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Neuroscience approach to innovative thinking and problem solving

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(Image: Stockfresh)

28 July 2015

Knowledge load
“You are reading, you are talking to people, you are inputting a lot of information and a lot of data into your brain as a way of trying to work out the problem,” Canter said.

“But if you stay in the stress associated with the Try Harder cycle, you are never going to solve it from there because the brain is in a threat state.”

Lingering too long in the Try Harder cycle of frustration and stress leads the brain into survival mode where it loops around the same pattern of thinking, preventing any new thinking. Therefore, once the brain has knowledge loaded, it soon needs to go into a distressed, relaxed state of mind to avoid going around in circles.

“For the parietal [cortex] to become active and do problem solving, the rest of the brain has to be in an optimal state. The optimal state is your temporal lobe where you have all your emotions and stress and all that needs to be really calm. So there needs to be a lot of alpha waves, which is the calm and relaxed waves going on in the brain. When the brain is in that state, the parietal can do its work,” said Dr Stratford.

Calming practices
The participants undertook practices to calm their minds, distress and decompress after having gone through an intense information collection exercise. This got them ready for a hands-on building exercise where they used clay, blocks, paper and other tactile materials to ‘feel’ their way through the problem and activate the parietal cortex.

“It’s the idea that once have thought a problem through, done as much thinking and as much knowledge loading as you can around it, the best thing to do is to actually set it aside, walk away and do another task for a period of 15 minutes at least. At that point what your mind is doing is actually incubating your unconscious mind, your back office.

“Even though you are not attending to that problem anymore, you’ve activated the neural network in the unconscious mind. So even when you stop looking at it, the back office is still working on it. It’s reorganising all that information that you input at the knowledge load stage and making connections between data points that are quite disparate. We wouldn’t consciously think to do it,” Canter said.

Results support
The results from the study showed 80% of participants improved their performance in creative thinking and 63% generated more viable solutions to problems. Thirty-three per cent improved their brain’s cognitive function, with a 26% increase in accuracy in problem solving and 25% reduction in failed attempts to problem solving across participants.

There was an increase in gamma waves (associated with fast learning and the aha! moment) right across the entire brain for each participant, with a decrease in beta waves.

“During my gardening I was totally de-stressed, wasn’t thinking about the problem, and I came at it at a completely different way and had that aha! moment”

Helen Nott, national manager of new markets at IAG Commercial Insurance, who was one of the participants, said she is educating others in her organisation on how to problem solve faster and increase innovative thinking.

“It was quite enlightening for me, I’m definitely sharing the experience,” she said.

“They suggested trying things where I was active with my hands and to do something well removed from the problem. So I started gardening as a way to give me a challenge of redesigning the garden, which is completely separate to the type of work I do.

“During my gardening I was totally de-stressed, wasn’t thinking about the problem, and I came at it at a completely different way and had that aha! moment.”

Dr Stratford said many of the participants used to have eureka moments at times that weren’t convenient such as 2 o’clock in the morning or on holiday.

Built for complexity
“The unconscious is built for complexity, it’s built to deal with complex problems, but we don’t let it. The only time we really let it is when we go to sleep. And how often do we wake up with the answer? You don’t have to go to a sleep pod like at Google, you can actually do it in real time,” she says.

Canter said this technique challenges the ‘keep at it and it’ll eventually happen’ approach, where we are used to thinking that working harder and longer pays off.

“But what the science has shown us is that is actually not true. We’ve actually learnt a better way of doing thinking that gives you better solutions and is less taxing in your health and wellbeing,” she said.

“If you can’t come up with an answer to a problem, we now know through neuroscience that if you put your attention onto another problem that is not quite as difficult but still difficult, if you switch to another problem for 15 minutes and then go back to the original problem, you will come up with the answer,” Dr Stratford added.

Discipline and commitment
However, in order for the technique to work it does take discipline and commitment. Dr Stratford said it takes eight weeks on average to build a neural pathway, practising it every day so that the brain can form a new habit.

“It’s mental discipline,” Nott said. “You know, you always slip back into bad habits. So there’s a little things that goes off in my mind that says, ‘OK you haven’t got to the answer wit this problem, so have you gather all the information?

“Instead of spiralling down in terms of keeping on in trying harder, gather all the information that you need, and then be confident enough to step away from it for a brief amount of time and that will enable you to solve it quickly in the long run.”

 

 

Rebecca Merrett, IDG News Service

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