Creating from the already created

How do we think new thoughts  ?

General perception is that the creative thought is supposed to be unprecedented one. But is it really so ? My personal experiences on creativity differ  completely. Lately I did an experiment . I listed all the creative things I have thought  till now. Even listed this article which i am writing .  Then for each of these creative thoughts. I started figuring how did I come up with the thought ,what was my mindset and what i was reading at that time . A startling fact came out that. my creative thoughts were the interconnections of the things which i experienced or read about during that time . All of them were in the context of the the things I was doing at that time.So creativity is not about thinking unprecedented thoughts. It is more about making the connections between several different knowledge chunks which one learns .It is just linking of the knowledge chunks .




IN  case of writing this article . The idea came to my mind because few days ago  I watched a talk about creativity (which i have posted in my blog ) And overtime I was reading the article related to meta cognition and lo! i get an idea to write about what drives creativity and what exactly is creativity. Just list out all the creative thoughts and see how you came up to them, you will discover this interesting fact yourself.

To induce creativity ,you need a calm environment to yourself .Isolation is the best possible environment you can get . Most of the new thoughts come to me when I am talking long walks .If you are stressed , your adrenaline level increases very much . and studies show that rise in adrenaline level  makes our mind  to think only in present and remove all the underlying thought which we have. I bet you get a creative idea when passing time idly rather that when working in your stressful job.

Why most of the time researchers  come with the creative ideas related to their research. Because they have toiled hard ,gained as much knowledge as they can about the field of study and have developed their knowledge chunk  ready to be interconnected. Overtime it will happen that they will come up with  creative thought.The more you gain knowledge that more knowledge chunks you have  and creativity comes from the connections of these knowledge chunks.Thus the more you learn the more creative you become