After watching Kirby Ferguson's short video about how our mind creates ideas, I reflected about how I think and create ideas. He says that there are 4 steps to coming up with an idea, the first step is to set boundaries that aren't too tight and that aren't too broad. He then says that you should consume/learn everything about the topic that you can withing those boundaries; read books, watch movies, try products, listen to music, do your research. Step 3 is to then digest the research; study the materials, organize them, arrange them into a narrative, try to group things together, create a map of what you've learnt, and make sense of the information. Stay in this phase for as long as you can, making sure you are fully saturated.
Although I have never tried Ferguson's method of creating ideas, I do not think that I magically pop out an idea from my subconscious mind after feeding it information about the topic, because my ideas don't come out of nowhere. I think that I will only be able take in information and piece together materials to form an idea if I brainstorm and think about the topic. Whenever I need to create something I need to spend a lot of time thinking about it, researching about it and making my own interpretations from it. After going through that, I then start to think about how I would present what I know to make my idea into something, but in the end, I just need to think about the topic and let my mind wander to wherever it interprets the information.
Although I have never been able to come up with something fully formed and ready to go, which could be due to my lack of experience, I do sometimes while in this deep thinking state start to pop up random ideas that are quite vague and seem like a stab in the dark, but once I've got an idea that I like, or a path that I want to take, I then start to refine and work more on it. I work more on it until it feels complete and fits in my criteria that I set for it. I have done a little painting sketch of what it looks like to me in my head about these images that sort of pop out;
I read an article at Stanford Medicine about how "Researchers tie unexpected brain structures to creativity — and to stifling it". The whole article was talking about studies that were done on a group of subjects who had to do drawings and somebody else was measuring their brain activity. Near the end the article talked about the fact that if we think too much about something, we mess it up and we in a way ruin the creativity of the idea. I understand this, as sometimes if I think too much about the idea, or if it lingers in my head for too long, it gets old and I feel insecure about it and it doesn't seem creative or spontaneous anymore. The article specifically says that sometimes creativity isn't best maximized when the subject is forced to come up with it, which I understand as well, so maybe in the future I should take some of Ferguson's advice and let the materials linger in my head for a moment and let my subconscious mind do the work.
You can find the article using this link; https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2015/05/researchers-tie-unexpected-brain-structures-to-creativity.html
To explain the image, is that whenever I create these random out of the blue ideas, is that it's kind of this faded thing in the middle of everything I know about the topic, and it seems like a very messy library with lots of layers and these ideas pop out of them somehow. This could be my subconscious mind that is instead doing the work while I think, instead of after. This phase is the main part of my thinking process of a creative idea.
THINKING ABOUT THINKING
In the end, after thinking and reading about how I think, I understand am conscious and aware of how I think, but am not completely confident with it, so I take this as a learning opportunity and will try to take advice and apply it again when needed and when given time. I will try to saturate myself with information and let my sub conscious mind create an idea for this next unit, where I will be creatively challenged.
