7 Unusual Psychological Techniques

7/27/2019 7 Unusual Psychological Techniques

1/11

7 Unusual Psychological Techniques

Everyone is creative: we can all innovate given time, freedom, autonomy, experience to

draw on, perhaps a role model to emulate and the motivation to get on with it.

But there are times when even the most creative person gets bored, starts going round in

circles, or hits a cul-de-sac. So here are 7 unusual creativity boosters that research has shownwill increase creativity:

1. Psychological distance

People often recommend physical separation from creative impasses by taking a break, but

psychological distance can be just as useful.

Participants in one study who were primed to think about the source of a task as distant,

solved twice as many insight problems as those primed with proximity to the task (Jia et al.,

20091).

For insight: Try imagining your creative task as distant and disconnected from your

current location. This should encourage higher level thinking.

2. Fast forward in time

Like psychological distance, chronological distance can also boost creativity.

Forster et al. (2004)2asked participants to think about what their lives would be like one year

from now. They were more insightful and generated more creative solutions to problems

than those who were thinking about what their lives would be like tomorrow.

Thinking about distance in both time and space seems to cue the mind to think abstractly andconsequently more creatively.

For insight: Project yourself forward in time; view your creative task from one, ten or a

hundred years distant.

3. Absurdist stimulation

The mind is desperate to make meaning from experience. The more absurdity it experiences,

the harder it has to work to find meaning.

Participants in one study read an absurd short story by Franz Kafka before completing apattern recognition task (Proulx, 20093). Compared with control participants, those who had

read the short story showed an enhanced subconscious ability to recognise hidden patterns.

For insight: read Alice in Wonderland, Kafka's Metamorphosis, or any other absurdist

masterpiece. Absurdity is a 'meaning threat' which enhances creativity.

4. Use bad moods

Positive emotional states increase both problem solving and flexible thinking, and are

generally thought to be more conducive to creativity. But negative emotions also have the

power to boost creativity.

One study of 161 employees found that creativity increased when both positive and negative

emotions were running high (George & Zhou, 20074). They appeared to be using the drama
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2009.05.015http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2009.05.015http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.87.2.177http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02414.xhttp://psycnet.apa.org/?fa=main.doiLanding&uid=2007-10536-009http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.87.2.177http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02414.xhttp://psycnet.apa.org/?fa=main.doiLanding&uid=2007-10536-009http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2009.05.015http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2009.05.015


2/11

in the workplace positively.

For insight: negative moods can be creativity killers but try to find ways to use themyou

might be surprised by what happens.

5. Combining opposites

Interviews with 22 Nobel Laureates in physiology, chemistry, medicine and physics as well

as Pulitzer Prize winning writers and other artists has found a surprising similarity in theircreative processes (Rothenberg, 1996).

Called 'Janusian thinking' after the many-faced Roman god Janus, it involves conceiving of

multiple simultaneous opposites. Integrative ideas emerge from juxtapositions, which are

usually not obvious in the final product, theory or artwork.

Physicist Niels Bohr may have used Janusian thinking to conceive the principle of

complementarity in quantum theory (that light can be analysed as either a wave or a particle,

but never simultaneously as both).

For insight: set up impossible oppositions, try ridiculous combinations. If all else fails,pray to Janus.

6. Path of mostresistance

When people try to be creative they usually take the path of least resistance by building on

existing ideas (Ward, 19945). This isn't a problem, as long as you don't mind variations on a

theme.

If you want something more novel, however, it can be limiting to scaffold your own attempts

on what already exists. The path ofmost

resistance can lead to more creative solutions.For insight: because it's the path of least resistance, every man and his dog is going up and

down it. Try off-road.

7. Re-conceptualisation

People often jump to answers too quickly before they've really thought about the question.

Research suggests that spending time re-conceptualising the problem is beneficial.

Mumford et al. (1994) found that experimental participants produced higher quality ideas

when forced to re-conceive the problem in different ways before trying to solve it. Similarly

a classic study of artists found that those focused on discovery at the problem-formulation

stage produced better art (Csikszentmihalyi & Getzels, 19716).

