According to the folks at Scientific American, you can boost your creativity by getting both sides of your brain working together. It turns out just the action of moving your eyes from left to right will result in a surge of fresh ideas.
I’m all for fostering creativity in everyday life. While it would be great to think like Tim Burton, I believe you can use creativity to make things easier, to get along with people and to make your surroundings more comfortable.
Here’s a little story about creativity: When my son was about two years old a friend of mine visited with her very young baby. We were sitting outside in the shade and the baby was sleeping in his stroller while my two-year old played nearby. My son picked up a pop can and started throwing it around dangerously close to the sleeping baby. After asking him several times not to throw the can in the baby’s direction, I could feel a war of wills coming on.
Then my friend said, “Can you hit that tree over there with the pop can?”
Revelation. My two-year old sauntered over to the tree, well away from the baby, and commenced his pop-can assault on it. Problem solved. It was my friend’s creativity that averted what was shaping up to be a melt-down situation. From that little episode, I concluded that if you were endlessly creative you could avert most parenting dilemmas. But you can’t always be creative. Sometimes you are sleep deprived, at the end of your rope or just not on your game.
Sometimes you just need to look at a problem from a different angle. To flip it this way and that and then back over again. Sometimes you arrive at a solution and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes it takes someone else’s brain to see things in a way that yours just does not.
To read “Boost your creativity with eye movement” by Christie Nicholson click on the link.
Leave a comment