Some fast facts about creative thinking and the brain !
1) The brain doesn’t like trying unknown things. Using highly visual, tactile, and auditory methods makes things more brain friendly because it creates emotional responses within an experiential framework. This process allows the brain to discover new information and then store this information into long-term memory.
2) When you build tactile, visible things, they can be shared with teammates. This allows all participants to engage, explore, and build on each other’s ideas.
3) When problem solving, the brain stores information in the frontal cortex, which cannot effectively store more than seven things at once. Do you remember the scene in ‘Through the Looking Glass’when the White Queen tells Alice “sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast?”
That’s pretty cool, White Queen,but you’re clearly relying on your frontal cortex or your impossible thing count would be way higher. If you want to make that number skyrocket … build stuff !
4) Build things. Objects we build with our hands hold large amounts of information. This frees up the working memory for idea generation and innovative thinking.
5) Our hands are connected to 70-80% of brain cells.If you don’t use your hands, you limit yourself to your frontal cortex. That’s shortchanging your grey matter. The neural connections in both hands activates both brain hemispheres.
6) While problem solving, people quickly converge or filter too soon. As soon as an idea is put on the table, someone plays devil’s advocate and throws out the baby with the bathwater. BigStorming® allows for both processes—convergent and divergent thinking— to be applied appropriately.