For insight: forget the solution for now, concentrate on the problem. Are you asking the

right question?

Everyday creativity

Despite all the high falutin talk of Nobel Prize winners and artists, all of these methods can

be applied to everyday life.

Combining opposites, choosing the path of most resistance, absurdism and the rest can justas easily be used to help you choose a gift for someone, think about your career in a new

way or decide what to do at the weekend. 'Off-duty' creativity is just as important, if not

more so, than all that 'serious' creativity.
http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=EJ494059&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=EJ494059http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/5558339http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=EJ494059&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=EJ494059http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/5558339


3/11

10 Counterintuitive Psychology Studies

Some critics say psychology is just common sense1, that it only confirms things we already

know about ourselves.

Ironically this can be difficult to argue with because once people get some new information

they tend to think it was obvious all along.

One way of battling this is to think about all the unexpected, surprising and plain weird

findings that have popped out of psychology studies over the years. So here are ten of my

favourite.

1. Cognitive dissonanceThis is perhaps one of the weirdest and most unsettling findings in psychology. Cognitive

dissonance2is the idea that we find it hard to hold two contradictory beliefs, so we

unconsciously adjust one to make it fit with the other.

In the classic study3students found a boring task more interesting if they were paid lessto

take part. Our unconscious reasons like this: if I didn't do it for money, then I must have

done it because it was interesting. As if by magic, a boring task becomes more interesting

because otherwise I can't explain my behaviour.

The reason it's unsettling is that our minds are probably performing these sorts ofrationalisations all the time, without our conscious knowledge. So how do we know what we

really think?

2. Hallucinations are common

Hallucinations are like waking dreams and we tend to think of them as markers of serious

mental illness.

In fact they are more common amongst 'normal' people than we might imagine. One-third of

us report having experienced hallucinations, with 20% experiencing hallucinations once a

month and 2% once a week (Ohayon, 20004).

Similarly 'normal' people often have paranoid thoughts, as in this study I reported previously

in which 40% experienced paranoid thoughts on a virtual journey5. The gap between people

with mental illness and the 'sane' is a lot smaller than we'd like to think.

3. The placebo effect

Perhaps you've had the experience that a headache improves seconds after you take an

aspirin? This can't be the drug because it takes at least 15 minutes to kick in.

That's the placebo effect: your mind knows you've taken a pill, so you feel better. Inmedicine it seems strongest in the case of pain: some studies suggest a placebo of saline

(salty water) can be as powerful as morphine (Hrobjartsson et al., 20016). Some studies even

suggest that 80% of the power of Prozac is placebo7.
http://www.spring.org.uk/2008/03/why-psychology-is-not-just-common-sense.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2007/10/how-and-why-we-lie-to-ourselves.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2007/10/how-and-why-we-lie-to-ourselves.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2007/10/how-and-why-we-lie-to-ourselves.phphttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0165-1781(00)00227-4http://www.spring.org.uk/2008/05/40-of-people-experienced-paranoid.phphttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/11372012/http://www.spring.org.uk/2011/09/80-of-prozac-power-is-placebo.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2008/03/why-psychology-is-not-just-common-sense.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2007/10/how-and-why-we-lie-to-ourselves.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2007/10/how-and-why-we-lie-to-ourselves.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2007/10/how-and-why-we-lie-to-ourselves.phphttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0165-1781(00)00227-4http://www.spring.org.uk/2008/05/40-of-people-experienced-paranoid.phphttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/11372012/http://www.spring.org.uk/2011/09/80-of-prozac-power-is-placebo.php


4/11

The placebo effect is counter-intuitive because we easily forget that mind and body are not

separate.

4. Obedience to authority

Most of us like to think of ourselves as independently-minded. We feel sure that we wouldn't

harm another human being unless under very serious duress. Certainly something as weak as

being ordered to give someone an electric shock by an authority figure in a white coatwouldn't be enough, would it?

