Alexandra Carmichael

August 5, 2012

Here’s another awesome breakout preview for the upcoming QS conference. Marcin Kowrygo, organizer of QS Poland, describes his session “Your Blue Room: The Neuroscience of Ideation”:

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There is no more important meta-idea than knowing where every idea comes from. – Jonah Lehrer

Creativity is a vague term describing a complex phenomenon belonging to the group of humanity’s ultimate riddles. And just like with the terms consciousness and happiness, we may encounter two dominant groups looking at creativity: those satisfied with the true but not very enriching remark of “it’s the result of the brain’s activity” and those pointing towards a Bill O’Reilly-themed phrase “you can’t explain that”.

While modern neuroscience and bioinformatics are making a serious attempt to decypher the mysteries of our exceptional ability to connect X with Y in novel and useful ways, our self-tracking community can make inroads by testing the abundance of mental strategies, environmental changes, supplements, and brain stimulation techniques and quantifying the results.

During my session, I would like to present you a synthetic, integrative summary of various approaches in studying the neuronal and psychological mechanisms engaged in creativity. All in all, generating breaktrough ideas may be the single best thing we can do with our minds in the conceptual age. After that, I will be happy to share some of my concepts, and I look forward to a fruitful and productive discussion that would enable us to measure higher cognitive skills without being too simplistic.

Feel free to contact me, make suggestions and share your views. Failing big and upgrading “stolen” concepts is the key!