Do you want to be more original? Does your brain generate good ideas? The latest scientific studies on creativity suggest some tricks that work:
1. Get bored
A team of British researchers from the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) has shown that performing a seemingly boring task for 15 minutes, such as copying numbers from a telephone directory, greatly increases inventiveness.
2. Play a Harry Potter movie
Researchers at Lancaster University have found that watching only 15 minutes of films with content typical of fantasy cinema, such as the magical content of wizards and witches that appear in the popular saga ofHarry Potter, it is enough for children and adolescents to be able to think more creatively.
3. Play
Video games enhance creative activity in our thinking organ, according to a recent study by Michigan State University (USA). In experiments with 500 twelve-year-old children, scientists found that those who played video games were more creative at tasks such as drawing or writing stories.
4. Boost your good mood
People who pause while working to listen to music or watch comic videos on the Internet are not wasting their time, but by improving their humor they can boost their creativity, according to a study published in the magazinePsychological Science. Positive mood seems to tune up the anterior cingulate cortex, a region of the brain that is always activated moments before you have an idea.
5. Move your eyes
Forward and backward eye movement exercises increase creativity, Elizabeth Shobe and her colleagues at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey have shown. The details of the work were released in the magazineBrain and cognition. Of course, the effect they observed was temporary and did not last more than 9 minutes.
