Jonah Lehrer’s has an excellent interview on Fresh Air about his new book on how creativity works, called Imagine.
There are three key components:
- Relaxed state of mind: Like when you’re in the shower and your mind is free to wander. It’s another reason not to be afraid of a little boredom, and setting aside personal time time in the day.
- Hard work: But the relaxed mind needs to have something to work with, and that’s all the hard work that came before. When you’re relaxed the mind processes things in different ways, it mulls over the things you’ve been thinking of, and makes unexpected connections.
- Uninhibited, childlike perspective: You need to allow your brain the opportunity to be creative. All the hard work requires good focus and persistence; things the pre-frontal cortex develops the ability to do (and something we train it to do) during adolescence. But the ultimate, creative insight often requires you to turn off that part of the brain so you can thing uninhibited, creative thoughts.