“Intense focus isn’t the way to come up with a creative solution to a problem. Relaxation is.”
Presented with a problem, our left hemispheres seem to take immediate charge. For problems requiring brute analytical force, this works just fine. But for those requiring creative solutions, the left-brain gets stumped. That’s when the right hemisphere kicks in, unleashing a steady stream of novel dot-connections between all sorts of random data in its storehouse. For some reason, an abundance of alpha brain waves – a certain frequency of neural oscillation that, frankly, we don’t know much about – seems to help us dip into that connection stream. A lot of these free associations are dead ends, but the ones that aren’t? Eureka.
3M, the Minnesota company behind innovative products such as masking tape and Post-It Notes, is famous for a work environment that encourages employees to regularly break their focus – and thereby crank those alpha waves. Go for a walk. Play a few rounds of pinball. Or even put your work to the side and get busy with a personal passion project. 3M even has a rule that staff spend 15 per cent of their day working on something that’s not, well, work.
Read the rest of this article by James Martin, as published in the Globe and Mail, at
