Disclaimer: in this essay about creativity, I am conveying my own understanding and ideas about creativity. All of that is strictly subjective and absolutely unscientific. Enjoy!

What is creativity 

Before I google a normal definition, I want to try to derive it on my own. The first instinct is to say that creativity is ability to think differently from 99.99% of other human brains currently operating on the earth. But then, considering we are strongly pre-AGI, it might be careless saying human brains, so maybe thinking differently from 99.99% of brains currently operating on the earth. But then thinking differently sounds like being a neurodivergent which is not exactly being creative or being creative but in one particular approach. 

Internet says: creativity is the ability to generate novel, valuable ideas or solutions by connecting seemingly unrelated concepts, reimagining existing ones, or exercising imagination, which makes sense. But in the next section, I will try to explain you creativity in my own words.

Think about it as an input / output machine 

Assume human is a blackbox, we put a puzzle inside, we get an answer as an output. If this answer is exactly in the middle of normal distribution, it is a trivial (non-creative) one. If it goes too far to one of the sides, with high probability it is unrelated or stupid. If it is not exactly in the middle, but somewhere 10-15% left or right from the middle – we are probably dealing with creativity. One can think of creativity as an ability to reason about usual things in unusual ways or producing outputs other people for some reason can’t produce.

I am deeply convinced that creativity is a skill or a muscle derived directly from all the training and retraining activity we are doing on human brains. If thinking about childhood, school, and to large extent university, as well as corporate and office environments, public spaces, cultural and society traditions as pre-training, it is of no surprise that most people lack creativity. Pre-training takes most of the training time and then there is just a bit left for things like trial and error reinforcement learning and almost no time at all for free flow explorations in the frame “what if…” 

“What if… I spent three months doing absolutely my best to find aliens and get in touch” – almost never happens because modern life and social spaces are organized in a way not leaving too much free time and an average grownup hardly ever is able to take three months for an alien side project even once per life. 

How to win more time for free flow exploration? Give up on social, traditional, and normal pre-training as much as possible. The cost – most people will hate you and do their best to bring you back. Assume a 12yo who decided to skip three months of school for a side project. Very few parents will actually support it (respect to those who will). 

But there is no cheat code here imo: to train and fetch out creative thinking, one has to fight all standard brain pre-training and exhausting life activities in a radical way. Otherwise – no creativity. 

Human is a neural network

To be creative, we ‘just’ need to engage different neurons in different brain areas in different combinations and permutations with different intensity. Humanity still doesn’t know too much about how exactly brain operates. But we do know some things, for example, we know that brain area is not allocated in a strictly fixed way, despite often hearing that one area is responsible for creativity and another one for speech and another one for vision – when one loses part of their brain, the brain space is reallocated from scratch so that all the existing skills are preserved. 

It is funny, our whole life is driven by operating a computer we have no clue about. Imagine living in a house that is orchestrated in some random way, when you get electricity, when water, when the lights is on when off, when furniture is rearranged, etc. And all your activity is fully dictated by the current state of the house you have little control of. This is exactly how our brain manages our life. Feeling sad or high energy, looped in a situation that has happened, disfucntional because of a broken heart and what not. Feels stupid and fascinating at the same time. 

But back to the point, to extract creativity from this blackbox called brain, we ‘just’ need to engage different neurons in different brain areas in different combinations and permutations with different intensity. This is the best recipe I found so far. Not very smart or high-tech, but it works consistently. How to do it – by engaging in very different activities, exposing ourselves to different experiences, in different contexts, environments, and circumstances, and never stop asking questions. The rest of the essay describes some way to make this happen derived from my personal experience. 

Routine kills creativity 

Routine is comforting and pleasant, but it is poisonous. Routine makes some neuron connections more explicit than others and then neurons tend to take this familiar way whenever they have an opportunity. Taking same type of coffee in the same cup from the same coffee spot degrades your ability to solve a puzzle creatively. It doesn’t mean one should avoid routine completely, it’s rather inconvenient, but one should optimise for neuro-connection diversity (often referred to as neuroplasticity). 

Society loves routine and humans behaving predictably. So whenever you live in a never ending exploration mode, people tell you something like: can you already decide who you are, settle down on what your life is, you should choose one vertical and build a consistent career and all things pretty much saying “stop exploring”. But it doesn’t matter, just ignore them. 

Learning new things expands creativity

Learning new things creates new neuro-connections which helps think more creatively. But here is an interesting thing: relearning things we already know expands creativity no less or maybe even more, because it deconstructs already existing neuro-connections into families of new related connections. For example, when I started learning Mandarin as a 5th language, we had many debates with my brain whether hieroglifs are actually letters because they do not look like other things we usually call letters. But after we settled down on yes those guys are also letters by thinking machine around letters has expanded in several dimensions which made my thinking more creative because now there are more neuron combinations and permutations available. 

I would say that learning things from the first principles make us more creative, but then it actually contradicts the ‘avoid routine’ concept because if we learn everything from the first principles this is learning  routine. But sometimes learning from first principles definitely optimizes for neuro diversity. For example, assume you want to learn computer architecture. If you just learn the von Neumann architecture which is the low-key default in the world at is, it becomes the default in your brain for a computer architecture. But if you start with inventing five different computer architectures that potentially could exist considering what job we want computer to execute – von Neumann won’t be the first one that comes to your mind. So it leads us to the idea that free flow learning is more useful than actual learning. And the combination of both gives us the best net gain in creativity.  

