There’s a provocative article in the October issue of Fast Company magazine that’s adapted from the book Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently by Gregory Burns. In it, the author explores the process of creativity by analyzing the brain activity that’s happening when a truly creative or inventive thought hits the brain. Some bad news:
- Offsites and scheduled brainstorms are ineffective, as the brain has time to prepare, and it becomes a routine procedure.
- Analogies are brain’s shortcuts designed to avoid creative process.
The second point is the most interesting. Lazy by nature, human brain prefers to use analogies instead of starting a hardcore creative thinking session. Analogies are fast and convenient, the brain knows how to deal with them, and hence always tries to use them up before coming up with anything truly original.
Fortunately, the networks that govern both perception and imagination can be reprogrammed. By deploying your attention differently, the frontal cortex, which contains rules for decision making, can reconfigure neural networks so that you can see things that you didn’t see before. You need a novel stimulus — either a new piece of information or an unfamiliar environment – to jolt attentional systems awake. The more radical the change, the greater the likelihood of fresh insights.
The article (I haven’t read the book) then lists a few examples of innovative processes that happened outside of the usual environments, thus leading to striking discoveries.
It seems that software engineering, an occupation that is usually connected with creative spark among most observers, is most of the time an exercise of relying on analogies. When you’re in college, you go through data structures and algorithms course, which teaches the generally accepted ways of running a queue or generating a number of permutations from a set of numbers. Later on, in the field, we frequently refer to design patterns, frameworks or best practices to bring previously acquired analogies into the new project we’re working on.
Analogy usage is incentivized – most of the software engineers would expect higher pay for more years of experience, which implies either a better ability to project analogies onto existing project (senior engineers which code faster) or a wider exposure to various projects in the past (senior engineers who have architectural knowledge about a variety of projects).