Stanley Milgram's famous study8found it was. 63% of participants kept giving electric

shocks to another human being despite the victim screaming in agony and eventually falling

silent.

Situations have huge power to control our behaviour and it's a power we don't notice until it's

dramatically revealed in studies like this.

5. Choice blindness

We all know the reasons for our decisions, right? For example, you know why you're

attracted to someone?

Don't be so sure. In one study people were easily tricked into justifying choices they didn't

actually make about who they found attractive. Under some circumstances we exhibit choice

blindness9: we seem to have little or no awareness of choices we've made and why. We then

use rationalisations to try and cover our tracks.

This is just one example of the general idea that we have relatively little access to the inner

workings of our minds10.

6. Fantasies reduce motivation

One way people commonly motivate themselves is by using fantasies about the future. The

idea is that dreaming about a positive future helps motivate you towards that goal.

Beware, though, psychologists have found that fantasising about future success is actually

bad for motivation11. It seems that getting a taste of the future in the here and now reduces

the drive to achieve it. Fantasises also fail to flag up the problems we're likely to face on the

way to our goals.

Instead of fantasising, use mental contrasting12.7. Brainstorming doesn't work

Want to think outside the box? Do some blue sky thinking? Want to...[insert your own least

favourite clichhere].

Well, according to psychological research, brainstorming doesn't work13. It turns out that in

groups people are lazy, likely to forget their ideas while others talk and worried about what

others will think (despite the rule that 'there are no bad ideas').

It turns out it's much better to send people off to think up new ideas on their own. Groups

then do better at evaluating those ideas.

8. Don't suppress

When you're down or worried about something people often say: "hey, try not to think about
http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/02/stanley-milgram-obedience-to-authority.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2007/12/at-heart-of-attraction-lies-confusion.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2007/12/at-heart-of-attraction-lies-confusion.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2008/01/what-everyone-should-know-about-their.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2008/01/what-everyone-should-know-about-their.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2011/01/success-why-expectations-beat-fantasies.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2011/01/success-why-expectations-beat-fantasies.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2011/01/how-to-commit-to-a-goal.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2009/08/brainstorming-reloaded.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2007/02/stanley-milgram-obedience-to-authority.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2007/12/at-heart-of-attraction-lies-confusion.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2007/12/at-heart-of-attraction-lies-confusion.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2008/01/what-everyone-should-know-about-their.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2008/01/what-everyone-should-know-about-their.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2011/01/success-why-expectations-beat-fantasies.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2011/01/success-why-expectations-beat-fantasies.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2011/01/how-to-commit-to-a-goal.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2009/08/brainstorming-reloaded.php


5/11

it; just put it out of your mind!"

This is very bad advice. Trying to suppress your thoughts is counter-productive14. Like

trying as hard as you can not to think about pink elephants or white bears. What people

experience when they try to suppress their thoughts is an ironic rebound effect: the thought

comes back stronger than before. Looking for distractions is a much better strategy.

9. Incredible multi-tasking skillsDespite all the mind's limitations, we can train it do incredible things. For example we hear a

lot about our multitasking abilities, but with practice, did you know people can read and

write at the same time?

One study of multitasking trained two volunteers over 16 weeks until they could read a short

story and categorise lists of words at the same time. Eventually they could perform as well

on both tasks at the same time as they could on each task individually before the study

began.

Read a full description of the study, along with potential criticisms, here15.10. It's the little things

We tend to think that the big events in our lives are the most important: graduation, getting

married or the birth of a child.

But actually major life events are often not directly as important to our well-being as the

little hassles and uplifts of everyday life (Kanner et al., 198116). Major events mainly affect

us throughthe daily hassles and uplifts they produce. The same is true at work, wherejob

satisfaction17is strongly hit by everyday hassles.

What most affects people's happiness are things like quality of sleep, little ups and downs at

work and relationships with our friends and family. In other words: it's the little things that

make us happy.

If we can all be creative, why is it so hard to come up with truly original ideas?

