Be Interested

Morten Friis-Olivarius is a neuroscientist who teaches at Copenhagen Business School. He’s conducted many studies on how the brain works when trying to accomplish creative solutions, and has a great TED talk on the subject (if you’re wondering at the low view count like I did, my hunch is that the sales pitch of his start-up at the end kept the otherwise interesting talk from getting traction). I appreciated his description of creativity from a neurological perspective:

“The underlying neural process of creativity is quite simple: it’s taking some things we already know and combining them in a new way. You have to realize that the brain is not capable of producing new material from scratch. We can only take what we have in our memory system and combine that in different fashions… Therefore, creativity is highly dependent on the type of information we have in our memory system.”

This is about the simplest argument for cultivating an array of interests that I’ve ever heard: “the brain is not capable of producing new material from scratch.” That means that, the more material you have to combine — and importantly, the more you practice combining them, the more you “risk” combining them — the more likely you are to hit upon a new combination!

And if you’re feeling like you’re out of raw material, then talk to a stranger (try to figure out what they know, as Paul Graham does), get disciplined about inspiration, or even try on random input — both will drive you to new combinations.

Click here to subscribe to Paint & Pipette, the weekly digest of these daily posts.