Posts Tagged ‘visualization’

Reduce stress! Become more creative in three steps

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011


Life is a cascade of challenge. Sometimes the flow trickles and sometimes it roars. How well you navigate determines who you are and your quality of life. Do you embrace the flow or avoid it? Does a torrent motivate or immobilize you? Do you look to the future with hope or fear?

Your answers to these questions probably correlate to your creative skill. A creative person sees opportunity in challenge. She tolerates and does not fear ambiguity. Entering life’s white waters, she is not paralyzed by stress but energized by the exhilaration. She does not look back or paddle upstream but races downstream toward the new vistas beckoning.

In Iconoclast: a Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently, Gregory Berns explains how highly creative individuals are hard wired. fMRI studies indicate that iconoclasts’ brains differ in terms of perception, fear response and social intelligence. Importantly, he provides practical ways for each of us to nurture such capabilities in ourselves. Yes! We can rewire the circuits and become more creative by pursuing three specific strategies:

  • Bombard the brain with novel experiences and learn to see differently
  • Tame the stress response and overcome fear
  • Develop social intelligence and persuade others to accept your novel ideas

The neuroscience behind creativity


Because the human mind runs on just 40 watts of power, it constantly seeks to conserve energy. It takes a lot of shortcuts, including in the area of perception. According to Berns, “the most likely way you perceive something will be in a manner consistent with your past experience. Commonplace perceptions feel comfortable and cost little energy to process.” The brain categorizes your past experience and then draws from these categories to determine what you “see.” By its nature, the brain does not want to expend the energy required to see differently.

Step #1: Bombard the brain with novel experiences and learn to see differently

Bern’s studies indicate that iconoclasts’ brains are more easily able to see differently — that is, their brains do not seek to conserve energy at the expense of creative insight. What about the rest of us? When confronting life’s cascade of challenge, what can we do to generate innovative solutions?

Berns suggests that we intentionally shock the brain with novel experiences, compelling it to expend the energy required to achieve creative insight. “By forcing the visual system to see things in different ways, you can increase the odds of new insights.” Specifically, he suggests that the “surest way to evoke the imagination is to confront the perceptual system with people, places, and things that it hasn’t seen before…In order to think creatively…bombard the brain with new experiences. Only then will it be forced out of efficiency mode and reconfigure its neural networks.”

For those who can learn to see differently, the brain has another, even more primal attribute that inhibits creative action. Fear. We fear the criticism, rejection and ridicule that may result from thinking differently. We avoid the risk associated with possible failure. We recoil from ambiguity because we fear the unknown. According to Berns, “The stress system is not rational. It reacts when provoked, and this reaction is powerful enough to derail many of the most innovative people out there.”

Step #2: Tame the stress response and overcome fear

Berns offers a number of specific strategies to overcome fear. None are simple and all require persistence and courage. For example, he says we need to understand the effects of fear and then re-frame it. Instead of fearing failure, train yourself to focus on its potential for learning and growth. Similarly, learn to tolerate ambiguity. The unknown can prove either detrimental or helpful to us. Berns suggests that we nurture the ability to mitigate our fear of the unknown by seeing its possible benefits. Finally, to avoid fear of ridicule, recruit a like-minded person to support you when you present an innovative idea to others.

Let’s assume that you have successfully tamed fear and are generating creative ideas. According to Berns, you have one final hurdle: taming the fear in others. Novel ideas are different. By its nature, the brain perceives what is different to be threatening. This is a primal response.

Step #3: Develop social intelligence and persuade others to accept your innovative ideas

Seeing differently and taming the stress response do not guarantee your success in creative endeavors. To implement novel ideas, you need to light up the brain’s circuits for social networking.

“In order to sell one’s ideas, one must create a positive reputation that will draw people toward something that is initially unfamiliar and potentially scary. Familiarity helps build one’s reputation…successful iconoclasts have an uncommon ability to connect on a social level that transcends the idea itself. The key to doing this is through social networks. In order to be successful, the iconoclast builds a network through two fundamental approaches: familiarity and reputation.”

Navigate life’s quick water with dexterity and joy


Reduce your stress! Face your unique cascade of challenge with a creative worldview. See differently, tame your fear and build social networks based on familiarity and reputation. While you may not become an iconoclast, you will surely navigate life’s quick waters with greater dexterity and joy.

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The Monkey Business Illusion

Monday, August 2nd, 2010


The video below tests your perceptual acuity. Listen carefully to the directions and then watch the video. (Note: if you think you’ve seen this video, you probably have not. It is a May 2010 sequel to the widely viewed 1999 selective attention test video that many of you probably have seen.)




How did you do? Miss anything? If you did, you are in good company. I, for one, counted the number of passes correctly but failed to see the gorilla in the 1999 version. And in this new version I missed the player in black dropping out. On a positive note: I did notice the color change!

Cognitive scientist Daniel Simons showed the video to 76 University of Illinois students. As reported in i-PERCEPTION, for those who had not seen the 1999 version, only 56% noticed the gorilla (23 out of 41). Just “11% of subjects noticed the curtain change, and 16% noticed the change to the number of players on the black team. Only 1 participant noticed both the curtain and the player change.”

