Can a brain fitness program help me become more creative?

Here is ques­tion 20 from Brain Fit­ness 101: Answers to Your Top 25 Ques­tions.

Ques­tion:
Can a brain fit­ness pro­gram help me become more creative?

Key Points:

• Cre­ativ­i­ty can be trained, like oth­er men­tal muscles.
• Set up struc­tured time, places, or rou­tines that pro­vide a frame­work for cre­ativ­i­ty to happen.
• Reduc­ing your stress helps to keep your brain more flexible.
• Using many parts of the brain as well as try­ing new things will stim­u­late the areas of your brain involved in creativity.

Answer:
Yes. As with all forms of brain exer­cise, cre­ativ­i­ty takes con­sis­tent effort, orga­ni­za­tion, and com­mit­ment. It is hard to be cre­ative if you work with­out any struc­ture. This struc­ture can take many forms: dai­ly rou­tines, lim­it­ed dis­trac­tions, or a record of the steps you took to get from the begin­ning to the end of a project or idea.

Idea gen­er­a­tion and cre­ative dri­ve orig­i­nate in inter­ac­tions between the frontal lobes, oth­er parts of the neo­cor­tex, and the lim­bic sys­tem. Positron-emis­sion tomog­ra­phy (PET) scans of people’s brains dur­ing cre­ative tasks sug­gests that cre­ativ­i­ty aris­es large­ly from the “association cortex” — parts of the frontal, pari­etal and tem­po­ral lobes that inte­grate sen­so­ry and oth­er infor­ma­tion. Frontal lobe dam­age usu­al­ly decreas­es idea gen­er­a­tion, in part because of men­tal rigidity.

The frontal lobes and oth­er parts of the neo­cor­tex can be exer­cised by a vari­ety of activ­i­ties and shut down with stress. Try mak­ing close obser­va­tions of a spe­cif­ic item or imag­ine being some­one else — try to expe­ri­ence life in those shoes. Do less of the pas­sive things in life, like watch­ing tele­vi­sion and do more activ­i­ties that chal­lenge you to be orig­i­nal. Try new things.

Fur­ther Reading

• Cruzan Mor­ton, Car­ol. Brain Regions May Sap or Spur Cre­ativ­i­ty. Focus: News from Har­vard Med­ical, Den­tal, & Pub­lic Health Schools. Decem­ber 12, 2003.
• De Bono, Edward. Lat­er­al Think­ing: Cre­ativ­i­ty Step by Step. (Harp­er Paper­backs; 1973). ISBN 0060903252.
• McConathy DA. The­o­ries of cre­ativ­i­ty. J Bio­com­mun. 1990;17:11–5.
• Schwartz, Jef­frey and Beg­ley, Sharon. The Mind and the Brain: Neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty and the Pow­er of Men­tal Force. (Regan Books; 2003). ISBN 0060988479.
• Tharp, Twyla. The Cre­ative Habit: Learn it and Use it for Life. (Simon & Schus­ter; 2003). ISBN 0743235266.
• Zull, James. The Art of Chang­ing the Brain: Enrich­ing the Prac­tice of Teach­ing by Explor­ing the Biol­o­gy of Learn­ing. (Sty­lus Pub­lish­ing; 2002). ISBN 1579220541.