The Creativity Project: The Habit of Image Streaming

Image stream­ing increased my cre­ativ­ity and unlocked my inner genius.

You might be strug­gling, as I was, to come up with new ideas for your business.

You might have tried many dif­fer­ent tech­niques, but none of them works.

In this art­icle, I will detail exactly how you can use image stream­ing to unlock your inner geni­us and become more creative.

Here we go:

“There Are No Bad Ideas”

I’m told I was a cre­at­ive child, but I lost that flair grow­ing up.

My lack of cre­at­ive ideas became a prob­lem at the begin­ning of my pub­lic rela­tions career. I feared being invited to brain­storm­ing sessions.

During brain­storms, I would sit there, quiet and unable to come up with good ideas. Only rarely would I be able to pro­duce a single idea worthy of fur­ther consideration.

At first, I bar­gained with myself. One doesn’t need cre­ativ­ity for creativity’s sake, I argued. 

“I can rely on my stra­tegic mind instead,” I thought.

Big Ideas Gave Better Results

One cli­ent wanted to raise aware­ness of their recruit­ment ser­vices. My “stra­tegic” line of think­ing stated that I should do a SWOT ana­lys­is based on data and, based on those insights, pos­i­tion the brand accord­ingly in the news media.

I would pitch stra­tegic­ally chosen con­flicts to cla­ri­fy my client’s pos­i­tion to news report­ers and edit­ors and get one, two, three, four, or five men­tions over time. 

It was always a lot of hard ground­work and patience, but it worked. And it could have worked for the recruit­ment ser­vice, too.

Despite rely­ing on this “stra­tegic mind” of mine, my best work still came from rare sparks of creativity.

On a rare whim, I wanted to do some­thing dif­fer­ent for the recruit­ment ser­vice. I wanted to know if job applic­ants lied on their resumes. This had noth­ing to do with the brand’s pos­i­tion — I was just curious.

I reckoned that most people lie on their resumes. But no one talked about it.

We decided that it was a fun idea, and in typ­ic­al PR fash­ion, we com­mis­sioned a survey:

It turned out that 4 in 5 would hap­pily admit to hav­ing lied on their resume. And this stat­ist­ic made the news — big time.

A flash of cre­ativ­ity yiel­ded bet­ter and more instant­an­eous res­ults than my typ­ic­al stra­tegic process.

Also, the cre­at­ive out­comes deman­ded more praise from both cli­ent and employ­er than my sys­tem­at­ic and meth­od­ic­al grind. 

One Is Better Than Zero

To con­cen­trate on get­ting bet­ter PR ideas, I stopped listen­ing to what my col­leagues were say­ing, and after one hour of block­ing out the chat­ter, then — per­haps — I could come up with at least one usable idea.

One is bet­ter than zero, at least.

But at this point, my col­leagues had ener­get­ic­ally pro­duced numer­ous ideas. And I had just been sit­ting there. Quietly. The whole thing was depress­ing and humiliating.

Solving prob­lems using a stra­tegic pro­cess was func­tion­al and, com­bined with the grind, kept me afloat at the agency.

But, I had to become more cre­at­ive. But how?

The Goal: Understand Creativity

I took the only path I knew to take: I devised a stra­tegic pro­cess to solve the prob­lem. I researched inform­a­tion, and I developed a test­able hypothesis. 

My first insight was that there are people who con­stantly pro­duce big ideas. How, I wondered. I wanted to know precisely.

I quickly real­ised that people who came up with big ideas also had ter­rible ideas. It seemed more pro­duct­ive to focus on gen­er­at­ing lots of ideas rather than try­ing only to have good ones pop up in your brain.

This might be intu­it­ive for most cre­at­ives, but this prin­ciple was news to me:

If you gen­er­ate 100 ideas, at least one will be help­ful. If you gen­er­ate 1,000 ideas, at least one will be big.

I might have lost my cre­ativ­ity at a young age, but I under­stood statistics:

I needed to learn how to have more ideas before learn­ing how to have big ideas. But how do you pro­duce many cre­at­ive ideas when you struggle to cre­ate a single one?

Quantity Comes Before Quality

My obser­va­tion was that cre­at­ive people are intu­it­ive and often highly visu­al. They seemed to be able to turn off parts of their brains tasked with logic and lin­ear think­ing and instead “see” dif­fer­ent ideas pop up.

Big idea cre­at­ives seemed to be able to go with a flow of sub­con­scious visu­al­isa­tion more freely than oth­ers, as if they knew how to trust and sur­render to their instincts. 

I kept read­ing to find sci­entif­ic explan­a­tions for these char­ac­ter­ist­ics. Finding such answers proved more fas­cin­at­ing than I thought:

Before we developed human lan­guage and inner dia­logue, our minds were nat­ur­ally visu­al. Without lan­guage, they had to be. 