Simons defines the phenomenon as inattentional blindness, “the failure to notice unusual and salient events in their visual world when attention is otherwise engaged and the events are unexpected.” In a Seed Magazine interview, he discusses the implications to our everyday life:

In inattentional blindness you’re not seeing something that’s right there because your attention is engaged. The most obvious practical application of that is driving. We intuitively think that if something important happens right in front of us, we will see it…Dan Levin has done studies where he just asked people, would you notice if something like this happens? He shows people the video, gives them the instructions, points out the gorilla, and then asks them “how likely would you be to notice the gorilla if you were doing this task and counting the passes?” Ninety percent of people say they’d notice. Regardless of how you ask that question, you get high confidence, and a high percentage saying “yeah, of course I’d notice that.”

That’s the intuition that’s interesting, and that’s the one that’s dangerous. If we were completely aware of these limits on attention, we wouldn’t do things like talking on cell phone while driving: We would know that it would make us just that much less likely to notice something. But we don’t have that insight into our own awareness. It’s only in that rare case where you actually have an accident that you become aware that you’ve missed something.

As Simon’s studies have demonstrated, we are all prone to innattentional blindness. What impact does it have on our problem solving? What salient events in our visual field are we missing, even though we are confident we are not? How often do we see what we are looking for and not what is there?

Post script

Science News reports on April 25, 2011 that a new study purports that multitaskers are better at spotting “invisible” Gorillas.


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Word Clouds

Monday, March 22nd, 2010


While data visualization tools are common for numerical analysis, they are less common for linguistic analysis. However, a variety of tools are now available for creating word clouds. Word clouds visually display the words in a passage of text such that each word’s visual prominence is proportional to its frequency of use.

A word cloud is both

  • An intriguing visual representation of a passage of text.
  • A novel analysis of its rhetorical emphasis.

A discussion on ReadWriteWeb.com illustrates the usefulness of this analytic tool by comparing word clouds of various inaugural addresses. Below, for example, is a word cloud of Lincoln’s first inaugural (left) and his second inaugural (right). The difference in emphasis is dramatic.



If you are writing something important and want a quantitative, visual analysis of your emphasis, create a word cloud. There are numerous free online tools; my favorite is Wordle. The word cloud below is based on the — more mundane — text on this site’s home page. The picture is revealing.

If data visualization is a topic that intrigues you, see The Economist’s recent Special Report on managing data for additional insights.

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Solution Webs

Friday, March 5th, 2010


Good problem solving requires the exhaustive exploration of all available options. Most of us are not good problem solvers, however. We get lazy, quit too early and select the first solution that adequately meets our criteria. Psychologists call this error in thinking “premature closure.” But, as Alex Osborn, the inventor of brainstorming, wrote, “The piling up of tentative ideas is an indispensable part of any problem solving project. Almost always we have to think up a number of unusable ideas in order to arrive at one that may work.”

I once had the good fortune to facilitate a technical problem solving session involving more than 30 scientists, engineers, executives, managers and laborers involved in electricity generation. They were trying to solve a persistent emissions issue. After defining the issue and structuring the problem statement, we began brainstorming.

After we had about 50 solutions, participants became frustrated and the energy in the room began to diminish. We had no really good options. I drew a line and challenged the group for one more push, for another ten solutions. A few moments later somewhere around the 57th option, one engineer’s eyes lit up, and we had the aha we were looking for.


There are dozens of tools available to help you structure your brainstorming and ensure that you generate many alternatives. One of my favorites is the Solution Web. There are various software programs and online tools available for such “mind mapping.” One free online service I use is Mind Meister. But it’s quite easy to create your own Solution Web using the model above.

Begin by stating your challenge in the center box. A useful way to structure the challenge statement is to complete this cue: “In what ways might I ….” Then simply brainstorm as many solutions as possible with the accompanying action steps. Those artists among us like to draw the challenge, solutions and action steps, sometimes completely dispensing with words!

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The Matrix

Thursday, February 11th, 2010


Struggling with a tough decision? Wavering back and forth, unable to make up your mind? Very likely your frustration results from thinking about a complex problem—like buying a house—one factor at a time. To attack a complex problem and keep track of its multiple factors, create a decision matrix:

  • Down the left side, enter your options. Across the top, list your decision criteria. A criterion is an objective test upon which a judgment can be made.
  • Assign a weight to each criterion to indicate its importance to a good decision. The weight is usually a number between 0.0 and 1.0 with the sum of the weights equaling 1.0.
  • Then, one column at a time, ask: “To what degree does option 1..2..3 contribute to criterion A..B..C?” Use a simple scale where 5 = Highest Contribution and 1 = Lowest Contribution.
  • Multiply the score in each cell by the criterion’s weight.
  • Then add across the rows to determine a total, weighted score for each option.

You should now have a deeper understanding of the relative value of each option. Hey, maybe you’ll even be able to make the decision!

Use the illustration below to build your decision matrix. For a comprehensive explanation, see our three-part post on multi-criteria decision-making. Alternatively, visit “Let Simon Decide,” a pretty effective online tool for matrix decision-making.


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