Are you in your right mind?
April 8, 2007 | 12:00am
The Power of Creative Intelligence: 10 ways to tap into your Creative Genius
By Tony Buzan
Available at Powerbooks
It is often the case that creative approaches to life are mistaken for loony behavior. To cite obvious examples, Copernicus was thought to be barmy for believing the Earth revolved around the Sun; Einstein’s dreaminess in school led folks to think he was retarded; and Shirley MacLaine was considered a nut-job for talking to dead ancestors.
Shirley MacLaine?
Yes, her name occurred to me while reading Tony Buzan’s The Power of Creative Intelligence. In this compact, easy-to-read volume, Buzan (who recently visited Manila for a book tour) points out "10 ways to tap into your creative genius." In Buzan’s view, everyone is a creative genius. Except maybe K-Fed.
One of Buzan’s 10 tips is to seek guidance from "Your Mastermind Group." Noting that each creative genius in history has had a "forefather" of sorts (Aristotle had Plato, Julius Caesar had Alexander the Great, Stephen Hawking had Isaac Newton), Buzan says he finds it helpful to "hold imaginary conversations" with the great, dead minds of history to spur creative solutions to problems.
When MacLaine did this, there was no end to the snickering. But Buzan says he personally chats up Leonardo da Vinci, Queen Elizabeth I, Buddha and Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of the Japanese martial art of aikido.
There’s nothing nutty about this. He says he imagines what advice his handpicked "think tank" would supply and is always amazed by the results. Don’t we all do this, at times, in our lives? When we confront new or untried situations in life, we often do consult with some "inner voice" that guides us toward possible options and solutions. (My inner voice is a combination of Groucho Marx and Bill Murray, so the results are not always optimum.) The point that Buzan wants to get across is that we have access to virtually limitless creative approaches to our problems, and to living life in general, at our disposal. We just learn to think creatively.
Of course, Buzan goes on to say that even mundane tasks  such as mapping out traffic routes and picking up the dry cleaning  can be approached as if they were a creative game to be tackled joyfully. I can’t remember the last time I tackled EDSA’s traffic and endless road reconstruction "joyfully," but Buzan assures us it can be done.
It’s all in the approach. Anyone who’s ever taken an IQ test of some kind probably realized that problem solving often lies with altering our traditional paths to finding an answer; if A doesn’t work, invent a B; if not B, then invent a C, or a D.
One suggestion of Buzan’s does seem to work when we’re stumped by a problem: take a walk. The Romans even had a phrase for it: Solvitas perambulum, which literally means "solve it while walking." We’ve all had the experience of taking our woes out for a walk, only to find the answer simply "popping" into our heads. Turns out there’s a rational explanation for this: not only does walking stimulate blood flow to the brain and increase oxygenation, but the altered perspective we gain by simply looking elsewhere can conjure up fresh thinking  though this approach might yield fewer positive results on a street full of smoke-belching vehicles or in a noise-polluted mall. One of Buzan’s key insights is that our notions of "left brain" and "right brain" intelligence  derived from groundbreaking research by Prof. Roger Sperry in 1981  are flawed, or at least incomplete. Though Sperry did conclude that one or the other cortical hemisphere is "dominant" in either logical (left) or creative (right) thinking, Buzan wants us to note that no one hemisphere is an island  each mental process, even getting up for another beer during a commercial break, requires intricate cortical cross-chatting and neural exchange. It’s not just left or right. In fact, Sperry’s theories  popularized for decades in books and self-help manuals  may have caused many people to conclude they are essentially non-logical or non-creative. This is a notion Buzan wants to blow out of the water.
Take, for example, Beethoven. While often considered a "passionate" Romantic composer, Buzan notes the musician’s output reveals a highly mathematical framework at work; passion only accounts for a certain percent of his concertos and sonatas. Similarly, the observation that birds don’t naturally "know" to sing  they learn it by imitating the older birds around them  led Dr. Shin’ichi Suzuki to develop his method of teaching kids violin. And if Einstein weren’t such a flake in school, he probably wouldn’t have dreamed up "creative mind games" that led intuitively to his Theory of Relativity.
With its tips and exercises, The Power of Creative Intelligence does make us think in different ways  and helps us to put this thinking into practice. One big "trick" developed by Buzan (an innovation he liked so much, he registered the name) is to use "Mind Maps."
Consider, Buzan says, how we usually make lists or outlines. They’re linear, logical, written out line by line.
What if, he says, we began with a little circle in the middle, and wrote the name of our project or problem at its center.
Then, what if we drew five arms branching out from the circle. On top of each line, what if we wrote words that we naturally associated with our "project"? Before you know it, we’ve "multiplied" our thinking about the problem by 500 percent.
Then, what if we branched out even more from those five arms, and put five more little arms branching from each of the five bigger arms? Then we’ll have multiplied our thought processes by 2,500 percent! Then, just for fun, what if we started switching to colored pens and using big, evocative fonts on our diagram?
When we’re done with this exercise, we will have either developed a personal "Mind Map" that can provide us with a unique way of solving our problem.
Or we’ll have drawn a very disturbing-looking spider that could get us locked up for observation.
Anyway, Buzan’s got loads of fresh approaches to creativity in The Power of Creative Intelligence. His exercises can help even the most creatively challenged to free up their ways of looking at life. All things considered, he’s no nuttier than Shirley MacLaine. And he draws some very cool spiders.
