My method to boost creativity

To boost creativity, expose yourself to a) lots of b) diverse and c) novel stimuli (e.g., art exhibition, design shop, trip to new town), ideally while moving around.

A few years ago, I observed/figured out how my brain seems to come up with new ideas:

I’d be strolling down the park, minding my own business, looking at the trees, and doing nothing in particular. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, WHAM, and I’d get a new idea; say, to use Karpathy’s brilliant post on the history of neural nets (link) as part of my LLMs course material. Or I’d be marveling at various Stone Age clothing and trinkets at Natural History Museum here in London, and then WHAM, and I’d get an idea how I need to wrap up the blog post I was writing.

However, in many of such cases, I’d register not only the idea itself, but also a tiny, almost imperceptible “tail” of mental object(s) that preceded the idea; those “dominoes” that fell and pushed the last one, the idea itself.

So I got curious and spent a few weeks trying to get better at registering these “tails.” To my suprise, I got really good really quickly, and soon could unravel these chains of mental objects to the third and sometimes even fourth predecessor.

For instance, in the first example, the chain I’d pull out of my mind would be:

1. the idea itself, i.e., to use Karpathy’s post as course material

2. the thought that wood is the material the trees are made of

3. the trees themselves as quite beautiful

In the second one, it’d look like this:

1. the idea that I need to wrap up my blog post in a certain way

2. the thought/realization that these Stone Age fellas wrapped their bodies mainly in animal skins

3. the wax sculptures of Stone Age people as nicely done

I figured that, essentially, my brain was making semantic leaps from stimuli that I fed to it to solutions to my problems/goals/open questions, e.g., idea re course material << wood as material for trees << trees themselves. (A bit similar to vector embeddings!)

So I thought: if this is how it works, I should be able to get more ideas/solutions/etc. by simply exposing myself to lots of diverse stimuli, for that would provide my brain lots of starting points for these “chains.” Very much like creative writing prompts do, but in a much more natural way, for we humans spent ~100,000s of years evolving to perceive real-world objects and only a few thousand to perceive media like text and images.

I tested this method, and it worked so well. I started moving faster across all my projects, and that felt awesome. But the best thing about this tool was that I no longer felt helpless when I was stuck on a difficult problem and didn’t know what to do, apart from “to think.” I started feeling in control of any problem I’d work on/face because now I had an exact sequence of steps I could perform, an algorithm of sorts, and I knew from experience I could rely on it, i.e., that it would work. That confidence felt more than awesome; it felt fantastic.

Over time, I made some observations on how to make the most out of this technique:

• it works better when I’m on the move. I’d get to an art gallery, sit down, and look around, but it just wouldn’t work as well as when I moved around the gallery. I think it was Nietzsche who said “Never trust a thought that occurs to you indoors.” I’d add “… and on your ass.”

• it works better if the stimuli I feed to my brain is not only diverse and abundant but also novel (or not seen for a while, like when you come to your childhood playground after a ~decade).

• it works better if I flesh out several open questions/loops/problems before I do the technique, ideally from unrelated areas. This has both cognitive and psychological benefits. Cognition-wise, focusing on a problem and mentally identifying the exact thing you don’t know but want to know/solve rewires perception to seek out relevant stimuli. Psyche-wise, having several problems to solve reduces stress because I don’t put all my eggs in one basket, i.e., I don’t have to solve this exact problem I’m working on.

• it’s important to not control/interfere with the process consciously; to let go. In the beginning, when I was training at catching those tails/chains, I’d often grab and hold the source/starting point but lose the idea itself, presumably due to working memory overload. As my favorite quote from Undone series goes, “Try not to try.”

• given that I work from home now, I perceive surprisingly little novel stimuli during the day. In addition to damaging creativity, it also keeps me “in my head” more, because nothing from the outside world grabs and holds my attention. Not good. Started working outside to mitigate this. Feels amazing. Will write a post about it soon.

• the best session length for me is 1-2h; after 2h I get fatigued a bit. The optimal cadence is 1-3 times a week. Basically, go to a new museum/shop/exhibition/town every weekend or so.

• it works even better if I’m doing it in a new location, e.g., an art gallery in a new town instead of a new exposition at the British Museum, where I’ve been a good dozen times already. Brains love novelty, and spatial novelty + map building literally has a unique place in our brains, place cells near hippocampus that encode locations.

If you want to try it, go to a new place with lots of diverse stimuli the next time you’re stuck with a problem(s).

Example places: bookshops, antique shops, markets with lots of misc objects/trinkets being sold (the weirder the better!), design exhibitions, museums of all kind (my favorite one!), art shops, art galleries, big shops like Fortnum & Mason here in London, forests, ancient sites, etc.

Make your pick! I’m pretty confident the method will work for you just as well as it works for me. I don’t see why it shouldn’t — it mainly relies on associative memory and thinking, and all human brains are almost identical in that regard.

Good luck!

P.s. some pics of my favorite objects and places over the past few years: