creativity is very difficult, if not impossible, to measure. The French mathematicians Poincaré and Hadamard defined the following four stages of creativity:
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Preparation - the attempt to solve a problem by normal means
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Incubation - when you feel frustrated that the above methods have not worked and as a result you then move away to other things
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Illumination - the answer suddenly comes to you in a flash via your subconscious
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Verification - your reasoning powers take over as you analyse the answer which has come to you, and you assess its feasibility.
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The right-hand hemisphere of the human brain, which controls the creative functions, is the side of the brain which is underused by the majority of people. Because it is underused, much creative talent in many people remains untapped throughout life. Until we try, most of us never know what we can achieve, for example one in three people in Britain have a desire to write a novel, yet only a very small percentage of these people progress any further than the initial stage of just thinking about it.
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We all have a creative side to our brain, therefore we all have the potential to be creative. However, because of the pressures of modern living and the need for specialisation, many of us never have the time or opportunity, or indeed are given the encouragement, to explore our latent talents, even though most of us have sufficient ammunition to realise this potential in the form of data which has been fed into, collated and processed by the brain over many years.
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Writers, indeed all artists, must, therefore, use both halves of the brain. They must use the right side of the brain to create things, and the left side of the brain to organise things. The creative and intuitive right side is able to cope with complexity and is where insights originate, whilst the left side controls language, academic studies and rational intellectual work.
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The problem is, especially as in so many people the left half of the brain is possessively dominant, getting these two halves of the brain to pass information back and forth and work together.
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In order to perform any creative task it is necessary to encourage your right side to start its creative juices flowing, in other words move your mental processes, albeit temporarily, from the dominant left side across to the creative right side. This may sound an easy enough task in theory, but not so easy to put into practise
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Like many other tasks, or pleasures, the majority of us never know what we can achieve until we try. Having then tried, we instinctively know whether we find it enjoyable or whether we have a talent or flair for it. Then, if these signs are positive we must persevere. By cultivating new leisure activities and pursuing new pastimes it is possible for each of us to exploit the potential and often vastly underused parts of the human brain.
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