Expand Your Mind: Creativity, Innovation and a Warning
by Miki Saxon
Are you middle-aged? Or wonder what you will be like when you are? Then I have great news for you. Creativity and thinking skills—new brain studies show that middle-aged brains are excellent, making new connections and perking along at their prime in lots of areas.
Inductive reasoning and problem solving — the logical use of your brain and actually getting to solutions. We get the gist of an argument better. We’re better at sizing up a situation and reaching a creative solution.
Creativity is a subject that has always fascinated. Why could Rembrandt create magic with a brush while others produced nothing? Many people write, but how many Shakespears has the world produced? What is the difference between them? Perhaps new research will offer some insight.
“Creativity is kind of like pornography — you know it when you see it,” said Rex Jung, a research scientist at the Mind Research Network in Albuquerque. Dr. Jung, an assistant research professor in the department of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico, said his team was doing the first systematic research on the neurology of the creative process, including its relationship to personality and intelligence.
Creativity often leads to some kind of innovation, but it doesn’t lend itself to groupthink. As I’ve frequently written, creativity happens in those long, silent times when your mind is free to roam. New research shows that this is true.
To come up with the next iPad, Amazon or Facebook, the last thing potential innovators need is a group brainstorm session. What the pacesetters of the future really require, according to new Wharton research, is some time alone. …a hybrid process — in which people are given time to brainstorm on their own before discussing ideas with their peers — resulted in more and better quality ideas than a purely team-oriented process.
It was so-called financial innovation that brought down the global economy. Five years before it happened Warren Buffett called derivatives “financial weapons of mass destruction,” but four years before that Peter Drucker condemned that kind of financial innovation.
In a piece he penned in 1999, “Financial Services: Innovate or Die,” he frowned on the kind of transactions that have done such terrible damage to Goldman’s reputation and, more important, to the world economy. Since the 1970s, he wrote, “the only innovations” among banks “have been any number of allegedly ‘scientific’ derivatives.
“But these financial instruments are not designed to provide a service to customers,” Drucker continued. “They are designed to make the trader’s speculations more profitable and at the same time less risky—surely a violation of the basic laws of risk and unlikely to work. In fact, they are unlikely to work better than the inveterate gambler’s equally scientific system for beating the odds at Monte Carlo or Las Vegas.”
Finally, a public service announcement from me to you. No matter how openly you live your life in these days of social networking, I doubt you would post your tax returns of medical records online, let alone send them directly to the bad guys.
But that is exactly what happens when you use a public copier or return a leased one. A decade ago I learned that digital copiers are essentially computers, complete with hard drive, and every document copied is saved on that drive and readable with software that can be downloaded free on the Net. If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe CBS News.
Flickr photo credit to: pedroCarvalho on flickr
