Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Brain Rain

From the Hmmm.... department, found at the JamesLedoux blog:

Warm, Partly Cloudy, 100% Chance of Brain Rain

Creativity may seem to come naturally to some folks but that is probably just a perception. Ideas flicker and flit through our minds so fast that often we can miss them if we aren’t aware of it. The truth is though that much of what we think is made up of things we have thought before. It is easy to go through an entire day thinking things like:

  • I’m tired
  • pizza would be good for lunch
  • Dick Cheney looks like The Count from Sesame Street
  • work is boring
  • got to pick up the dry-cleaning
  • Lost is on tomorrow night
  • sex would be nice

You get the point. It is easy to go through a day, week, even a month without really thinking things you haven’t thought before.

If you are feeling a little brain dead try and set aside 10 minutes a day to thing. Really think. About anything. About nothing. About the things between everything and nothing.

I started doing this on my trip to New Zealand last year and have noticed the ideas really taking off. Sometimes you get clunkers and other times you may just grab hold of a real winner. I call these sessions making brain rain. Not quite a storm and not a drought. After a few weeks of this I found my mental energy and ideas really starting to pick up. The truth is that the ideas were there all along, I just wasn’t listening.

1 comment:

Rach said...

I think I may try this sometime. Usually when I have a moments peace, I just let my mind go into lala mode .. kind of a way to recoup after being so stretched after dealing with kids. But I like the idea of putting my mind to work and thinking of more productive things rather then mindless mishmash.