Transcriber: Eunice Lo Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
Hello.
Today's topic is "Art and the Practical Science of Creativity."
(Applause)
Thank you, wow.
I wanted to do my entire speech in Japanese.
However, my Japanese isn't very good.
And probably, therefore, I'm going to have to speak in English.
(Applause)
So the topic is "The Art and Practical Science of Creativity."
And for thousands of years of human history,
civilizations have believed that creativity was pure art,
that it had nothing to do with science,
because science was, well, you know, scientific or analytical,
while creativity was magical.
You know, the ancient Greeks
believed that the human mind wasn't even capable of creative thought,
but that we were visited by Muses,
those beautiful, creative goddesses
who bestowed us with just brief moments of brilliance.
And I find the idea of muses very romantic.
If you have time to wait for weeks or months
for your muse to arrive, great.
Great.
But most of us need creative solutions every day,
and daily creativity,
that doesn't sound like muses or magic,
that sounds a lot more like science.
And luckily, scientists and psychologists have been hard at work on creativity,
and I'm intensely interested
in the ways that their research and theories
can translate into simple, practical things
that we can all do to boost our creativity.
And I've brought five of those simple ideas along today.
And this first one is so simple
that the skeptical, analytical part of your brain
may try to reject it.
And this idea
is if you want to be extraordinary,
try to stop being ordinary, right?
Try to choose to be creative.
And no, I am not kidding.
And no, I am not making this up.
I interviewed this legendary psychologist
named Robert Sternberg,
who had researched creativity and genius
at Yale University for 30 years.
And Dr. Sternberg said
that the one thing all the creative people he researched had in common,
the one thing they had in common
is that all of them, at some point in their lives,
they just chose to be creative.
They just decided to be creative.
And Dr. Sternberg says this decision to chose creativity
is an important, perhaps essential, step on the path to creative confidence,
because, he says, creative is not typically the default setting
for the adult human brain.
But his findings on choosing creativity is good news, really,
because it means you all have the power to choose.
Today, right now, before you leave the room,
you have the power to choose creativity
and maybe, just maybe, change your life.
So that first one about choosing creativity
is a very powerful one,
but I know it's also a bit intangible.
So next up
is this very concrete, actionable idea about capturing your best ideas.
Because, you know, scientists tell us
that our short-term memory lasts only 15 to 30 seconds, right?
So content is streaming across our brain all of the time,
and the vast majority of that content just floats away.
It just escapes - right? -
never written into long-term memory.
But what if you had a capture device?
What if you had some sort of virtual butterfly net
that would allow you to capture the best of your ideas.
And the good news is you get to pick your own capture device.
You know, I'm a digital immigrant, so I still like paper,
and so I pretty much always have
some sort of little notebook in my back pocket to capture those ideas.
But for you digital natives,
I'm sure there's an app for that,
using some clever digital device that you're already carrying around.
But whether you use analog or whether you use digital,
you still have to try this
because this idea of a capture device
leverages something I would call "the math of creative yield."
Imagine that maybe right now
you're capturing, say, 10 percent of the stuff,
that content, the ideas that flow across your brain.
What if using a capture device,
you could increase that to, say, oh, I don't know, 90%?
Think about that! Right?
You would have nine times as much material to work with
when you sort through those ideas to find your favorite solution.
So pick your own favorite butterfly net
and see how much you can increase your own creative yield.
So this third one kind of sneaks up on you
because it seems like it shouldn't work as well as it does,
and this idea is that when you're working on a tough challenge,
do whatever you can to get a little mental distance from the problem.
Because research shows
that people come up with way more creative answers
when they think the question came from another country.
And they're also more creative
if they imagine
that they themselves are a distant age -
so if they're told to think like a seven-year-old.
And so any kind of mental distance
can help you come up with more creative ideas.
So, could this work?
I mean, I wasn't so sure myself
until one day last year I risked trying it.
It was an important client workshop.
The client was in the liquor industry,
and we were trying to get them to think creatively
about bars and nightclubs, right?
And I've been in hundreds of IDEO client workshops,
and to be honest,
teams can be a little slow to get started,
but not that day
because I gave them a chance to get a little mental distance.
I said, imagine it's 10 years into the future -
you know, a distant time, right? -
and imagine you've just turned 21 years old -
you know, a distant age.
And wow! This team was amazing.