It's because creativity is mysterious. Just ask any scientist, artist, writer or other highly

creative person to explain how they come up with brilliant ideas and, if they're honest, they

don't really know.

But over the decades psychologists have given ordinary participants countless tests, forms

and tasks and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews. From these emerge the

psychological conditions of creativity.

Not what you should do, but how you should be...
http://www.spring.org.uk/2009/05/why-thought-suppression-is-counter-productive.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2009/03/learning-to-multitask-simultaneous-reading-and-writing.phphttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7288876http://www.spring.org.uk/2011/07/10-psychological-keys-to-job-satisfaction.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2011/07/10-psychological-keys-to-job-satisfaction.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2009/05/why-thought-suppression-is-counter-productive.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2009/03/learning-to-multitask-simultaneous-reading-and-writing.phphttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7288876http://www.spring.org.uk/2011/07/10-psychological-keys-to-job-satisfaction.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2011/07/10-psychological-keys-to-job-satisfaction.php


6/11

The Dark Side of Creativity

Creative individuals are more likely to be arrogant, good liars, distrustful, dishonest and

maybe just a little crazyOK, let's say eccentric.

We hear a lot about the benefits of being creative but less about the dark side of creativity.

I recently wrote about why people secretly fear creative ideas1, which hints at a dark side,

but what about creative people themselves? Do they pay a price for their creativity?

Psychological research has only recently begun examining the dark side of creativity but it's

already turning up some interesting findings. Here are some of my favourite insights.

Liars

An alien observing humans for the first time might wonder why we pay people to lie to us.

We would have to explain that we call novels, TV shows and films 'fiction', not lies.Then we'd concede that sometimes we enjoy being lied to, especially when the lies are much

more entertaining than reality.

Given all the practice they get, we might expect, then, that creative people should be better at

lying.

And, indeed, this seems to be true: Walczyk et al. (2008)2tested it by giving participants a

series of everyday dilemmas to solve. Highly creative people told more and better lies than

those who were less creative.

Arrogant

On the positive side, creative people are generally open to new experiences, but how easy are

they to get along with?

Until now much of the research on agreeableness, one of the five fundamental aspects of

personality, has been mixed.

New research, though, has looked at two sub-types of agreeableness (Silvia et al., 2011)3.

This found no association between agreeableness and creativity, but a strong negative

association with honesty-humility.In other words, creative people tend to be arrogant.

Distrustful
http://www.spring.org.uk/2011/12/why-people-secretly-fear-creative-ideas.phphttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10400410802355152http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2011.06.011http://www.spring.org.uk/2011/12/why-people-secretly-fear-creative-ideas.phphttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10400410802355152http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2011.06.011


7/11

Is there a link between thinking distrustful thoughts and increased creativity?

Consider this: being distrustful means being more likely to distrust surface appearances and

have a desire to work out what is reallygoing on. In other words distrust breeds a sort of

'what-if' mindset: exactly the sort of mindset associated with creativity.

Distrust may also breed flexibility in thinking. Instead of taking things at face value, people

with suspicious minds try to see things from different angles. That's yet another marker of

creativity.

When Mayer and Mussweiler (2011)4tested this idea experimentally they found good

evidence to support it. Participants who primed with the idea of being distrustful came up

with more creative ideas and showed greater cognitive flexibility.

But crucially these results were only found when participants were being privately creative.

When people thought creative ideas would be made public, distrustful thoughts didn't

increase creativity.

Perhaps that's why it's hard to spot creative people. They are more likely to be distrustful of

others and so keep their creative ideas to themselves.

Evil

So far creative people have been characterised as arrogant, distrustful and good liars but not

actually evil. But perhaps there is something to the evil genius stereotype?

Across a series of studies Gino and Ariely (2011)5found that creative people displayed all

sorts of dishonest traits:

Creative people were more likely to cheat on a game in the lab,

Creative people were better at justifying their dishonesty afterwards,

Creativity was more closely associated with dishonesty than intelligence.