Many of us use inner dia­logue to reas­on, a lin­ear pro­cess. Linear think­ing has mer­it, but we might also be squelch­ing visu­al notions.

I read about how many geni­uses through­out his­tory have been cred­it­ing sig­ni­fic­ant break­throughs to visu­al rep­res­ent­a­tions that emerged instantly, like a flash of lightning. 

Many geni­uses were also highly pro­duct­ive, but their out­comes seemed to be based on quant­ity rather than qual­ity. This insight is sug­ges­ted to sup­port the import­ance of hav­ing many ideas as a pre­requis­ite to get­ting the res­ult of hav­ing big ideas.

“Write It Down”

I also found that quite a few his­tor­ic geni­uses ten­ded to write things down. 

What did all of this mean?

I didn’t know how to prac­tic­ally con­vince my sub­con­scious to push more bril­liance into my con­scious mind.

And I still didn’t know how to pro­duce lots of ideas.

But I knew how to write things down!

When research­ing lit­er­at­ure on beha­viour psy­cho­logy, a par­tic­u­lar theme seemed to be recurring:

For any beha­viour, you get more of what you reinforce.

What if writ­ing things down is more than just a quant­it­at­ive effort?
What if writ­ing ideas down rein­forces a steady stream of ideas?

I decided to take a quant­it­at­ive approach to note-taking.

I pushed myself to write down ten ideas per day for three months. At first, it took a lot of effort and time. But at the end of three months, I could jot down 20 ideas in as many minutes — with little effort. Most of them were rub­bish, but still. 20 ideas in 20 minutes!

I was amazed. 

All those scrib­blings, note­books, and ideas. Reinforcement works!

For any beha­viour, you get more of what you reinforce.

Good stuff, yes.
Complicated ter­rit­ory? Yes, that too.

Neuroplasticity and Reinforcement

At this time, there wasn’t much lit­er­at­ure on the top­ic. However, the emer­ging evid­ence for neuro­plas­ti­city seemed promising. 

Research on neuro­plas­ti­city stated that the brain could wire and rewire itself based on extern­al stim­uli. It sug­gests that our brain con­stantly rein­forces and elim­in­ates neur­al pathways.

So, I assumed that writ­ing ideas down might rein­force neur­al path­ways help­ful in gen­er­at­ing ideas. I tried rig­or­ously writ­ing down each idea — and I got more ideas.

Now, please note that I’m not mak­ing any claims here. I under­stand the dif­fer­ence between anec­dot­al exper­i­ences and sci­entif­ic facts. I know the dif­fer­ence between cor­rel­a­tion and causality.

But I nev­er set out to estab­lish new facts. I only set out to find ways to become more cre­at­ive. If I got there by trick­ing my psy­cho­logy, it didn’t mat­ter. If it worked, it didn’t mat­ter why.

As I began per­form­ing increas­ingly bet­ter dur­ing brain­storms, my con­fid­ence grew. And con­fid­ence is likely part of the explan­a­tion, too. I kept writ­ing down my ideas, and the exper­i­ment seemed to work fine.

But, I still felt I hadn’t under­stood the cre­at­ive pro­cess. And it was hard work writ­ing down every new idea.

I kept won­der­ing why writ­ing ideas down was essen­tial to the pro­cess. If I stopped writ­ing ideas down, my pro­gress quickly plat­eaued. I was miss­ing some­thing, I thought.

Win Wenger and Project Renaissance

Unfortunately, I could not find sci­entif­ic lit­er­at­ure on what type of beha­viours seemed to have a more sig­ni­fic­ant impact (and why) on neuro­plas­ti­city. This is where I stumbled upon Project Renaissance and the con­trari­an ideas of Win Wenger, PhD. 

Wenger had developed a hypo­thes­is that I found to be highly inter­est­ing for my line of research: he argued that neur­al path­ways were rein­forced by phys­ic­al feed­back only. Meaning: Just think­ing about things doesn’t rein­force beha­viours. Only phys­ic­al action does.

For instance: If you’re think­ing of going to the gym without actu­ally going, your brain will inter­pret this as a waste of energy.

There was an evol­u­tion­ary argu­ment for Wenger’s line of reasoning: 

Infants must learn a lot to sur­vive — quickly. But con­ven­tion­al skill devel­op­ment and habit build­ing are too time-con­sum­ing. Infants learn differently.

The Physical Feedback Loop

In some sense, infants are born with a “fully wired brain.” This allows infants to learn rap­idly by redu­cing neur­al path­ways instead of cre­at­ing them. How does this work?

