The Power of Creative Intelligence: 10 ways to tap into your creative genius. Tony Buzan
Chapter 7 – Creative Flexibility and Originality
The prime reason people get stuck in their pursuit of creativity is that they have been taught to think in only one basic way. This becomes a hole out of which it is difficult to dig themselves. In this chapter I will show you many techniques for seeing with ‘fresh eyes’ – for looking at things from different angles and from many diverse points of view; techniques that all the great creative thinking geniuses used to trigger their world-transforming ideas.
How often do you hear people saying of a great creative genius that he or she is ‘one of a kind’; ‘a one off’; ‘unique’; ‘incomparable’? This quality of uniqueness is a cornerstone of creative thinking. I will demonstrate that you are already much more unique than you think, and will show you ways of developing your originality that will amaze both you and your friends.
Chapter 8 – Your Brain: The Ultimate ‘Association Machine’ – Expansive and Radiant Thinking
Creative Intelligence is based on your ability to make associations between many different thoughts and ideas. The average person makes far fewer associations than are possible. In this chapter I will guide you through an enthralling association game; as it progresses, you will increasingly realize new ways to develop your own powers of association, and will discover something amazing about your brain’s ability to make connections.
Chapter 9 – You and Shakespeare – Poets Both!
For many people poetry, like painting and music, is a ‘special art’ that is the precious privilege of only a very few gifted individuals. This is a romantic and false belief. You are a poet!
In Chapter 9 I will guide you back to your poetic soul, showing how you can apply all the lessons you have learnt so far from The Power of Creative Intelligence to produce your own poetry.
Chapter 10 – Only Kidding
Why is it that children are the best and fastest learners? Why is it that children are considered to be more creative than adults? Why do so many of the great artists (like Picasso, for example) try to ‘get back’ their childhood creativity?
In this chapter I will answer all those questions, and show you how to rediscover the child and the creative genius within you.
Throughout The Power of Creative Intelligence, you will have one other special guide: Leonardo da Vinci – voted the greatest Creative Genius of the last millennium!
In this Chapter you will be given state-of-the-art information about your left and right brains, and how you can combine the two sides to multiply, phenomenally, your Creative Power.
We are going to go on a supersonic flight over the past 50 years of research on the brain. The journey starts in the laboratory of Professor Roger Sperry in California, and describes the research that won him a Nobel Prize in 1981, and which will make you delightfully aware of hidden creative capacities waiting to be unleashed by you.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Professor Sperry was investigating brainwave function. To explore different thinking activities and their effect on the brainwaves, Sperry and his colleagues asked the volunteers to perform different mental tasks, ranging from adding and subtracting numbers in their heads, through to reading poetry, reciting memorized lines, doodling, looking at different colours, drawing cubes, analysing logical problems and daydreaming.
Sperry had predicted that the brainwaves would be somewhat different for different activities, and he was correct. What he had not predicted – and this finding changed forever the way we think about the potential of the human brain and its ability to think creatively – was the following startling revelation: on average, the brain divided its activities very distinctly into ‘left brain’ (left cortex) activities and ‘right brain’ (right cortex) activities. This is the research that has become popularly known as the ‘left/right brain’ research.
The dominant division of labour was as follows:
| Left brain | Right brain |
| Words | Rhythm |
| Logic | Spatial Awareness |
| Numbers | Dimension |
| Sequence | Imagination |
| Linearity | Daydreaming |
| Analysis | Colour |
| Lists | Holistic Awareness |
Sperry also discovered that when the right cortex was active, the left tended to go into a relatively restful or meditative state. Similarly when the left cortex was active, the right became more relaxed and calm.
Furthermore, and this came as a real surprise (as well as a beacon of hope), every brain involved in this brainwave experiment was shown to have all the cortical skills in fine working order. In other words, at the basic physical, physiological and potential level, everybody had a massive range of intellectual, thinking and creative skills that they were obviously using only in part.
By the 1970s, these results had led to an explosion of further researches, studies and surveys around the nature of this untapped potential.
One obvious line of investigation (with which I was personally involved) was to survey people on what they thought about their own abilities, and then to check these perceived abilities/disabilities with their real brainwave-measured capacities.
Here is one survey for you to try yourself.
Left/Right Brain Self-check
Would you find it virtually impossible (almost genetically impossible) to calculate quickly and accurately, the proportion of interest to capital still owing on your mortgage, for example, or the area of your garden as a proportion of the total area of your house and garden? YES/NO
Would you find it virtually impossible to draw portraits that looked like the person being drawn, to paint landscapes, master dimension and perspective, understand the history of art and make realistic and abstract sculptures? YES/NO
Would you find it virtually impossible to compose music and songs, identify different classical composers by just a few notes from their works, dance to music in time, and sing songs where every note you sang was the note as it should have been sung? YES/NO
You will probably be relieved to know that over 90 per cent of people surveyed were confident that they were genetically incapable of accomplishments in these three vital areas of numerical, artistic and musical skills.
You will hopefully be pleased and encouraged to know that they were all wrong!
Subsequent research discovered that when people were trained – by good teachers – in those areas of skill that they had assumed to be weak, they suddenly became much stronger in those areas. It was very much like identifying a weak muscle group that was weak not because the muscles themselves were fundamentally incapable, but simply because they had not been used for a long time.
This was not all: in addition to everyone being able to develop areas that they had previously considered weak, another amazing finding soon began to emerge. With the new ‘mental muscle’ now in place, the other ‘mental muscles’ all began to improve their performance.
Thus, for example, if people who had been weak in imagery and art, were trained to be competent in that field, they suddenly became more skilled with words, more able to manipulate numbers and, generally, more creative. Similarly, if people who had been weak in numerical ability were trained to strengthen this area, their imagination