While creativity produces all sorts of positive, beneficial outcomes, it also allows people to

cheat more easily, and to cover up their cheating behaviour.

Criminal

Let's stop beating around the bush: does being creative help you become a master-criminal?

There are certainly examples of creative criminals. Shirley Pitts was a famous British

shoplifter who got around the security tag system by simply lining her carrier bag with metal

foil. She could then put what she liked in her bag and walk out without the alarm going off.

But that may well be an unusual exception as there's little strong evidence that creativity is

unusually high amongst criminals (Cropley & Cropley, 20116). On average criminals show

relatively low levels of creativity, along with a lack of social conformity and low levels of

inhibition.

However there is some evidence that when it comes specifically to crime, criminals are

creative. After all, it is their job.

Or maybe the really creative criminals are just too creative to get caught...

Crazy
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0024407http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1738311http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2011.621817http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0024407http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1738311http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2011.621817


8/11

A strong link exists in the popular imagination between madness and creativity. The

evidence, though, is more equivocal.

Certainly creative people score higher on psychoticism, meaning they tend to be more cold,

antisocial, egocentric and low in empathy. But generally this is balanced out by high self-

esteem, high intelligence and the ability to keep their worst excesses in check.

It also depends on the type of genius you are. On average mental health is best amongst

creative geniuses who are natural scientists (like physicists and chemists), is worse amongst

social scientists (including psychologists), worse still in the humanities and is at its lowest in

the arts (Simonton, 20097).

Simonton argues that creative geniuses aren't necessarily crazy, a better word to describe

them is eccentric.

Dark side

So creativity isn't all upside. Creative individuals are more likely to be arrogant, good liars,

distrustful, dishonest and maybe just a little crazyOK, let's call it unusual or eccentric.But what would the world be like without its creative eccentrics? I'll tell you: a very boring

place.

Still, perhaps you'll think twice the next time you admit how creative you are!

As Pablo Picasso once pointed out, all children are creative; the challenge is to remain

creative into adulthood.

Unfortunately public education systems around the world seem designed to crush creativity

in favour of rote learning and test passing. As the years pass a fear of being wrong takes over

from our natural creative tendencies.

Unlike mathematics, languages or the humanities, we are rarely taught about creativity,

despite its importance to our lives. Yet the information is out there, waiting to be used.

If you would like to be more creative at work and at homeand that has to be most of us

the insights in this ebook will be useful.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2009.01152.xhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2009.01152.x


9/11

7 More Psychological Techniques

Trying to make connections? Here are seven more research-based techniques to increase

creativity.

"Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality

overcomes everything." ~George Lois

Following on from a previous article on how to be creative1, which had a tremendous

response, here are another 7 techniques for breaking through a creative block.

1. Counterfactual mindset

Conjuring up what might have been gives a powerful boost to creativity.

Markman et al. (2007)2found that using counterfactuals (what might have happened but

didn't) sometimes doubled people's creativity. But counterfactuals work best if they are

tailored to the target problem:

Analytical problemsare best tackled with a subtractive mind-set: thinking about what

could have been taken away from the situation.

Expansive problemsbenefited most from an additive counterfactual mind-set: thinking

about what could have been added to the situation.

2. Two problems are better than one

People solve many problems analogically: by recalling a similar old one and applying the

same, or similar solution. Unfortunately studies have found that people are poor at recallingsimilar problems they've already solved.

In a counter-intuitive study, however, Kurtz and Lowenstein (2007)3found that having two

problems rather than one made it more likely that participants would recall problems they'd

solved before, which helped them solve the current problem.

So don't avoid complications, gather them all up; they may well help jog your memory.

3. Generic verbs

Another boost for analogical thinking can be had from writing down the problem, then

changing the problem-specific verbs to more generic ones.

What Clement et al. (1994)4discovered when they tested this method was that analogical

leaps are easier when problems were described in looser, more generic terms. In this study

performance increased by more than 100% in some tasks.

This is just one of a number of techniques which encourage focus on the gist of the problem

rather than its specific details.

