Overworking Your Brain Can Spark Ideas
In our modern lives of nowadays, where creativity is a rare ‘aspect’; people who work in different organizations try out different methods to they could better deal with a rising problem. When we’re tired, most of us think that resting would help us think better. Well, that’s not entirely true, the findings from a new research study have suggested that mental exhaustion can unleash creativity.
As we go through our day, juggling multiple tasks, our mind works hard to stay focused on a single task. At the end of it all, we are left feeling exhausted. At such times, instead of shutting down, we should try to further exploit the mental fatigue and try to be more creative. If you walk down to the office gallery at Pearl fisher Inc., a design agency based in London, you hear the unmistakable cluck of plastic balls colliding.
At first, you might dismiss it as the sound of employees chilling out on a ping pong game. But if you walk further, following signs for “Jump In!,” the sound will turn into a rattle like that of maracas. What you see next might take your breath away, there is a huge ball pit, filled with 81,000 white plastic balls. But frolicking in the pit are not pre-schoolers or kindergartners. They are in fact corporate managers and associates, dressed in business suits, in an afternoon brainstorming session.
Businesses nowadays, go to extents just to get that spark of idea or creativity. Many companies including Google, Skype, and Facebook similarly emphasize the power of play. When we are tired, our mind can be too weary to control our thoughts, and eccentric ideas that might normally be filtered out as non-relevant can bubble up, suggests a recent study by Rémi Radel at the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis, France. This means that perhaps creative ideas can be hatched at the workplace, right when we feel drained from a mental overload.
Being creative is not just about achieving a state of low inhibition, which is probably what we get from alcohol or drugs, but about tweaking inhibition without losing control. Harvard psychologist Shelly Carson, the author of Your Creative Brain, calls this process “flexing the brain.” She says that creative people can turn down the volume of inhibition to let novel ideas inspire them, and then, turn the volume back up to put their ideas to meaningful use.
This is exactly why after a long day of work, maybe try sitting down and working out your different passions of yours; you might end up being an amazing artist! However, we cannot also deny the fact that some people just work better when they are calm and refreshed; it just varies.
