A creativity technique from science fiction

I'm reading Rainbows End, by Vernon Vinge. The novel takes place in a future where security spooks play mind games with social, neurobiological and genetic threats. As usual, I pay attention to nuggets of creative wisdom. Here's one of them:

For Robert Gu, real creativity most often came after a good night's sleep, just as he roused himself to wakefulness. That moment was such a reliable source of inspiration that when he was having problems with writing he would often go the pedestrian route in the evening, stock up his mind with the intransigencies of the moment ... and then the next morning, drowsing, review what he knew. There in the labile freshness of new consciousness, answers would drift into view.

I use a similar technique to get an insight into most difficult problems. During the evening, or several evenings in a row, I do a lot of background work on analyzing the problem, exploring its system aspects, trade-offs, dilemmas, etc. often, when I wake up in the morning, I go over my analysis again and discover a new idea that was not there before.

This experience is consistent with the earlier Lunch Talk video in my blog where neuroscience professor Vincent Walsh recommends to become obsessed with a problem in order to come up with a creative solution. I would add that system analysis techniques really help with getting obsessed in a right way, especially when you have to do it for an inter-disciplinary group of creative people.

Mental time travel

Since past is fact and future is fiction, common sense might suggest that different cognitive mechanisms underlie recollection of past events and construction of future ones. There is a fundamental causal asymmetry, and one simply cannot know the future as one knows the past. However, various lines of evidence suggest that mental time travel into the past shares cognitive resources with mental construction of potential future episodes(Suddendorf & Corballis 1997). Normal adults report a decrease in phenomenological richness of both past and future episodes with increased distance from the present (D’Argembeau & Van der Linden 2004). The temporal distribution of past events people envisage follows the same power function as the temporal distribution of anticipated future events (Spreng & Levine 2006).
DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X07001975

It's quite possible that foresight is, at least in part, a skill that allows us to construct imaginary situations, either in the past or in the future. Maybe that is why exercises like The Three Magicians a The Nine-screen View are so useful during invention sessions.

Reference:
DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X07001975 Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007. The evolution of foresight. BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2007) 30, 299–351.

tags: creativity, forecast, magicians, 3x3, technique, teaching, method, quote

Tyler Cowen writes about, what he calls the "Me Factor" in "his book "Discover your inner economist (p. 52):

To put it crudely, we must force ourselves to keep on paying attention. Ranking the pictures focuses our attention on our favorites. It also focuses our attention on ourselves, which is in fact our favorite topic. Me, me, me. It sounds crude, doesn't it? But if the "Me Factor", as I will call it, is operating against the art rather than working with it, our love affair with museums won't last very long.

This a very effective technique. We deliberately activate this factor during Reverse Brainstorm sessions, when participants are asked to "invest" into problems. The attention, and as a consequence, the quality of input is much higher than during regular brainstorming. People tend to take their investment responsibilities very seriously, even when it is done with "funny money". We further strengthen their motivation later, by giving them several more opportunities to make their choice count, either through problem analysis or problem solving.

on p. 54 he also mentions the biggest scarcity of all: "our time and attention are scarce."

another thing that is really scarce, especially in the group dynamics context, is trust.