Creativity Exercises
Creativity Exercises - A Great Exercise That Will Dramatically Improve your Creativity
I want to let you in on a great creativity exercise that will get your creative juices flowing to the extreme. The secret I've just discovered is a creativity exercise called Image Streaming.
It comes courtesy of Win Wenger, Ph.D, and the effects on intellect and creativity are truly startling. You can see results in a few hours.
I'm sure you're wondering . . .
Creativity Exercises: What is Image Streaming?
"Image Streaming is a technique that facilitates access to the deep subconscious by accessing the constantly arising stream of visual images that we have." - source
Creativity Exercises: How to Image-Stream?
What you need is an external focus to describe your images to. A tape recorder with blank tape, or a simple Dictaphone like every office used to have, provides you a potential listener for that all-essential focus. Call in a friend, or phone to call up a friend and keep him or her on the line, and you have, even better, a live listener to serve as that external focus.
Of that half of you who did get an image, some found a strong, clear, definite image or set of images, while others just got a glimpse, a faint impression which you might think was hardly worth describing, or weren't certain whether you were just making up the idea rather than seeing an image —
— Yet whatever you got, the key is to examine and describe it aloud, in as rich detail as possible even if you feel at first as if you are "forcing" it and "making up" some of it to fill your description to your external focus listener.
More, though, and more, will come as you describe — be alert to this happening, and describe the new impressions when they come. Your images will become rich and vivid and even their meanings — as Image-Stream contents are often symbolic or metaphoric — will start to become apparent.
That is Image-Streaming. Each full-flow Image-Streaming session should run from 10 to 30 minutes. Examine whatever images happen to be playing in your mind's eye at the time, while describing them in rich detail to a live or potential listener (person or tape recorder).
Even minimum, trivial-seeming impressions or whatever: describe them in such richly textured detail as to force anyone listening to experience and see what you are describing. 10 to 20 minutes at a time, practice several hours of Image-Streaming and you will have mastered the basic skills needed to make other forms of visual thinking work for you. — And you will also have experienced some of the other benefits of Image-Streaming as well, including improved intellectual performance and creativity.
Even if your imagery is already clear and vivid, you will be astonished at how much more so it quickly becomes when you describe it in this way, while continuing to examine it.
Creativity Exercises: 3 Ways this improvement is even stronger!
1)You describe in as sensory-textured detail as possible.
The major part of your brain that we want to bring on line, works with sensory images even in profoundly intellectual matters. Explanation takes you away from that sensory immediacy. Instead of saying, "I'm at the beach" or "This is Virginia Beach," detail instead the warmth of sand under your toes, the sound of surf, the smell of salt, the wheeling of the gulls above you in the almost-white sky, black and white of the gulls on that paler white far above you ....
2)Describe as rapidly as you can, to get more and more detail in.
Describe faster than you can stop to judge whether or not something is worth mentioning, just go ahead and flow it through (and see what comes with it). This is a kind of "brainstorm" only with description instead of ideas or answers, and has a similar rule to brainstorming's "if it occurs to you, express it!" Really rapid-flow describing exerts almost a Venturi force or suction pulling other perceptions into focus.
3) All this is done most easily with eyes shut. . .
so that your inner visual circuits aren't distracted away from these initially subtler signals, and so they can operate at full sensitivity. In other words, please keep eyes closed during such processing, in order to see more freely.
Read more on the Image Streaming Creativity Exercise
Jose Silva also conducted creativity exercises with many of the kids in his hometown of Laredo. Why not read more on Enhancing Creativity through Gaining Inspiration From Within.