4 Ways To Make Space In Your Brain To Create

Creative thinkers, including filmmaker Brian Koppelman, journalist Maria Shriver, illustrator Francesca Chessa, and life-hacker Tim Ferriss, have all used morning pages with great success.

Try this theory in your life: Write by hand three pages every morning for eight weeks. See if they help you feed the artist within you.

2. Stephen Kosslyn’s psychology of ideas

What color is the Mona Lisa’s hair? Is your front doorknob on the right side or the left? To answer these questions, you most likely used visual mental imagery, also known as “seeing in the mind’s eye.”

Harvard professor Stephen Kosslyn has studied the psychology of the ways the brain uses mental imagery to generate ideas. Once we understand how the brain generates imagery, it’s easier to act upon this imagery and turn it into new ideas.

Essentially, in this process, the brain receives visual imagery straight from your memory, from things you’ve previously seen that stuck in your brain. When you answered the question above about the doorknob, your brain probably created a mental image of your door and then zoomed in on the door knob area.

Visual imagery is incredibly powerful, Kosslyn says, because “we can transform at will objects in visual mental images, for example by imagining them rotating, shrinking, or growing.” Kosslyn believes that we can use this visual imagery to come up with new ideas—but only if we’re paying attention.

According to Kosslyn, the brain uses four steps to transform mental imagery into new ideas:

a. Generate the image. Images usually come when we’re open to them but slightly distracted (i.e., in the shower). These images can be thought of as half-formed ideas.

b. Retain the image. If you get out of the shower and don’t write the image down, you may forget it as soon as you start making breakfast for your kids.

c. Inspect the image. Look at it from different angles.

d. Transform the image. Modify it to fit your own creative goals. By transforming it into something useful for your own life, you’ve turned it into a fully-formed idea.

At which step do you falter??

For introverts, ideas tend to come from reading, observing the world, spending time in nature, traveling, or taking in the creative arts (movies, art exhibits, concerts). But often, we don’t leave enough white space in our lives to follow up on creative inspiration.