Creative Intelligence is your capacity for originality and creativity. It taps into your right, creative brain functioning, opposed to your left, linear and logical brain. Creative thinking can be thought of an art, however, delves deeper than music and painting into the creating of any new association or new expression.
The neurons in your brain work the same way as Mind Maps do. There is a central focus, and energy follows pathways or creates new pathways, being new connections, new associations and new thoughts. Whilst our brain develops rapidly during our formative childhood years, our brain has the capacity to continue creating new neurons every day of our life.
As you create your life, create new opportunities and create new resources you are drawing upon your creative intelligence.
Leonardo Da Vinci, considered one of the greatest geniuses of all time, stated four needs for creative thinking 500 odd years ago. What is most fascinating, is that science is only just catching up with his ‘thinking’ now.
- Develop your five traditional senses as well as your spiritual / intuitive senses.
- Study the art of science.
- Study the science of art.
- Realise that everything is connected.
Test your creative intelligence by grabbing your notebook and in two minutes write down as many uses for a paperclip as possible.
Go!
Tony Buzan suggests scores on this test range from 0 through 4-5, which is the global average, to 8, which is a good brain-stormer level, to 12 (exceptional and rare) and finally 16+ which is the Thomas Edison level. If you take as long as you like, rather than the allocated 2 minutes, 20-30 uses are average.
What is great about this creative intelligence test is that just by doing it, it helps develop this area of intelligence. Note your responses. How many of your responses were driven from the left, logical and linear side of your brain? Practical, traditional paperclip uses.
A great exercise to significantly develop the responses you create are with random picture cards.
CCS Corporation provides a deck of 52 random picture cards as shown to the left.
Using these images to trigger new thoughts and create new brain associations (usually the process involves using one picture card at a time), how many new and additional uses can you now think of for a paperclip in an additional one minute brainstorm?
Random words can be used for exactly the same process. Using the following words, give yourself a further one minute timed to generate new ideas for how a paperclip could be used:
Dog Bus Ocean Pencil
Football Leaf Coach Nail
Hair Scarf Glass Moon
Whether you physically did the exercise, or instead chose to keep reading, your creative intelligence just created new neural pathways. Congratulations!
You can take this exercise a step further by giving yourself one more minute and this time, look around where you are seated or standing right now for clues. The floor, roof, windows, what is through the windows, other people, what they are wearing, how you are feeling… the triggers for creative thought are all around you. Now you have awareness of the value of your surroundings you’ll start generating new ideas and creating new thoughts everywhere you go!
Remember, everything is connected and associations can be drawn and created between every thought and every object!
Reflecting on that pesky paperclip again… What if we changed some of the attributes of the paperclip? What if it were made of string rather than metal? What if it were twice the size? What if it contained magical properties, could fly, or the person using it had different knowledge or power? How may an astronaut think of a paperclip differently to a musician?
Value can be found with that old swear word, “can’t”. Consider what a paperclip can’t be used for, then figure out how it could. Map it out in a Mind Map.
Random picture, random words, random objects, new perspectives, drawing Mind Maps and thinking in reverse all develop our creative intelligence.
