"This Trend Will Take Writing by Storm in 2022: How to Improve Your Creative Thinking"

"This Trend Will Take Writing by Storm in 2022: How to Improve Your Creative Thinking"

Substack is the future of email. It’s also the present. It’s because they're not just an email service. Substack is a social media platform. As content platforms become multi-dimensional, their creators should learn to adapt. The future of blogging is synergy with visual media. If you’re an entrepreneur in 2022, you have to make content.

In order to thrive in this new landscape, it's important to improve your creative thinking. The way memories are associated makes it possible to connect your ideas later. In fact, recent evidence shows that semantic memory structure—how we relate language-based concepts—is one of the biggest predictors of creativity. Creativity is the ability to produce an artifact or an idea that is both novel and useful given a particular social context.

Researchers generally believe that creativity is a two-part process. The first is to generate candidate ideas and make novel connections between them, and the second is to narrow down to the most useful one. As a memory moves from short-term to long-term storage, what’s represented in that memory is associated with existing memories (aka "schemas"), and your overall understanding of the world shifts slightly.

Understanding how our brains give rise to the creative experience helps us understand the process more deeply and fills in a critical component that is thus far missing—attention. When coming up with new ideas, a network of brain regions called the "default network" is activated. In brain imaging studies, this network shows the highest activation during spontaneous, self-generated thought—including mind wandering, which is specifically not related to a task. Governing this process is a "control network" that allows us to think flexibly, inhibit outside distractions, and pull from our memory.

Switching between the default and control networks is thought to be governed by a "salience network," which helps us to engage each one effectively. Higher creative thinking scores are correlated with greater coupling between these networks. "Constraints breed creativity." Memories are the materials needed for creative thinking. Consuming other people's ideas in conversation by reading or listening to them stimulates creativity and deepens existing associations.

To widen our divergent thinking funnel, we could try and seek out new ideas that are maximally different from our own, but this typically won't work. It’s actually better to make incremental steps outside your own filter bubble because new information must overlap somewhat with what you already know to be effectively associated and assimilated. Taking notes, making highlights, and revisiting that material when it’s related to what you’re currently thinking about is a good way to maintain and strengthen connections.