Building lightbulb moments
Don’t know about you, but when I have a lightbulb moment, i.e, when a new idea strikes or something puzzling suddenly becomes clear, feelings of excitement or creativity or the satisfaction of those ‘aha’ moments wash across my consciousness.
More often than not these moments occur when I’m having a shower or, as writer Naomi Bulger describes in her story on page 28, “elbows deep in a repetitive painting project or digging in the garden”.
Bulger’s feature, ‘White Space’, examines why, when it comes to creative ideas, the brain needs to stop in order to spark. Which is often why we think of our best ideas when our minds begin to drift. Bulger has some great tips and exercises for creating what she calls ‘white space’, necessary, she says, “because never in our human history have our brains had to process so much information, or receive it in such a constant, never-ending flow”.
I also love author Tim Harford’s insight, “...creative ideas don’t always surrender to a frontal assault. Sometimes they sneak up
on us while we are paying attention to something else”. In his book, Messy: How to be Creative in a Tidy Minded World, he talks about the benefits of having multiple projects on the go and how they can cross fertilise one another. Not only can knowledge gained in one enterprise provide the key to unlock another, but while we’re paying close attention to one project, we may be unconsciously processing another – like inspiration striking us in the shower. Some scientists, writes Harford, believe that this unconscious processing is an important key to solving creative problems. That daydreaming strips items of their context, and that it is a powerful way to unlock fresh thoughts.