Mindframe

Creativity as a whole is a hard thing to concretely study. However, a slightly easier question than "where does creativity come from?" is "how do epiphanies work?" Those sudden flashes of new ideas happen when your brain connects up associations that don't normally go together, like bacon and popcorn. The process starts when your more rational, top-down conscious thinking system struggles with a question it can't seem to solve. With possibilities exhausted, you start to lose focus, and as a result, your attention shifts. At this point, your executive control system bows out and the problem gets dumped into the more reflexive, impulsive, emotional brain. Your brain is designed in such a way that when you stop actively working the problem, your unconscious systems help out by taking over, continuing the associative matching exercise. It's like an architect who, out of ideas, kicks a problem down to the site foreman, saying, "See what your ...

Irrational behavior is commonplace in sports. Michael Jordan wore his "lucky" University of North Carolina practice shorts under his Chicago Bulls shorts every season, believing that extra layer of shorts made the difference between winning and losing. Tennis ace Serena Williams is rumored to have worn the same unwashed pair of "lucky" socks 162 matches in a row . And the list goes on and on. Are professional sports stars somehow more superstitious than the rest of us? The answer is no. And it's not just humans: famed psychologist B.F. Skinner once reported that pigeons seem to behave superstitiously , too. Although we can, of course, never know for sure what birds are thinking, Skinner observed patterns of strange behavior, like a bird twirling in a circle prior to feeding. He posited that the bird had somehow associated the act of twirling with the act of getting fed. We are all twirlers to some extent. We can trace our irrational behaviors, both col...