Free Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer Page B

needed to be more disciplined about my mind wandering.” And so, every afternoon, Schooler parks his car on the Pacific Coast Highway, leaves his iPhone behind, and walks along these seaside cliffs. “I never have a plan or a list of things I need to think about,” he says.
    “Instead, I just let my mind go wherever it wants. And you know what? This is where I have all my best ideas.”

    • • •
    The advantage of knowing where insights come from is that it can make it easier to generate insights in the first place. When we’re struggling with seemingly impossible problems, it’s important to find time to unwind, to eavesdrop on all those remote associations coming from the right hemisphere. Instead of drinking another cup of coffee, indulge in a little daydreaming. Rather than relentlessly focusing, take a warm shower, or play some Ping-Pong, or walk on the beach.
    Look at this recent experiment, published in Science. These psychologists, at the University of British Columbia, were interested in looking at how various colors influence the imagination. They recruited six hundred subjects, most of them undergraduates, and had them perform a variety of basic cognitive tests displayed against red, blue, or neutral backgrounds.
    The differences were striking. When people took tests in the red condition, they were much better at skills that required accu-racy and attention to detail, such as catching spelling mistakes or keeping random numbers in short-term memory. According to the scientists, this is because people automatically associate red with danger, which makes them more alert and aware.
    The color blue, however, carried a completely different set of psychological benefits. While people in the blue group performed worse on short-term memory tasks, they did far better on those requiring some imagination, such as coming up with creative uses for a brick or designing a children’s toy out of simple geometric shapes. In fact, subjects in the blue condition generated twice as many creative outputs as subjects in the red condition. ( Interestingly, exposing subjects to an incandescent light bulb can also increase performance on a variety of insight puzzles. Because the lit bulb is a cliché of insight, the cheap cultural artifact makes people more sensitive to those quiet insights coming from the right hemisphere. )
    We can now begin to understand why being surrounded by blue walls makes us more creative. According to the scientists, the color automatically triggers associations with the sky and ocean. We think about expansive horizons and diffuse light, sandy beaches and lazy summer days; alpha waves instantly increase. ( And it’s not just blueness; the scientists speculate that any open, sunny space can lead to increased creativity. Architecture has real cognitive consequences.)  This sort of mental relaxation makes it easier to daydream and pay attention to insights; we’re less focused on what’s right in front of us and more aware of the possibilities simmering in our imaginations.
    There’s something deeply surprising about these data. We tend to assume that some people are simply more creative than others, that originality is a predetermined personality trait: if a person isn’t born with the correct kind of brain, he’ll never be able to compose an original song or come up with an idea as innovative as Post-it notes. But creativity isn’t a fixed feature of the mind — that’s why merely exposing people to the color blue can double their creative output. The imagination is vaster then we can imagine. We just need to learn how to listen.

Ch. 3  THE UNCONCEALING
    It was a flash of inspiration. Kind of a thirty-year flash.
— Charles Eames
    The poet w. h. auden was a drug addict. He began every day the same way: He sat at his cluttered desk and gulped a cup of strong black coffee. Then he smoked a cigarette. Auden needed the caffeine and nicotine — “I need them quite desperately,” he admitted