Who are you?
Do I trust you?
Am I afraid of it?
Will this work for me?
Who says it's important?
What will my peers think?
These are all variations of one complicated thread: how will this process make me feel?
Even though that's all we care about, marketers seem to think it's fine to spam, fine to focus on specs and important to talk mostly about price.
"According to a study done by researchers at the University of British Columbia," Kecia Lynn reports on Big Think, "when the mind drifts, two areas of the brain that were previously thought to activate themselves separately from each other actually begin functioning simultaneously.
“You see a relationship between these two networks in the brain that many people didn't think was even possible — and that almost nobody thought was a common mental state.”
So mind-wandering produces wonderstanding.
This giant art installation of the Mona Lisa in Sydney, Australia was created from 3,604 cups of coffee, each filled with different amounts of milk to create the different shades!!
To be more creative now,
To reduce stress now, try heart breathing--a sixty second breathing exercise that calms anxiety and lets you focus on what matters. For more on the science of how this works, dive into the The Heart Math Solution.
Unlike the usual advocacy ads in Washington, DC, CTIA's new Wireless Mind commercial opens possibilities and lives up to its theme of freedom.
Laugh. Daydream. Doze. Move (to a bigger city, a blue room, out of your cubicle). Travel or just imagine you are. Pretend to be 7 years old again.
And, K.I.S.S. Drop the jargon. Use generic verbs. For example, replace "drive" with "move." Is it a traffic jam or a mobility puzzle?
" Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It's a skill," Lehrer notes. "A surprisingly concrete set of lessons has emerged about what creativity is and how to spark it in ourselves and our work."
Laugh. Play. Move.
Updated September 27, 2012
Jonah Lehrer resigned his position as staff writer at The New Yorker after apologizing for fabricating quotes attributed to Bob Dylan that appeared in Imagine and repurposing ideas first published in Wired and the Wall Street Journal articles.
Sadly, this has seemingly wiped out the value of his insights into the science of creativity, a loss for us all. After reading the vituperative comments posted to the New Yorker site, I offer up H.G. Wells' insight, recently promoted by goodreads.com:
"Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo."