The Neuroscience Of Innovation
How Your Own Brain Limits Your Creative Thinking By Susan Robertson
everal neuroscience principles limit our ability to cre- atively solve problems and generate innovative ideas. Understanding some of these principles can help you optimize your creative thinking and innovation processes.
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1.While your whole brain is working all the time, there are serious energy constraints. The brain stores no fuel and running on empty degrades per-
formance significantly. Therefore, it needs frequent breaks from high energy usage. One of the places you experience this brain energy constraint
most acutely is during the brainstorming phase. It’s a fast and furious pace of generating ideas, potentially for a long time. Leaders have always known that taking breaks from ideation makes for better results, and this neuroscience principle is the obvious reason. However, it’s also important to help people understand that
they actually need to take a brain break, and to have the willpow- er to do it (instead of checking email or doing other work during the “break”). To help them, plan a little “enforced fun.” This can be things like group juggling, kid-like games, songs like “Heads, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes,” or an impromptu dance session. You’ll notice many of these activities have a physical element.
This physicality also helps with restoring some energy for the intensive brain work. Another energy-enhancing tip: Feed people. A growling
stomach is not conducive for maximum output of ideas. Be sure to feed them satisfying food—not just sweets. Offer nuts, cheese, veggies, or fruit. You can offer sweets too, but always make sure there’s some more sustaining fare as well.
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2. The brain naturally limits System 2 thinking. Your brain has two types of thinking:
• System 1 (fast) is the “easy” type of thinking that we use most of the time. It’s intuitive and automatic. So, obviously, it’s also energy efficient.
• System 2 (slow) is thinking that requires more deliberation, more focus, more conscious thought, and literally uses more energy. Therefore, we subconsciously avoid it whenever we can.
If you avoid (or limit) System 2 thinking when it’s needed in your
innovation process, you will, at the least, miss out on really good ideas, and at the worst, make some bad judgment calls that you might have avoided if you had effectively used System 2. One of the phases where people frequently try to avoid System
2 thinking is immediately after idea generation, when it’s time to select the best ideas. The brainstorming is usually lots of fun. It’s fast and our brains are making sub-conscious and intuitive connec- tions. Then comes the time we have to be focused and deliberate to narrow to a manageable set of ideas. Suddenly, it all becomes a lot less fun. Know that your team will try hard to avoid System 2 thinking, so
you need to be prepared to counter the objections and ensure that the needed deliberate thinking will happen. For example, people will say, “It takes too long to review all the ideas. We don’t have time.” Or, “Let’s just have everyone champion a few ideas instead of review- ing all of them. The ones we remember are probably the best ones anyway.”
(This isn’t true, but that’s another topic.) Self-Storage NOW! 33
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