This is an inspirational video, but not one with lots of quotes or sunsets or quotes about sunsets.
This is a video for unmotivated people who want to find inspiration in many ways. It's
a video for myself. I started off this year not doing much at all.
Even with lots of work and goals, my motivation had hit rock bottom.
So I started to wonder how could I become inspired? Where does inspiration even come from
in our brains? I dug deeper and soon found myself testing out Thomas Edison secret trick to spark
great creative ideas. Here's how that went. This video is sponsored by TCL.
You can find out more about their TVs and smart home devices at TCL.com.
What comes to mind when you hear the word inspiration?
For me, being excited about an idea is the driving force for me to do something great in my life,
whether that's big or small, for a long time, inspiration was considered
unscientific, and I'm sure that the quotes about sunsets didn't help that perception.
But in reality, inspiration can boost motivation and feed creativity.
Researchers hypothesized that two distinct processes make up the experience of inspiration,
a passive process of being inspired by an an active process of being inspired to. For example,
you can be inspired by a sunset, after which you may be inspired to draw it. Think of the
inspired by as being the spark of inspiration. The aha moment or idea that you have and the
inspired to is you're getting off the couch to actually do that and bring that into the world.
This spark of inspiration and effort both play equally important roles in the creative process.
Creativity is the combination of ideas and action. Greatness for me is the effort put into realize
an idea. Science inspires that creative process. Through research, we can understand how to spark
creativity to do something great in your life. What's really cool is that research has found
more sparks of inspiration and can lead to an increase in passions and more creative writing.
Being inspired by is a key motivator to becoming
inspired to So how can we have more sparks of inspiration, more creative insights? It's tricky
to know when you'll be inspired by an inside or aha moment can pop into your brain at any time.
Science suggests that there are certain moments and types of thinking where inspiration might
occur. More often when we're going about our daily lives, focusing on tasks and studying and working.
We use a group of brain regions that's collectively called
the Executive Attention Network using them, and you're able to relate to the here and now
and pay attention. But then at the moment, your brain becomes disengaged,
like when your mind wanders. You activate a group of different brain
regions called the default mode network. You're not engaging with the outside world.
Your brain is at rest. You're not focused on one task You may think this is idle time and
that there's not much going on up there. But that couldn't be further from the truth. During idle
time, much of the brain continues to work. As you think to yourself, you visualize the past
and imagine the future. Your mind wanders and new ideas that spontaneously emerge.
Creative thinking is thought to involve the interplay of both of these networks,
a kind of teamwork between spontaneous thinking and cognitive control. The default mode network
is involved in generating ideas, while the Executive Attention Network is important
in selecting ideas, working together to give you that
aha moment. And there's one occasion where our brains use both of these networks.
The moment that we're drifting off to sleep the moment between wakefulness and sleep has
long been suspected to hold something special. The inventor, Thomas Edison, would allegedly
taste the twilight moments between being awake and being asleep. It said that Edison would sleep in a
chair with a tray and two bowls. When he drifted off to sleep, he'd drop the balls in the tray.
They'd make a loud noise that would jolt him awake, and he'd write down his ideas before he
forgot. Fast forward to today, and a new study used this technique to investigate if the very
first sleep stage called and one offers the right conditions for insight and creativity.
Participants were given a task where they had to identify a hidden pattern.
Then they were seated in a reclining chair holding a metal drink bottle,
which they would drop if they drifted off into the first sleep stage. If the bottle fell,
the participants were asked to report what they were thinking just before they let go.
The researchers found that those who drifted into anyone for at least 15 seconds with three times as
likely to identify a hidden role to complete the task compared to those who had remained awake.
The findings support the fact that the interplay of those brain networks in the first stage of
sleep can lead to insight. So I wanted to see if this would maybe work for myself.
I spent one day and three nights trying to get into that twilight zone, and I couldn't do it.
I was so conscious that I was filming myself for this video and my brother's card didn't help,
so I went back to my old faithfuls to try to be inspired and rekindle my creativity.
Reading fiction, walking and listening to music. So a question for you what can you do today
to disengage your brain? Moments of creative inspiration. A moment of greatness. The
moments before this are when your brain is disengaged and ready to be inspired.
We are often inspired by and have creative ideas when our brain is
disengaged while walking in the shower or about to fall asleep.
Taking time out is crucial for generating new ideas and problem-solving. However,
contrary to Edison's belief that what A boils down to is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration,
both inspiration and perspiration or effort work together either in the creative process.
Being inspired more often can lead to great ideas and to take action.
So rather than focusing on tools to optimize our productivity or creativity, maybe we should look
for inspiration and for ways to find inspiration and to disengage in our everyday lives.
I would love to hear from you guys about where you find inspiration. What inspires your creativity,
even? What inspires greatness in general in your daily life? You can find moments to disengage
your brain by, for example, using smart home devices to free up your time from housework.
Technology can give you tools to find your inspiration so you can create great things.
I'd love to hear from you about what inspires your creativity, or even just
things you use to become more motivated in your everyday life. Please let me know
down in the comments. This episode was made possible by TCL, a consumer electronics
company who were ranked second in the global TV market, and TCL would like to inspire people too.
You can find out more at TCL.com