The human brain has an awesome ability to generate and comprehend abstract concepts. It’s why the comic xkcd can take five crude lines and a circle and make us understand that this stick figure represents a person with passions and desires, while simultaneously being very funny. It’s this same abstract creative ability that occurs in your brain every time we have a new idea.

While inspiration might seem to occur at random times there are some things we can do to make our brains more likely to smash together unrelated concepts and give birth to a brand spanking new idea.

Welcome to the the idea factory right here in your head.

How to generate new ideas

Since we know a bit about how the brain handles new information and process our senses, we can shortcut some of these and jump start the creative process. There’s a thousand brain storming guides out there, but really there is only one thing you have to do – stimulate the parts of your brain that are active when you’re being creative. Lucky for us it’s the same regions of the brain that fire up when you experience something new.

Expose yourself to new things

Go out of your way to see something or experience something you’ve never done before. Eat something different, read some classic literature you wouldn’t normally consider, go out and visit a part of the city you’ve never been to. From a biological perspective, your hippocampus and cortex are forced to work harder to understand something you’ve never seen before. Now this new information you’ve just presented to your brain needs sorting and categorizing. It does this by shuffling through all the senses and concepts you’re already familiar with to try and decide how they relate to this new thing and then it decides if you will remember this new experience or discard it as irrelevant.

As part of this process your brain is drawing on your previous memories and experiences to make sense of what it’s seeing. In a way, the brain is pulling up old ideas and incorporating them into new concepts. And it’s not a one-way street; the new experience you’ve just encountered affects your old memories and experiences too – and then bingo! You’ve just created a new idea. A synthesis of old and new. This often manifests itself as a ‘flash’ of inspiration where an idea seemingly pops fully formed into your head from out of nowhere. But as we’ve just seen, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes, it just seems like it’s out of nowhere.

You might not consciously be aware of it, but you are already generating new ideas all the time, just by walking around and experiencing new things – the failure to recognize this is because you’re either not looking for a new idea and not receptive to it, or more often – it evaporates. Fast.

This is a very volatile time here. If it’s one thing the hippocampus is really strict on it’s new experiences. If you want to form a new memory then the hippocampus is the gatekeeper, and it wants to make damn sure it’s worth the effort.

Just as important as generating a new idea is actually recording it. If you don’t put a piece of paper in front of your inspiration, then it will fade away like the memory of what color shirt you wore on Monday last week.

How to capture ideas

It’s not real until it’s manifested. Words spoken, sentences written, pictures drawn. The key to all of these is to get your idea out of your head fast. Only then should you start to work on the concepts and ideas and try to refine them.

Though inaccurate, let’s use the analogy of an old computer that has run out of memory – it goes slower and slower as it can only hold so many discreet pieces of information at once. It constantly writes information about what it’s working on to a page file stored on the hard drive. It’s slower than holding all the data in active memory but it’s an efficient way to expand the memory it has to work with. And that’s what that piece of paper in front of you is.

You need to use this bit of paper because new experiences and new sensations help you generate the new ideas but with one major drawback. New experiences and sensations demand a lot of attention from your brain to process them. Hence once you have your idea the original inspiration becomes a distraction.

If you think of something brilliant while watching TV and you don’t take action to record it, then the TV is still there, demanding attention from your frontal cortex and your brief thought will lose the attention race. Capture these brief flashes, single words, poorly spelt sentences, bad stick figure drawings. Speed is essential here lest the heart of your idea fade or worse still – change due to your over analysis before you put pen to paper.

Don’t censor yourself

I can’t stress this enough. Just get it out there. You can destroy it, or erase it later before anyone’s ever seen it if you’re embarrassed. If you try to take your idea and over analyze it in your mind before you’ve written it down, then the odds are that you’ll think of more reasons why it won’t work than you will on how to improve your idea. With this attitude you won’t write it down and you won’t remember it later on when you might have second flash of inspiration on how to make it work brilliantly.

Let me leave you with an example of a stupid idea I had.

I send text messages from my phone. It costs me 11 cents every time I do it and I’m limited to 160 characters. What if you could offer almost the same service for free but have the texts sent it over the web rather than to phones? But really stop to think about it some more before you bother to write it down. Why on earth would anyone use that?

Firstly you have to have Internet access to use it, and so does everyone you want to send the text message to.

If I have access to the web I why would I limit myself to 140 or 160 characters? I could send a 12 page email, photos, pictures, video or better yet, post them all to my web page.

And why should I even type anything – why not just use Skype or MSN messenger or Google chat to communicate instantly?

Free text messaging over the web? Ludicrous. It’s a waste of time even thinking about it, and I certainly wouldn’t write it down.

And that’s why I didn’t invent Twitter.

If you want to be exposed to some inspiring new stimuli then you should subscribe to our RSS or Email updates. If inspiration is hitting you right now though, you’d better write it down in the comments section. Quick before it fades!

Original image by kaibara87 remixed by Patrick

January 22nd, 2009