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Comment by gphilip | Hacker News Reader

Interview with Prof Vincent Walsh of UCL, one of the world’s preeminent cognitive neuroscientists. Some interesting points from the interview:

1. You’re only aware of less than 1% of your brain activity, and most creativity happens in the other 99%.

2. If you want to stimulate an idea, you need to give your brain time to go “off-line”.

3. Creativity is not a team sport, and brainstorming is a terrible way to generate good ideas.

4. Execution of ideas is more important than generation, and previous failure helps this.

5. There are no miracle exercises / processes / drugs / brain implants to “turn on creativity” in areas where it didn’t previously exist.

6. However, creativity can be improved by giving people the right exercises, knowledge, experiences and environment.

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#2 - Yes. Jumping into an Isolation Tank (sensory deprivation) is a great hack to kickstart an immersive off-line mode.. You need to truly go offline for this work. A walk might not always yield this. Hence I recommend the use of hacks like an Isolation Tank or just plain Meditation. For those interested in Isolation Tanks I wrote a piece here: http://www.theroadtosiliconvalley.com/local-california/float... - a truly hackers hack!

Having a shower is almost as good - lots of white noise and shower water is the touch equivalent of white noise. Close your eyes and with only the smell and taste of warm water you are in a el cheapo isolation tank.

Works for me tremendously well, and that's why few years ago I bought a waterproof notepad and take it with me to the shower. I do that often when I'm confused or out of ideas how to continue something. Actually, the best public talks I gave were all designed in the shower ;).

Specific music like DJ Armin van Buuren's A State of Trance helps me. There are lyrics but you don't actually have to listen to the words, they sort of blend in the music. It's, well, a state of trance. http://www.538.nl/programma/37/a-state-of-trance/gemist/deta...

John Cleese made a brilliant talk some time back about stimulating creativity (actually more about using such time more effectively) [1]. The talk highlighted various practical concepts he found useful for entering into a better creative, or 'open', mode. Well worth watching for those interested, and touched on a few of the points highlighted by Walsh.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AU5x1Ea7NjQ

All of the above is easy to understand when you think of creativity as unconscious problem solving.

Also John Cleese has a great talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AU5x1Ea7NjQ

Yeah I dunno, it's a long video.

Is there a transcript? I can't listen to Cleese for more than the average length of a comedy sketch.

As for creativity not being a team sport, and brainstorming being "terrible", I disagree. Creative ideas need organised foundations, and brainstorming can solve problems for a team to action and expand creative ideas. The band jamming in the garage, is their musical brainstorming so terrible?

"Creativity" is such a loose word. As for what it even is, I lean towards the theory I read somewhere of it being about "discovery" rather than bringing something new into the world. Creativity is the act of discovering what was already there. Works for me until I change my mind.

My experience of brainstorming is that everyone comes up with a crap idea (a couple of people will probably come up with the same idea).

I can see why some are crap, and can't see why some others are. I have an OK idea, I can see is better than the crap ones. The loud people get hooked on one of the crap ideas and don't listen / or bother to comprehend why your idea may be better, they are too busy elaborating on of their crap one.

My best ideas come at unusual times. Staring into space. Or Riding my bike. Crap idea wins.

Brainstorming is a way to explore ideas, not create them.

I think the fundamental mistake in brainstorming is thinking that out-there ideas are a good approach. And that comes from underestimating the size of idea-space. Exploring idea-space without a map doesn't break you out of your own limitations, because combinations are infinite but your own mind is not. So you flail generating unworkable ideas within the box rather than hill-climbing towards a workable one that might be out of the box.

What is missing is a heuristic. Like, nobody would expect an AI to generate good ideas by throwing random numbers in the air. They would demand to see some heuristic for iterative improvement.

Yeah it can be like that. But also its a time for everybody to throw out the ideas they already had, but haven't shared.

Maybe its function is social rather than creative -- simply giving permission to throw anything out there.

It also seems to contradict some things that I heard about creativity, namely that period right after waking is when you are at your most creative. Severe lack of sleep would cause person to extend that period, but it would increase noise to signal ratio.

Have to agree with this. Lately I've noticed that the best thinking on ideas I do is about 60 minutes after I leave some group collaborative session for generating ideas.

Hence a flurry of emails and actual forward progress afterwards.

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