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It's true creativity is connecting things. Daniel Kahnman in Thinking Fast and Slow referred to it as associative memory working exceptionally well. Additionally, being in a good mood has been proven to make people more creative and intuitive, but is that the whole story? So what if you make more connections. Is that enough to say you are more creative? Do you do something with them or do you just forget them?

I'm not as convinced it's changing your state in general that makes you more creative. We all change many states daily. Are we all de facto more creative daily and haven't got a clue about it?

The general idea is you start from an open mode where all thoughts are entertained and progress is slow. After you become sure of what you want to do, you eventually enter a closed mode, where you shut out the world and move as fast as you can, until you run into the next big obstacle. According to John Cleese, who studied creativity, a big problem is we stay in the closed mode too long. It's the change between open and closed mode that is a big deal. He names 5 factors that make us more creative: http://www.brainpickings.org/2012/04/12/john-cleese-on-creat...

I do know of a few specific creativity exercises though in addition to John Cleese's.

1. Unstructured play. Setup some time, at least 1.5-2 hrs and ideally every day, where the goal is to just play. This removes the expectation to produce anything, which allows your subconscious to visit thoughts you ordinarily wouldn't let it. It's one way to counteract one of the biggest killers to creativity: expectations.

2. Constraint before freedom. Don't initially give yourself the freedom to work on something big or on everything. Instead focus on something small and specific, however minute and irrelevant it might originally seem. This has the effect of keeping the fire contained, which leads to a denser collection of connections. You touched on this already, it's a way of artificially setting a filter without waiting for a personal mood swing or an external change to do it for you. It feels like zig-zagging aimlessly like a fly originally and that's ok.

But do switch into a freedom mode after that. Once the ideas kick in, feel free to run after them. When? There's an embarrassing pull of delight that alarms you. "Why didn't I think of this before...?"

Unstructured play is one instance of the application of this principle.

3. Purge in the morning. This is another long-known writing trick. Write aimlessly in the morning as soon as you wake up, mostly to get the negativity out. Although you are awake, the critical part of yourself isn't yet, which allows thoughts produced by your subconscious overnight to come nearer to the surface. This might be more related to the REM state of sleep, which is when dreams happen, and where tough problems are solved by the subconscious. (The book The Committee of Sleep offers ample evidence to this.) So purging might be less related to mornings and more related to waking up.

Sounds too negative? Don't be surprised the writing continues with solutions to the annoying problems you write about.

Julia Cameron's other two pieces of advice that complement purging in the morning are: a) have a date with yourself once a week (it sounds like unstructured play in the real world) and b) (IIRC) get in the habit of imagining the physical world from a different camera angle.

Which seems similar to...

4. Toy with limits. You touched on this too with improv comedy. Get in the habit of purposefully looking for the two extremes in each situation. If you could lay out every subject on a continuum, what's the worst case and what's the best? It mostly helps understand the forces at play behind a subject and that helps generate ideas.

btw, I like your thinking. At some point reading this post I exclaimed "Hey it's visakanv!" We seem to be interested in similar things.

[visakanv]

Oh hey, sorry I didn't see this earlier!

+1 for associative memory

+1 for morning purges, very powerful stuff

+10 for constraints! Absolutely.

+1 for self-dating

+1 for unstructured play

+1 to extreme-hunting (I'm reminded of a book by Tina Sellig talking about entrepreneurship- don't try to look for good ideas, because you constrain your thinking. Try to look for extreme ideas, crazy ideas, intentionally-bad ideas. Then flip them around, invert them, etc).

re: "we all change many states daily"- great point. I guess I was thinking about specific subsets of state change- like when we experience a sharp or dramatic change, or if we make a wilful change while holding something in our minds. I'm sure I'm being rather sketchy and messy about this, but you know how it is.

Thanks for the thoughtful response! I really appreciate it.