By Tony Buzan
Available at Powerbooks
It is often the case that creative approaches to life are mistaken for loony behavior. To cite obvious examples, Copernicus was thought to be barmy for believing the Earth revolved around the Sun; Einstein’s dreaminess in school led folks to think he was retarded; and Shirley MacLaine was considered a nut-job for talking to dead ancestors.
Shirley MacLaine?
Yes, her name occurred to me while reading Tony Buzan’s The Power of Creative Intelligence. In this compact, easy-to-read volume, Buzan (who recently visited Manila for a book tour) points out "10 ways to tap into your creative genius." In Buzan’s view, everyone is a creative genius. Except maybe K-Fed.
One of Buzan’s 10 tips is to seek guidance from "Your Mastermind Group." Noting that each creative genius in history has had a "forefather" of sorts (Aristotle had Plato, Julius Caesar had Alexander the Great, Stephen Hawking had Isaac Newton), Buzan says he finds it helpful to "hold imaginary conversations" with the great, dead minds of history to spur creative solutions to problems.
When MacLaine did this, there was no end to the snickering. But Buzan says he personally chats up Leonardo da Vinci, Queen Elizabeth I, Buddha and Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of the Japanese martial art of aikido.
There’s nothing nutty about this. He says he imagines what advice his handpicked "think tank" would supply and is always amazed by the results. Don’t we all do this, at times, in our lives? When we confront new or untried situations in life, we often do consult with some "inner voice" that guides us toward possible options and solutions. (My inner voice is a combination of Groucho Marx and Bill Murray, so the results are not always optimum.) The point that Buzan wants to get across is that we have access to virtually limitless creative approaches to our problems, and to living life in general, at our disposal. We just learn to think creatively.
Of course, Buzan goes on to say that even mundane tasks  such as mapping out traffic routes and picking up the dry cleaning  can be approached as if they were a creative game to be tackled joyfully. I can’t remember the last time I tackled EDSA’s traffic and endless road reconstruction "joyfully," but Buzan assures us it can be done.
It’s all in the approach. Anyone who’s ever taken an IQ test of some kind probably realized that problem solving often lies with altering our traditional paths to finding an answer; if A doesn’t work, invent a B; if not B, then invent a C, or a D.
One suggestion of Buzan’s does seem to work when we’re stumped by a problem: take a walk. The Romans even had a phrase for it: Solvitas perambulum, which literally means "solve it while walking." We’ve all had the experience of taking our woes out for a walk, only to find the answer simply "popping" into our heads. Turns out there’s a rational explanation for this: not only does walking stimulate blood flow to the brain and increase oxygenation, but the altered perspective we gain by simply looking elsewhere can conjure up fresh thinking  though this approach might yield fewer positive results on a street full of smoke-belching vehicles or in a noise-polluted mall. One of Buzan’s key insights is that our notions of "left brain" and "right brain" intelligence  derived from groundbreaking research by Prof. Roger Sperry in 1981  are flawed, or at least incomplete. Though Sperry did conclude that one or the other cortical hemisphere is "dominant" in either logical (left) or creative (right) thinking, Buzan wants us to note that no one hemisphere is an island  each mental process, even getting up for another beer during a commercial break, requires intricate cortical cross-chatting and neural exchange. It’s not just left or right. In fact, Sperry’s theories  popularized for decades in books and self-help manuals  may have caused many people to conclude they are essentially non-logical or non-creative. This is a notion Buzan wants to blow out of the water.
Take, for example, Beethoven. While often considered a "passionate" Romantic composer, Buzan notes the musician’s output reveals a highly mathematical framework at work; passion only accounts for a certain percent of his concertos and sonatas. Similarly, the observation that birds don’t naturally "know" to sing  they learn it by imitating the older birds around them  led Dr. Shin’ichi Suzuki to develop his method of teaching kids violin. And if Einstein weren’t such a flake in school, he probably wouldn’t have dreamed up "creative mind games" that led intuitively to his Theory of Relativity.
With its tips and exercises, The Power of Creative Intelligence does make us think in different ways  and helps us to put this thinking into practice. One big "trick" developed by Buzan (an innovation he liked so much, he registered the name) is to use "Mind Maps."
Consider, Buzan says, how we usually make lists or outlines. They’re linear, logical, written out line by line.
What if, he says, we began with a little circle in the middle, and wrote the name of our project or problem at its center.
Then, what if we drew five arms branching out from the circle. On top of each line, what if we wrote words that we naturally associated with our "project"? Before you know it, we’ve "multiplied" our thinking about the problem by 500 percent.
Then, what if we branched out even more from those five arms, and put five more little arms branching from each of the five bigger arms? Then we’ll have multiplied our thought processes by 2,500 percent! Then, just for fun, what if we started switching to colored pens and using big, evocative fonts on our diagram?
When we’re done with this exercise, we will have either developed a personal "Mind Map" that can provide us with a unique way of solving our problem.
Or we’ll have drawn a very disturbing-looking spider that could get us locked up for observation.
Anyway, Buzan’s got loads of fresh approaches to creativity in The Power of Creative Intelligence. His exercises can help even the most creatively challenged to free up their ways of looking at life. All things considered, he’s no nuttier than Shirley MacLaine. And he draws some very cool spiders.
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