Research by Wilma Koutstaal at the University of Minnesota suggests that people in creative occupations benefit from mental ‘warm-up’ activities just as much as athletes do from a physical warm-up. She tested the famous ‘alternative uses’ exercise as a warm-up, which requires people to list as many uses as they can for an object like a brick or a chair. They found warming up for ten minutes increased mental flexibility, word association fluency, and problem-solving. A subsequent study at the Chongqing School of Psychology in China found that a similar ‘alternate uses’ warm-up increased the connectivity between the medial prefrontal cortex and the middle temporal gyrus of the brain – associated with verbal creativity, originality and fluency. Plodding thinkers benefited even more than creative people from the warm-up. (Innovating Minds: Rethinking Creativity to Inspire Change by Wilma Koutstaal and Jonathan Binks, Oxford University Press)
Now a new organisation, Seempli (geddit?), has developed a ‘Creativity Gym’ to foster the link between mindfulness and creativity. One of the ‘magic seed’ exercises involves searching your environment for inadvertent smiles and photographing them. You can sample the gym for free at seempli.com.