coming close to a solution.

But with insight-type problems, most people have no clue when they are about to get a solution, Schooler explains. The solution almost seems to be delivered to you.

 Ah Ha Insights Unveiled
Science is yielding new insight into this ultimate form of creative thinking. And these insights can help YOU increase your creativity. Psych professor John Kounios of Drexel University and Mark Jung-Beeman of Northwestern University are studying ah ha insights using high tech equipment.

The researchers are asking people whether their answers to a complex word puzzle just popped into their heads  or if they used a more systematic approach to coming up with their solution. While all this is going on, the people are hooked up to EEG and fMRI machines to monitor their brains.

The EEG measures the when, Kounios explained, it records patterns of brainwave activity over time.

The fMRI, a brain imaging device, on the other hand, measures the where. It takes a picture showing which spots in the brain get the most blood flow  indicating they are more active during a given task.

The researchers discovered some surprising brain activity patterns occur at the moment the right answers just pop into one’s mind as a sudden insight.

The EEG showed a burst of brain activity in the right hemisphere about a third of a second BEFORE the research subjects hit a button indicating they had the answer.

The fMRI revealed that a tiny spot in the right temporal lobe just above your right ear lights up when people get an answer through insight. Have you ever noticed you might put your fingertips to your right temple when you’re searching for an answer to a question?

Insightful Precognition

 Chance favours the prepared mind.~~ Louis Pasteur

But then … the researchers discovered something even more remarkable:

Those who would later get the answer with insight had increased brain activity before they even saw the question. This brain state before the problem is presented actually predicts whether the subjects will solve it with insight or not. Kounios said. 

What happens is those who use insight to solve problems actually put their brains into a state in which they were more likely to have a flash of insight, he explained. It seems these people pulled a chain to turn on their mental light bulbs  just like they show in comic strips.

Here’s Two Clues
Krounos’s results suggest there’s something truly unique about ah ha insights. There’s been this long debate over whether insight is anything special, he said. In his experience, it’s definitely something special.

Clue 1: Psychologist Jonathan Schooler, who has also done insight experiments, found that people have more trouble getting ah ha solutions when they try to talk themselves through the steps. Sometimes it’s better to just shut up, Schooler concluded.

 Humm.

Clue 2: Kounios also reported that insight comes more easily when people don’t try so hard. They let go a little bit, he said. They relax and turn their focus to other things.

The Ah Ha State and Creativity
Like insightful problem solutions, creative ideas in the arts also often seem to come from out of the blue.

In a radio interview ex-Beetle Paul Simon once said he was just fooling around with some chords one day, when suddenly he began to play Bridge Over Troubled Water for the first time. He said it was as if the song just created itself in his brain.

Work like that in Kounios’ lab helps to demystify creativity by connecting it to a very real brain process, Christoff Koch, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology tells us.

I agree.

We’re only conscious of a small fraction of our true brainpower

Insight, creativity, and our other most treasured mental abilities seem to flow out of the subconscious mind and just suddenly burst into consciousness. What a marvel our human minds are.

Entering the Ah Ha Zone
Anyway, it now seems there IS something to the sensation of a light bulb going off in our brain when we get a sudden creative insightful.

Stop and think about the moments you’ve had such experiences. You will likely recall being very relaxed. Einstein claimed to get his greatest creative insights in the shower.

Ask yourself what activities tend to best help you empty your mind? Then get these activities into your life when you’re trying to solve a problem, or get a creative insight.

Here’s a brain smart key: Logical analytical thinking is just the opposite of creative ah ha thinking. Your mind can only do one or the other at a given time.

If you have a particular problem you’re trying to solve, try this approach. First do your logical analysis. Then just let go. Do something totally different and relaxing. Just forget the problem

Allow your subconscious mind to play with the question or problem. Just go about your life, and allow the insight to flash into your conscious mind.

You CAN do this. It’s actually built into your mental hardware.

You’ll recognize it when it comes. That light bulb will flash.

How We Create Coincidence

Do you believe in coincidence?

Actually nothing happens by chance. We actually CREATE what we call a coincidence.

When do coincidences happen in our lives? Stop and think about it. When you are focused on something and it has a priority in your life, little coincidences seem to occur.

