How Creativity Works

What is creativity? Depending on who you ask, you'll can get a wide range of answers to this question. But if you ask me my definition of creativity is taking a unique thought and implementing it to obtain something of value. To have innovative thoughts and ideas, but not act on them means you are imaginative, not creative. If you create something that has no context, function, behavior, or structure, then you have created something of no value, thus propelling that something into the useless piece of trash bin.

So, creativity is the process as a whole, but not any one component. Using a set of tools in a unique and innovative way to implement an idea to some value can be called creative, but only after the process is successful.

The following video gives a great visual definition of creativity.

Enjoy!

It has long been known that the human brain is comprised of two sections known as the left brain and the right brain, Each half processes received information or stimuli in radically different fashion.

The left brain is like a filing cabinet or reference catalog. The files are like zip files that show an image for reference. For instance, what we have stored is a fireworks display. The image used for the icon my be the one fireworks image from that display, giving us access to to the facts about that display. Who we were with, how old we were, where the display occurred, etc. Details and facts.

The right brain on the other hand is responsible for new information, feelings and emotions, abstracts and associations. We may see a fireworks display today and not see an icon, but we will associate it with one that we experienced in our past and remember how we felt about fireworks, the puppy love we had with that girl or guy who took us to that display in the past. This will in turn bring about romantic feelings and maybe cause us to hug the one we're with during the current display.

Knowing this we can see how creativity works.When we experience something new (vision, idea, or thought) our left brain begins to tickle all the old information stored in relative files and begins to massage the information in those files to form an idea that is unique.

Now for implementation.

An advertising executive is at a fireworks display with his love. The show starts and he is taken back to when he was fourteen years old and at a small town Independence Day Celebration that was capped off by a fireworks display. He remembers meeting his girlfriend, Beth, by the Tilt A Whirl. The emotions he remembered about that night leads to seeing Beth's name everywhere. He was smitten.

Tonight, as that memory plays across the movie screen in his mind, he looks at his fiance. Feeling overwhelmed by the sudden flood of romantic notions, he reaches to kiss Jill and then, through association, a great television ad is conceived.

The commercial is pitched to a client and produced. Air time is bought and the ad is exposed to millions, thus completing the creativity process.

This little test is a popular way to see if you've been "wired" to be right brain dominant, left brain dominant, or whole brain.

We cannot truly be creative without being able to use both the left brain and the right brain. We may have novel thoughts and ideas, even implement the, but if the end product doesn't meet the four tenets of context, function, behavior, and structure, then the process is a failure.

We are raised by the left brain. In most cases our education systems and social structures hammer repetitive input of facts and logics into us.

Local at the typical school curriculum and what we are taught. Math is a structured discipline, science, history, and even language arts. Even the music classes we are taught are based on A + B=C. We have been taught and are teaching our children to go out in the world and be productive cookie cutter drones. We are ignoring our right brain.

Can we get our right brain back? Can we achieve a working relationship between the two sides of the brain? Yes.

There's a blue moon full of creativity exercises, lessons and seminars that can show us how to win our right brain back, and every one of them involve a process that we are taught is the way to learn; repetition.

Below is a quirky, unique exercise that is very powerful when you consider what is really going on.

Enjoy!