Why Retrain The Brain?

Some have asked why I named this blog Retrain the Brain.

It’s because I believe that to max­i­mize cre­ativ­ity, most peo­ple, whether pur­su­ing per­sonal, cor­po­rate or orga­ni­za­tional goals, need to rekin­dle the cre­ativ­ity that is latent in all of us.

Every human being is born with the abil­ity to be cre­ative, but unlearn it as they grow to adult­hood. Five-year-olds are the most cre­ative crea­tures on earth — more than 95% tested are classed as highly cre­ative. But by age 10 that num­ber is halved. By the time they become adults, only about 2% are still highly creative.

Why is this? Because 5-year-olds haven’t been social­ized. They don’t know all the words so make up their own. They don’t know they’re sup­posed to color fire engines red, so color them with what­ever they like (based on emotion).

Our soci­eties are based on logic, which insists on step by step think­ing that pre­vent the thought leaps that are the basis for cre­ative think­ing. To use a lan­guage exam­ple, log­i­cal think­ing would have you go from A to B to C in an orderly pro­gres­sion. But cre­ativ­ity involves leap­ing from A to, say  Z, and back again, likely stop­ping at M, O, P, and sev­eral other let­ters along the way.

Each time, the brain stops at a let­ter, even for a nanosec­ond, a lit­tle insight is formed. These insights are mashed together by the brain into an idea that may be way “out of the box” of pro­gres­sive think­ing.  Rather than see the alpha­bet as an orderly series of steps, we may com­bine let­ters into a new word. Thus, we have the basis for writ­ten lan­guage, the inven­tion of which was an apex of creativity.

We all know writ­ten lan­guage today because our brains have been trained to under­stand the think­ing leaps they involve and the sym­bols words rep­re­sent. When com­bined, these form a struc­ture of more com­plex thoughts.  In a sense, writ­ten lan­guage is the result of applied cre­ativ­ity, the putting of cre­ative insights into a com­plex struc­ture that we all understand.

Sim­i­larly, to be more cre­ative in our per­sonal, busi­ness, and orga­ni­za­tional lives, we have to  retrain our brains to see in dif­fer­ent ways, to escape the think­ing struc­tures we build in our heads over time to process the con­stant flow of infor­ma­tion that comes our way. We  usu­ally refer to this as “experience”.

To para­phrase Ein­stein, the think­ing that got us into a sit­u­a­tion won’t get us out of it. This requires another form of infor­ma­tion pro­cess­ing, in which we put together seem­ingly ran­dom bits of infor­ma­tion to cre­ate new insights and ideas.

So, to retrain the brain, a per­son has to exam­ine pre­vi­ous ways of think­ing, change them where appro­pri­ate, and some­times build new ones.

There are many ways to do this, and they will be high­lighted in fol­low­ing posts.