This works no matter what you’re focused on. If you’re focused on worry and fear, or anger and frustration you will have coincidental events reflecting what you are worried about.

Worry is actually negative goal setting.

The classic example is someone who is looking for success, but just can’t achieve their goals. They might be focused on their goal, and that seems like a good thing. But their unconscious mind might be filled to overflowing with negative thoughts and beliefs.

So what happens? They create negative coincidences that sabotage their efforts. Self-defeating situations are inevitable when your mind is focused focus on fear, worry, or the concept of being somehow limited.

What is Coincidence?
Negative outcomes don’t just happen in our lives. They occur when we refuse to pay attention to warning signs of a probable negative outcome.

Let’s run a little test of how you got to where you are today because of coincidences that occurred in your life.

Start with one aspect of your life. This could be love or romance, your career or business, financial success anything that has truly special significance to you.

You know where you are today in that area, but let’s step back say three years. What was the situation then? Take a few introspective minutes to recall the major decisions you made in that area of your life as you think forward to today.

Here’s where you’ll begin see how one decision led to another. Pick one major decision. If you had made a different choice, how would things be different today?

So why do you think you made that decision? You were focused on something positive or negative, that focus created your response to an opportunity or challenge and here you are today as a result of that past focus and action.

Creating Positive Life Outcomes
Here’s how to get some positive results in your life:

Begin by deciding what it is that you really want make it a positive outcome, and not fear based.

Then begin to focus on what you want.

Now continuously reassure yourself that everything in your life is moving in the desired direction.

Trust and be patient. Do NOT buy into any challenges as evidence of a negative outcome. View them as learning experiences and opportunities to fine tune your actions.

The very moment you adopt the above technique, you have moved from creating what you don’t want to creating what you DO want.

On the other hand, if you choose NOT to direct your subconscious mind to create the life you want, everything will remain as it is today or will go downhill because of building anger and frustration. This IS your life. Why not make the most of it, and be happy?

A weekend with Dr Jill’s Get What You Want OR her Live Well and Prosper e-workbooks will take you by the hand and show you step by step exactly how to make your life a better, more successful experience. Click Here

Put the power of visualization to work in your life today. Click here to find out how. OR, of course, you can just pass this off as just a pitch and never know what benefits you could have gained.

 

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Meditation Builds up the Brain

Meditating does more than just feel good and calm you down, it makes you perform better and alters the structure of your brain, researchers have found.

People who meditate say the practice restores their energy, and some claim they need less sleep as a result. Many studies have reported that the brain works differently during meditation – brainwave patterns change and neuronal firing patterns synchronise. But whether meditation actually brings any of the restorative benefits of sleep has remained largely unexplored.

So Bruce O’Hara and colleagues at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, US, decided to investigate. They used a well-established psychomotor vigilance task, which has long been used to quantify the effects of sleepiness on mental acuity.

Ten volunteers were tested before and after 40 minutes of either sleep, meditation, reading or light conversation, with all subjects trying all conditions.

What astonished the researchers was that meditation was the only intervention that immediately led to superior performance, despite none of the volunteers being experienced at meditation.

Every single subject showed improvement, says O’Hara. The improvement was even more dramatic after a night without sleep. But, he admits: Why it improves performance, we do not know. The team is now studying experienced meditators, who spend several hours each day in practice.

Brain builder
What effect meditating has on the structure of the brain has also been a matter of some debate. Now Sara Lazar at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, US, and colleagues have used MRI to compare 15 meditators, with experience ranging from 1 to 30 years, and 15 non-meditators.

They found that meditating actually increases the thickness of the cortex in areas involved in attention and sensory processing, such as the prefrontal cortex and the right anterior insula.

You are exercising it while you meditate, and it gets bigger, she says. The finding is in line with studies showing that accomplished musicians, athletes and linguists all have thickening in relevant areas of the cortex. It is further evidence, says Lazar, that yogis aren’t just sitting there doing nothing.

The growth of the cortex is not due to the growth of new neurons, she points out, but results from wider blood vessels, more supporting structures such as glia and astrocytes, and increased branching and connections.

NewScientist.com news service, By Alison Motluk

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