Trying new things expands creativity

Just trying new things without learning the whole skill seems to be useful for creativity too. Because they activate new combinations of neurons in new brain areas. They do not develop the new family of connections as a meaningful cluster in the neuron highway system, but it adds some routes that were not available previously. It seems from my empirical observations that it is more useful to try things in the sensorial areas that are not my core leading areas (i.e. not brain activity). So doing things by hands (e.g. making jewellery or woodwork) or with meaningful body engagement (surfing, shibari, paddle, food tasting, golf, etc) give me more new thoughts, angles, and perspectives than purely intellectual activities (philosophy or mathematics). But of course we want to combine all. 

Combining different contexts that have nothing to do with each other 

This is for those who like experiments and does not care about looking weird, but doing a regular activity in a different context changes our way of thinking drastically and makes us more creative. For example brain solves a math puzzle at home and at a night club in completely different ways. I actually like thinking, jamming on puzzles or even journaling at nightclubs. Other examples might include solving puzzles at the sunrise at the beach, moving to a friend’s house for a couple of day and solving puzzles on their sofa, and pretty much whatever you can invent where you will feel slightly unusual. I should highlight that it won’t make you more productive, probably it will make you less productive, but it will help you to think thoughts that otherwise wouldn’t come to your mind. 

Sensational experiences 

Instead of changing purely context, one can also change the persona context. For example, putting on a long coat and taking a pack of Marlboro in one hand and shitty black coffee in another hand – you already will think differently and more creative. The idea of this exercise is not to lock ourselves into one single personality but fluidly moving between different embodiment experiments. It helps think. 

Rewriting inefficient automatic strategies 

Sometimes some thoughts take too much power in our brains. Fears, unfortunate experiences of the past, anxiety, overexcitement, pretty much whatever takes too much place for too long degrades creative thinking. I see huge value in removing those automatic strategies because it frees space for thinking. It is a life long process and ongoing work, some strategies can be removed easily, some only partially, some are hard even to identify, some are hard to change but even consciously giving place to them already makes difference. I think therapy is the third largest cost category in my spending structure last years, especially when I started building a company. The less inefficient automatic strategies are driving my life, the more place for creative thinking I have. 

For handling this particular issue, the most efficient method I found are constellations. It is not scientific, but it works personally for me really good. I also should admit that except for this particular use case and handling posttrauma I do not see much value in therapy (it has nothing to do with the article, just do not want to sound by accident as a huge therapy-believer).

Running thought experiments 

Solving imaginary problems is a huge source of creativity. For example, designing a nuclear coordination protocol in four hours. No one asked me (unfortunately). Furthermore I even do not have enough inputs. But it is a thought experiment. So for four hours believe this is real and solve it. The patterns we design and discover in thought experiments are also handy when we solve real problems because solving imaginary problems one doesn’t need to stay grounded. One can come up with any tool, algorithm, or mechanism disregarding laws and common sense. But then remember that most technology we use today some time ago didn’t make any sense. 

How far can you go 

The truth is … as far as you want. I do not like edge experiences like locking yourself to the mental hospital to understand how other patients think and borrow some strategies. But I know people who have done it and it was worth it for them. It’s everyone’s personal choice and responsibility. And even “playing all in” might mean different things. 

Drugs for creativity 

The set of experiments I conducted is quite limited and includes trying different substances, one by one with large enough intervals, and trying to solve unsolved puzzles in a more creative way compared to how I usually would solve them. Tl;dr I didn’t notice any meaningful difference. There are still many drugs to try, I will keep you posted but I am not too excited about this way. 

If someone (except for Erdos operating on amphetamine) found any meaningful results in using drugs for solving really hard puzzles — please email me I would love to hear about it: lisaakselrod@gmail.com   

p.s. spiritual insights and knowledge about how everything is connected to everything do not count. While those are entertaining, I do not see any fundamental value in them. 

Alcohol for creativity     

Just very very bad. Alcohol makes everything worse off without making anything better off, it degrades sensations, ability to think, connection to the reality, ability to listen and express thought clearly, etc

Human connection and tantra for creativity 

Very very good, it touches a lot of brain areas that are rarely touched in our day to day life. Because of the architecture of modern society, deep authentic connection at all levels, including physical, intellectual and emotional, is almost excluded at all society levels. While other people are great source of rearranging and refactoring our brains, the flow of neurons, and the input/output machine, it also decreases the level of stress drastically. And it makes you think differently. 

Basic information exchange mostly adds useless data repeating already existing data. Deep human connection allows us to see the aspects of existing data from new sides. 

There also might be some metaphysical aspect here, affiliated with information stored in the space and human machine somehow getting access to this information. I do not have any good insight here, but I believe that in the future we will discover how information is stored in the space except for chips and analog devices and we will learn to read/write it. It might be the case that different human machines have access to different information. 

But even putting metaphysics aside, we scientifically know that the better one’s emotional machine is, the better they can reason (despite the BBC Sherlock show being an opposite example). So interacting with other humans in an emotionally meaningful way improves reasoning a lot.

Stress for creativity 

Depends on one’s ability to process stress. If one can stay calm, with clear mind and fast reasoning, then stress is great, it is a new obstacle that provokes thinking differently. Otherwise, stress just degrades creativity to trivial and template thinking. 

Overall, decreasing stress to bare minimum seems to be an optimal strategy in almost 100% of cases. Stress is a weird scam game our mind tricks us into, but we can trick it back into the state of chill and relaxation. By conscious observation, practicing mindfulness, and meaningful bodywork. 

Those were some thoughts on creativity. Thank you for reading. Feel free to drop any thoughts or questions here: lisaakselrod@gmail.com