They came up with dozens of ideas right away.
I mean, immediately, they imagined a zero-gravity bar
in which there was a different room for every planet.
And they started thinking of this idea of a nightclub with moveable walls,
so it's small and cozy at the beginning of the evening
when people start arriving,
and then it grows to become this giant space
when you got the pulsing crowd at 2 am.
And so powered by this mental distance,
my team that day actually glowed with energy.
They just came up with so many creative ideas.
So next time you're facing a tough challenge,
see - try getting a little mental distance,
and see if doesn't help you generate some fresh, new ideas.
So the fourth idea
from the intersection of science and creativity
is about switching off self-critique,
and it comes from a brilliant researcher and surgeon
at Johns Hopkins University
named Charles Limb.
And I hope you've seen Dr. Limb's great Ted Talk,
in which he takes jazz musicians
and he puts them into a fMRI machine
to see what happens to their brains when they're creating music in real time.
So as soon as he puts them in there
and they switch from playing the memorized music -
the ones that require no creativity -
to the more creative mode of jazz improv,
as soon as they do that, two things happen.
First, a region of the brain associated with creativity lights up -
no surprise there, right?
But at the same time,
a region of the brain associated with self-critique,
it gets deactivated.
It goes quiet during the period of jazz improv.
And I'm not a jazz musician,
but as soon as I heard about Dr. Limb's discovery,
it occurred to me that I thought I was recognizing
a familiar pattern from the business world.
Ever give a speech or a presentation,
and afterwards, a friend of yours says,
"Well, how'd it go?"
and you have no idea?
You're not being evasive; you have no idea.
And the reason that is, you know, my theory at least -
which I would love to have Dr. Limb test -
my theory is that your brain is helping you out.
You know, that you're risking embarrassment,
sharing new ideas with a bunch of people
and your brain says,
"Look, I'll switch off self-critique here to help you get through this."
And if your brain can switch it off subconsciously,
I bet you can switch it off consciously.
I bet you can say to yourself,
"Yes, I am taking a little personal risk here,
but I still have got to try this.
I am going to switch off self-critique and take a creative leap."
Right?
And so, none of these have been hard, right?
You'd have to say those are pretty easy,
but this is the easiest one of all
because here is a way you can boost your personal creativity
without even getting out of bed.
If you've read any of the work of Jonah Lehrer,
that wonderful, brilliant neuroscience writer,
now most famous for his book "Imagine."
Jona Lehrer talks about the frontal cortex,
sometimes called the executive center of the brain,
which is really good at helping you act like a grown up
but not really so good about creativity.
It actually gets in the way of creativity.
In fact, many kids -
around the fourth grade, they see a drop in creativity,
and that's exactly at the time
that the frontal cortex is growing in size, in influence,
and starting to say, "I'm in charge."
But there's still a daily window of opportunity
because that bossy frontal cortex,
it goes to sleep at night,
which is why you have those wonderful, creative dreams,
and like some people you may know,
a little bit slow to wake up in the morning.
So if you can re-purpose that snooze button on your alarm clock,
you might even want to rename it.
Because if you can start thinking of that as the "muse button,"
you can take good advantage of those first precious moments of the day.
So tomorrow, when the alarm clock rings,
press that "muse button,"
and then do not go back to sleep, right?
Do not jump out of bed, as I suspect some of you do,
but instead, let your mind wander in a state of relaxed attention,
working in an unfocused way
on some problem you've been wrestling with,
and see if you don't suddenly have some new ideas on that problem.
Now, I've been working on all five of these things.
You know, I chose to work in a creative field.
You know, I started capturing as many ideas as I could.
I've practiced at the art of getting mental distance.
I've learned to switch off self-critique.
And then, on March 15th of this year,
my alarm clock rang at 6 am,
and I pushed that muse button,
and I let my mind, let me say that again,
my mind wander,
and, I swear, what happened next
is that my brain spontaneously generated
both an introduction and a pretty complete outline
of a talk I was dreaming of giving someday.
So I reached for a pad of paper, which I always have nearby,
and wrote some notes about those ideas.
And those ideas really did become a talk,
opening up a whole new adventure for me.
In fact, those notes from the snooze button
on March 15th,
became the talk you heard just now.
(Laughter)
So let the practical science of creativity
help you unleash your own unique creative potential.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)