Enhance Creativity.
Reignite your brain.
Creativity can be difficult to define. Most people think of it as a spark, an energy tasked with breathing life into the world. According to conventional wisdom, this creative energy fuels art, humor and even scientific discovery.
Cognitive psychology, though, has a different perspective about creativity. Like many other researchers, those at Lumosity understand creativity to be the ability to solve novel problems – regardless of whether those problems are artistic, scientific or pragmatic. This creative problem-solving, in turn, requires flexible thinking. To create something new, we must first have the ability to see the world from a different perspective.
Lumosity.com has a number of brain exercises for strengthening this ability. These exercises target fluid intelligence, a cognitive function that allows us to perceive relationships without previous instruction about these relationships. Fluid intelligence, in other words, recognizes hidden patterns in the world around us and then uses them to solve new problems.
To discover these creative solutions, though, our fluid intelligence needs to access a lot of information. And that’s where our working memory comes in.
Working memory is the brain’s “workspace.” It’s the mental faculty that allows us to process and manipulate multiple pieces of information at once. The bigger this workspace, the more tasks to which the brain can attend. Working memory is thus central to multitasking and information processing.
Working memory allows us to hold in our mind multiple concepts, concepts that may have nothing, at first glance, to do with one another. Because working memory is the “space” in which fluid intelligence operates, it functions as a crucible for new ideas.
The Lumosity training program has been shown in controlled studies to enhance working memory and fluid intelligence -- and by extension the brain’s ability to creatively solve new problems.
Join Lumosity.com now to fan your creative flame.
