Creative Thinking: 3 Brain Programs

The old approach is to brainstorm, trying to suck ideas from your head. It uses the brain as the primary source of ideas as if it were a library.

A different approach is to use stimulii to tap unexplored corners of your imagination and make it fun!

These are the illuminating views of Doug Hall, described by Dateline NBC as "an eccentric entrepeneur".

Maybe, but his course "Jump Start Your Brain" is crammed with brain programs which can take your creative thinking to unsurpassed levels.

Here are just 3 brain programs to illustrate:

Newsstand

Newspapers, magazines, and radio and TV news outlets open your mind through current events and trends, through the eyes of the media.

Method: Just browse through a heap of magazines and newspapers and allow your mind to fill with images, statements, thoughts. The jumbled result can produce brand new connections.

Use magazines with lots of photographs and which are at least tied in to a limited extent with your task in hand.

Write captions, titles, names, brief descriptions as they begin to flow from your brain. Attach sticky notes to the various magazine photos, or newspaper captions, as the ideas come to you, spread them across the floor and start borrowing and swapping even more ideas.

Hitchhiking

This tool for creative thinking involves hitchhiking on other people's ideas and imaginations.

Find ordinary, commonsense people who are unaware of the preconceptions, laws, and facts surrounding your problem.

Ask for an off-the-top-of-the-head commonsense answer.

People you could approach include the waitress, taxi driver, barber, in fact, anyone you come in contact with in daily life who is in touch with the real world!

Look out for pure gut reactions or spontaneous innocent first perceptions which can lead you into virgin territory with creative thinking.

Musical Chairs

This brain program means stepping outside yourself, sitting in a different seat, forgetting who you are, wearing someone else's shoes.

Imagine your problem in the hands of an Eskimo, a Zulu chieftan, a Norwegian fisherman.

What insights might they have to expand your perspective?

Jeffrey A. Stamp, Ph.D., Principal Scientist at Frito-Lay, Inc. was doing doctoral research on aspartame (NutraSweet).

To understand how the sweetener might behave in a food system, he pretended he was a molecule of aspartame, and mentally visualized how he might react under certain experimental variables.

Get the idea?

This is just a brief overview of only 3 brain programs from a list of 37 explained in detail in Doug Hall's "Jump Start Your Brain".

If you are researching creative thinking and need a rich source of fresh ideas, get yourself a copy. It's highly recommended.