Imagine a new­born baby. How does it learn to con­trol arms and legs? The baby’s brains send mil­lions of sig­nals, some pro­du­cing a phys­ic­al response. This cre­ates a feed­back loop.

The feed­back loop informs the baby’s brain about what con­trols what. And sig­nals that don’t res­ult in phys­ic­al feed­back, and the brain’s syn­aptic struc­ture are effi­ciently chis­elled out. 

And through neuro­plas­ti­city, the phys­ic­al feed­back loop keeps affect­ing our brain structures.

Since human lan­guage and inner dia­logue entered our evol­u­tion­ary path so late, men­tal reas­on­ing still sits entirely out­side this ancient neur­al feed­back system.

The feed­back loop sug­gests that most of us might be wast­ing lots of men­tal energy on build­ing skills and habits without prop­erly rein­for­cing them physically.

Your Actions Form Your Thinking

Here’s one way of describ­ing the potency of the phys­ic­al feed­back loop:

If you get a great idea but neg­lect to mani­fest it through a phys­ic­al act (like writ­ing it down), you send sig­nals to your brain to downs­ize those syn­aptic struc­tures to con­serve energy.

If you get great ideas and you mani­fest them phys­ic­ally, your brain will rein­force those syn­aptic struc­tures to increase your chances of sur­viv­al. If you get great ideas but neg­lect to mani­fest them phys­ic­ally, your brain will weak­en those syn­aptic struc­tures to con­serve energy.

As I was read­ing about his some­what eso­ter­ic find­ings on Wenger, he had more to say on the subject:

What if our lan­guage-driv­en inner dia­logue fails to tap into avail­able sub­con­scious resources? What if sig­ni­fic­ant reserves of ingenu­ity and cre­ativ­ity reside in us sub­con­sciously? It’s a beau­ti­ful idea, for sure.

Welcome To Crazy Town

Wenger sug­ges­ted that the sub­con­scious parts of our brains, being “ancient” from an evol­u­tion­ary per­spect­ive, might not “speak” human lan­guage. Instead, he pro­posed that these parts of our brains com­mu­nic­ate visu­ally. This is why dreams are primar­ily visu­al, for instance.

To unlock our inner ingenu­ity, we must tap into these ancient parts of our brains. We must find a way to con­di­tion our con­scious mind to visu­al­isa­tions bub­bling up from our sub­con­scious depths.

Wenger sug­ges­ted a form of med­it­a­tion, image stream­ing, which was then rein­forced using pen and paper or a tape recorder.

Okay. Welcome to crazy town, I thought.
How did you end up in this new-age space?

Still, easy enough to put to the test.

The Practice of Image Streaming

I star­ted prac­tising image stream­ing. I sit down for a few minutes, and I close my eyes. Unlike med­it­a­tion, where you prac­tice let­ting go of thoughts enter­ing your mind, you wait for visu­al­isa­tions to enter your mind.

You then stay with whatever visu­als mani­fest, examin­ing them in detail using your inner eye. Directly after­wards, you write down your observations. 

You begin by exam­ing one visu­al per ses­sion. As you get used to the prac­tice, visu­als flow more freely. They also become more vivid in col­our and detail. You can do many of them if you write them down dir­ectly afterwards.

Image stream­ing is a simple habit. You sit down, close your eyes, and relax. If you’re famil­i­ar with med­it­a­tion, that will help. Instead of let­ting thoughts pass, you pay atten­tion to any imagery that presents itself mentally.

After a short ses­sion, you describe any images you encountered as detailed as pos­sible into a tape record­er or onto a note­pad or a word pro­cessing doc­u­ment. Whatever works for you.

A Profound Personal Shift

For me, the res­ults of com­bin­ing visu­al­isa­tion with note-tak­ing have been breathtaking.

Daily, I now see the visu­als of prob­lems, solu­tions, ideas, con­cepts, com­plex­ity, pat­terns, music, texts, and people. Before I star­ted prac­tising image stream­ing, I didn’t see any­thing. I only heard my inner voice talk­ing lin­early in a lan­guage I could understand.

The dif­fer­ence is dif­fi­cult for me to explain, but the exper­i­ence of see­ing most things as visu­als instead of hear­ing them as words is profound.

It could be that image stream­ing works because I think it does. One per­son­al anec­dote doesn’t con­sti­tute evid­ence. But even if I’m wrong about the phys­ic­al feed­back loop and image-stream­ing, I’m still happy to reap the bene­fits personally. 

Still, as a the­or­et­ic­al frame­work for increas­ing cre­ativ­ity, image stream­ing is con­cep­tu­ally inter­est­ing — and fur­ther testable. 

Thinking of it, I bet­ter write this down… 

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