Explosing

“The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.” 
Folk Wisdom

One of the biggest stumbling blocks to creativity is routine, being stuck in a mental rut.  Same habits, same influences, same old blah blah.  It leads to what the computer programmers used to call GIGO...garbage in, garbage out.  Pointless routines that lead to useless programs. 

The same is true in the world of creative efforts but for most of us in this age of all-encompassing data, the garbage in question is rigid patterns of information.  The risk in our time is being overwhelmed by repetitive input, which becomes numbing.  Like watching endless reruns of the same TV show, the information available to us can be entertaining but not inspiring.  We can be stuffed without being sated.  Redundant information is comforting but it is rarely a boost to innovation.  

Creative thinking, on the other hand, tends to thrive on the new, the different, the unexpected.  The tid that does not quite fit the bit.  In this sense, all information is not equal but assessing the value of our input is not easy.  In a world swamped by canned data, it is hard to break out of patterns and see new possibilities.  To counteract this tendency, most innovators become data brats – infornographers – who are always poking their noses where they shouldn't.  They have to do this to get out of mental ruts.  They know, or intuitively sense, that injections of the unusual can wreck those cozy neural pathways and force our brains to make new connections.

This is one of the reasons to study new things – another language or a new instrument, for example – because going out of our information comfort zones forces our complacent synapses to start reforming.

When I first wrote this, I accidentally typed the phrase “explose yourself to new data.”  Not a bad mistake.  Exposing does in fact explode the norm and open the way to new discoveries.  One nice thing about “explosing” yourself is that it is easy to do.  You don't have to scour the world for it, unless you enjoy world scouring.  Plenty of creative work has been done within a narrow, routine lifestyle.  Immanuel Kant, the philosopher, never left his small town of Konigsberg; neighbors said they could set their watches by his routines.  But Kant’s creative work was not to be found in his daily habits or his travels; it was in his thinking and writing informed by reading everything, especially the philosophers he most disliked. 

A good way to approach this habit is by exploring what you don’t get, can’t fathom, or vehemently disagree with.  This relies on an appetite for discomfort well known by explorers and stand-up comics but if you don’t have that innately, you can force yourself to do it.  Make an effort to explose yourself to the unusual, the unfamiliar, even the uncomfortable.  New news.  Stuff that shakes you up and challenges your assumptions. 

This is more difficult than it sounds in a world in which we are inundated with packaged information.  Through TV, movies, and the web, we are mostly passive recipients of pre-planned edutainment.  Fascinating stuff and some of it inspiring, but overall it can easily become a rut of slick commercial forms and formats.  For creative work to work, we need to get out of these ruts by delving into new, even unusual and offbeat, input.  New news, crackpot websites, kooky zines, unfamiliar images and texts, alien cultures, unfamiliar pasts.  Stuff that shakes us up and out of the standard patterns of information processing and allows the brain to go hog-wild now and again.

That is why parents who want to foster creativity in their kids make sure to have rich and varied stimuli around not just TV and video games, plus materials for actually making as opposed to simply using things.  With this in mind we can be fostering parents for ourselves as adults.

It is not always pleasant to indulge in the uncomfortable but it can be enlightening and push us in new directions.  It is that habit of explosing, of actively seeking out the unfamiliar, that goes into our Ingenarium.