For coming up with new recipes or designing your next workout, AI can spit out a workable solution in no time. But as a growing body of research is showing, give AI a creative task — say, writing a short story or brainstorming a collection of blog posts — and its large-language prediction engine will most likely make your ideas a lot more generic and boring.
We’re also seeing another new consequence of AI’s efficiency: It over-fills whatever free time we create for ourselves in our day-to-day work. Rather than use the newly freed-up time to reflect on complex challenges and arrive at novel insights, employees tend just to take on more tasks, leading AI to make work more effortful, not less, as it’s generally been sold.
Neuroscience can help bridge the gap between our need to be more creative while having precious little time for the exercise. On a recent episode of Your Brain at Work: Live, Dr. Indre Viskontas, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of San Francisco, discussed with Dr. David Rock the neuroscience of creativity and how we can bring the insights into our everyday working lives.
Here are three strategies to follow, all of them rooted in working with, not against, AI.
Carve out quiet time for insight
Good ideas don’t come on-demand, when we decide to have them. They strike us like lightning bolts, or apples falling on our head in Eureka! moments. To arrive at these moments of insight, neuroscience shows we need to let the brain have peace and quiet, like when we’re in the shower or going for a walk.
At work, people’s schedules are so busy, they almost never get quiet time; their brains are always online. To help your team become more creative, you need to weave quiet time into the systems of everyday work.
Try Minimal Meetings Mondays (or Minimal Meeting Mornings), so that people can ease into their week and have as much quiet time as possible to spark new ideas they can implement during the week. Our research has shown that people are most creative outside work and in the morning.
Rethink group brainstorming
The research is clear: Brainstorming doesn’t work. Telling people to crowd into a room and come up with something innovative usually results in reheated old ideas or a bias toward the loudest voices in the room. In fact, brainstorming has dependably been shown to reduce original creativity, compared to people working solo.
Instead, as Dr. Viskontas advises, the neuroscience of creativity suggests that people come together to agree on the problem, and then disperse to think about the idea on their own. After some quiet time to reflect individually, only then should people convene to share their ideas, and then pressure-test them with the group.
The approach minimizes the risks of “groupthink,” where a confident or loud opinion becomes the accepted idea in the group, sometimes to disastrous effect. Instead, people can generate their own ideas free from group-triggered bias, thereby making the creative process more inclusive and, ultimately, more effective.
Use AI to stretch your thinking (not think for you)
AI was designed to solve our problems and help us think less, but research shows AI’s creative ideas are actually just groupthink at the largest possible scale. (Remember, LLMs are essentially the conglomeration of the world’s ideas, smoothed out into a tidy consensus.)
So, we shouldn’t rely on AI’s “new” ideas, because they aren’t truly new. Instead, we should stay in the driver’s seat and prompt AI to challenge our thinking, to push us further, to break out of patterns using our own discernment. What we arrive at through this process is almost sure to be more innovative than what we ask AI to produce on our behalf.
The common thread running through all of these strategies is that creativity is often non-intuitive; it goes against our intuitions about what the brain is capable of and what role AI should play.
However, with an understanding of how the brain works, we can design our workdays to support imagination and creativity, with ample down time for the deep thinking that makes innovation possible. While we may use AI to enhance our thinking, we humans still have the final say over where our minds will wander.