4. Synonyms and category taxonomies

Just like changing the verbs, re-encoding the problem using synonyms and categorytaxonomies can help.

This means analysing the typeof problem and coming up with different ways of representing
http://www.spring.org.uk/2010/03/boost-creativity-7-unusual-psychological-techniques.phphttp://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0146167206296106http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17645174http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1994.1019http://www.spring.org.uk/2010/03/boost-creativity-7-unusual-psychological-techniques.phphttp://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0146167206296106http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17645174http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1994.1019


10/11

it. Lowenstein (2009; PDF5) emphasises the importance of accessing the underlying structure

of the problem in order to work out a solution.

5. Fight! Fight! Fight!

We tend to think that when people are arguing, they become more narrow-minded and rigid

and consequently less creative.

But, according to research by Dreu and Nijstad (2008)6, the reverse may actually be true.Across four experiments they found that when in conflict people engaged more with a

problem and generated more original ways of arguing.

Being in social conflict seems to give people an intense motivated focus. So, to get creative,

start a fight.

6. Think love not sex

Forster et al. (2009)7found that when experimental participants were primed with thoughts

of love they became more creative, but when primed with carnal desire they became less

creative (although more analytical).

While it certainly isn't the first time that love has been identified as a creative stimulus,

psychologists have suggested a particular cognitive mechanism.

Love cues us with thoughts of the long-term, hence our minds zoom out and we reason more

abstractly and analogically. Sex meanwhile cues the present, leading to a concrete analytical

processing style. For creativity, abstraction and analogy are preferred.

7. Stop daydreaming

To increase creativity we're always hearing about the benefits of daydreaming for incubatingideas. It's a nice idea that all the work is going on under the hood with no effort from us. But

you'll notice that all the methods covered here are active rather than passive.

That's because the research generally finds only very small benefits for periods of incubation

or unconscious thought (Zhong et al., 20098). The problem with unconscious creativity is

that it tends to remain unconscious, so we never find out about it, even if it exists.

The benefit of incubating or waiting may only be that it gives us time to forget all our initial

bad ideas, to make way for better ones. Moreover, incubating only works if the unconscious

already has lots of information to incubate, in other words if you've already done a lot ofwork on the problem.

So: stop daydreaming and start doing!

Move abroad and learn another language

If all that fails, including the 7 techniques9from the previous article, then I've got one

radical, bonus suggestion: move to another country and learn another language. Maddux and

Galinsky (2009)10found that people who had lived abroad performed better on a range of

creative tasks.

In an experimental test of this idea, Maddux et al. (2010)11asked participants to recall

multicultural learning experiences and found that this made people more flexible in their

thinking and better able to make creative connections.
http://www.mccombs.utexas.edu/faculty/Jeffrey.Loewenstein/papers/LoewensteinPLMdraft2.pdfhttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18729700http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0146167209342755http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18947357http://www.spring.org.uk/2010/03/boost-creativity-7-unusual-psychological-techniques.phphttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19379035http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19379035http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20445025http://www.mccombs.utexas.edu/faculty/Jeffrey.Loewenstein/papers/LoewensteinPLMdraft2.pdfhttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18729700http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0146167209342755http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18947357http://www.spring.org.uk/2010/03/boost-creativity-7-unusual-psychological-techniques.phphttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19379035http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19379035http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20445025


11/11

This only worked when people had actually lived abroad, not when they just imagined it.

As Pablo Picasso once pointed out, all children are creative; the challenge is to remain

creative into adulthood.

Unfortunately public education systems around the world seem designed to crush creativity

in favour of rote learning and test passing. As the years pass a fear of being wrong takes over

from our natural creative tendencies.

Unlike mathematics, languages or the humanities, we are rarely taught about creativity,

despite its importance to our lives. Yet the information is out there, waiting to be used.

If you would like to be more creative at work and at homeand that has to be most of us

the insights in this ebook will be useful.

Documents

7 Unusual Psychological Techniques