Free 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot by Richard Wiseman

technique might not be for everyone, but that is not to say that your unconscious mind is not a powerhouse of creative thought.
    In fact, several studies suggest that when it comes to innovative ways of looking at the world, there may be a lot more going on in your unconscious mind than you realize. In a simple experimental demonstration of this, Stephen Smith at Texas A&M University presented volunteers with picturewordpuzzles that suggested common phrases and asked them to solve as many as possible. 6 For example, they might be asked to identify the phrase indicated in the following set of words:
   YOU JUST ME
The answer is “just between you and me.” Now that you have the general idea, try these three:
   SALE SALE SALE SALE
    STAND
        I
   BRO KEN
    The answers are “for sale,” “I understand,” and “broken in half.” In Smith’s experiment, if a puzzle was unsolved, the volunteers were told to relax for fifteen minutes and then try the puzzle again. More than a third of the puzzles were solved on the second attempt. While relaxing, the volunteers were not working on the puzzles consciously, but their unconscious thoughts devised new and helpful perspectives on the puzzles.
    Recent work suggests that you don’t even need to spend as long as fifteen minutes away from a problem. Instead, you can achieve the same results with just a few moments’ respite.
    Psychologists Ap Dijksterhuis and Teun Meurs at the University of Amsterdam carried out a series of fascinating experiments on creativity and the unconscious. 7
    Their ideas about the nature of the unconscious mind and creativity are simple to understand. Imagine two men in a room. One of them is highly creative but very shy. The other is clever, not as creative, and far more domineering. Nowimagine going into the room and asking them to come up with ideas for a campaign to advertise a new type of chocolate bar. True to form, the loud but not especially creative man dominates the conversation. He does not allow his quieter counterpart to contribute, and the ideas produced are good but not very innovative.
    Now let’s imagine a slightly different scenario. Again, you walk into the room and ask for campaign ideas. However, this time you distract the loud man by getting him to watch a film. Under these circumstances, the quiet man is able to make his voice heard, and you walk away with a completely different, and far more creative, set of ideas. In many ways, this is a good analogy for the relationship between your mind and creativity. The quiet guy represents your unconscious mind. It is capable of wonderful ideas, but they are often difficult to hear. The loud guy represents your conscious mind—clever, not as innovative, but difficult to get out of your head.
    Dijksterhuis conducted a series of experiments to find out whether people might become more creative if their conscious minds were distracted. In perhaps the best known of these studies, volunteers were asked to devise new and creative names for pasta. To help them, the experimenters started by presenting five new names, all of which ended with the letter i and thus sounded like typical pasta possibilities. Some of the volunteers were then given three minutes to think before listing their ideas. In terms of the “two guys in the room” analogy, these volunteers were listening to the comments of the loud, and not especially creative, guy in their heads. Another group of volunteers was asked to forget about the pasta and instead spend three minutes performing a mentally challenging task—carefully tracking a dot as it moved around a computer screen and clicking the space bar whenever it changed color. In terms of the room analogy, this task was designed todistract the loud guy and give the quiet man a chance to have his voice heard. Only after completing this difficult and attention-sapping task were the participants asked to list some new names for pasta.
    The researchers