In this episode of the Idea to Value podcast, we speak with Prof Angus Fletcher from Ohio State University. He describes himself as a “Story Scientist, and his team have been doing some interesting research into new ways of improving creativity and problem solving through narrative and storytelling.

We speak about the unique link between motor neurons and creativity, how to use movement to spark creativity, and how artificial intelligence may never be truly creative.

Themes discussed in this episode:

  • 00:01:30 – What is narrative storytelling
  • 00:03:00 – How the motor regions of the brain are responsible for much of our logical intelligence
  • 00:04:30 – How this technique is different from divergent thinking pioneered in the 1950s
  • 00:07:00 – The longer people study, the less able they become at counterfactual thinking
  • 00:10:15 – Narrative and storytelling helps taking a specific single idea and expanding it in level of detail and logically into the future
  • 00:13:00 – The curse of knowledge and solving problems using the same techniques as always
  • 00:16:30 – The neuroscience of creativity in the brain’s motor regions, and how this is different from pattern-recognition networks like the visual system
  • 00:18:00 – What people believe is possible is usually related to their fears or hopes
  • 00:20:00 – Spontaneous movements may spark new ideas, and also get you out of your comfort zone
  • 00:22:00 – Artificial creativity like AlphaGo and GPT-3 are already better than humans at generating divergent iterations of ideas, but will never be creative as they cannot use logic to progress a narrative and understand meaning

Links mentioned in this episode:

Did you know that scientific evidence shows your creativity decreases over time

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Creativity & Innovation expert: I help individuals and companies build their creativity and innovation capabilities, so you can develop the next breakthrough idea which customers love. Chief Editor of Ideatovalue.com and Founder / CEO of Improvides Innovation Consulting. Coach / Speaker / Author / TEDx Speaker / Voted as one of the most influential innovation bloggers.