(A response to Elliot's article about creativity.)

How to be creative

There is no single recipe for creativity, but they all seem to follow roughly the same technique.

The best intro to creativity I’ve found is this video by John Cleese. Being John Cleese it’s a fun video, but what he talks about is completely accurate and based on how our brain works and is backed by research:

For an in-depth look at creativity, check out the book “deep work” by Cal Newport. Among other points, he talks about how artistic and highly productive people have managed to set themselves up for productive output throughout history. For another viewpoint look up Brian Tracy’s lectures on “the superconscious mind”. Many other sources say pretty-much the same thing.

To summarize, at any one time your brain runs lots of competing little subroutines that are primed by what you encounter in the environment (see “priming” on Wikipedia) used to predict the immediate future, called “nexting”.

When you set yourself in an environment with no distractions, these subroutines run their course and eventually die down, leaving your mind clear to think deeply about something with no distractions. During this time, if you have set up a problem for your brain to think about, it will do exactly that… and eventually give insight into the problem.

The effect is real, and not something people usually experience or even know about. The experience is also highly pleasurable.

It takes about 1/2 hour of uninterrupted time to *begin* this state if you are practiced at it. The first time might take a person 60 minutes and the first time they might not even be able to do it at all. It takes a few sessions to get the feel of it and know what to expect and where to put your mind.

Anything that distracts you from the state will stop it completely, and it will take another 1/2 hour to get back into the mode. A phone call will do it, someone stopping by your office will do it, and checking twitter on your phone will do it. Any distraction will activate more subroutines in your head, and it takes time for these to die down again.

There’s a brain neurochemistry explanation for this which I won’t go into (it’s in Cal Newport’s book, IIRC).

Lots of famously productive people practice this technique, it’s the root of their creativity.

Difference from flow

Flow is a slightly different state. The flow state is where you are hyper focused and lose track of the sense of time, but it’s not specifically tied to creativity. If you are an expert in something you can get into flow and be highly productive by using your existing skills, but not necessarily creative.

Creativity is described as being in the “open” or “closed” state, online it’s called “systemic mode” and “heuristic mode” (cf. wikipedia).

A good distinction between flow and creativity is the target: if you have a task to complete (writing, coding, sewing, circuit design) you can get into flow and complete the task quickly and efficiently. At any point you always know what the next task is.

Being creative is the opposite: it’s where you *don’t* know what the next step is, you don’t have a ready-made solution, and you have to mull over possibilities.

If you can quiet your mind, and think through the issues, your brain will eventually pop up a creative solution seemingly at random.

It’s weird – you’re thinking through a problem with no obvious solution, and suddenly the answer pops into your head with no obvious prior reasoning.

That’s the open mode. It’s closely related to flow.

(Flow also has a neurochemistry explanation.)