Self-censorship is a classic creativity pitfall. It's natural to attempt to multi-task when coming up with new ideas: to generate, and simultaneously evaluate, the material we come up with. But experience and research both suggest that such tasks should be separated. It can be painful to deliberately defer judgment, but such discipline pays off.

Dr. Charles Limb's TED Talk is one of my all-time favorites, not only because of the subject matter, but also because of the inventive approach he took to the research. He shares fascinating insights about how creativity works from fMRI studies of jazz musicians performing improv inside the machine.

In the experiment, Dr. Limb had musicians play memorized pieces, and then asked them to improvise. The team then compared the blood flows in the brain in order to answer the question, What happens in the brain when performing a rote activity, and how is that different to what happens in the brain with a more creative endeavor like improvisation? He explains the resulting changes in blood flow that the fMRI measured:

"We have this combination of an area that's thought to be involved in self-monitoring, turning off, and this area that's thought to be autobiographical, or self-expressive, turning on. We think... a reasonable hypothesis is that, to be creative, you should have this weird dissociation in your frontal lobe. One area turns on, and a big area shuts off, so that you're not inhibited, you're willing to make mistakes, so that you're not constantly shutting down all of these new generative impulses."

Short-circuiting the tendency to evaluate each and every idea that comes up is very hard to do, but it's essential. One reason is that often, the value of a particular idea lies not in its own merits, but rather in its ability to stimulate other ideas.

When generating volume (which is essential!), "what does this idea make me think of?" is a much better question than "what do I think of this idea?" What you think of an idea matters much less than what that idea makes you think of. But that's only true if you deliberately separate idea generation from evaluation. You know, like a jazz musician with your head stuck in an fMRI machine...

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