Boost Your Memory And Watch Creativity Blossom

Right now you probably think of memory as something opposite to creativity.

But what if I told you that there is a link between our memory and being creative? In fact memory and creativity go hand in hand.

As we’ve already discussed, creativity isn’t a luxury reserved for those born with it. Creativity is a totally trainable skill with the right practice and exercises.

But if you are still on the fence about this, let’s explore how memory can contribute to your creative development.

What do we know about memory?

It has long been believed that our memory is a lot like a computer hard-drive. That it simply a binary process of recording and storing details of occurred events into neat little bytes into the storage compartments of our brain.

However this does not appear to be so.

Neuroscientists and researchers have reasons to believe that memory works in a much less linear way. It turns out that there is a somewhat creative process going on.

Your memories are imagined.

Memory is not linear, but actually creative

In a book titled ‘On the Witness Stand: Essays on Psychology and Crime’, author and memory research specialist Hugo Münsterberg discusses several peculiar findings on memory.

Typically people (that’s everyone – including you and I) have a good memory for the general gist of events occurred

• Simultaneously they have a generally bad memory for the finer details of the same events
• Secondly if pressed for the unremembered details, even well-intentioned people inadvertently fill in the gaps by making things up (does that sound like creativity to you?)
• And thirdly, the memory will store the made-up information as fact, and people will actually now treat these memories as genuine

What do we know about creativity and ideas?

• Every great idea is a combination of existing older ideas, juxtaposed in a unique way. In order to combine this existing information, it requires the retrieval of older ideas from your memory.
• Creative ideas occur when a traditional concept is examined through a unique lens of a person’s own experiences, beliefs and memories.
• Creativity researchers know that creative people’s brains are no different from the rest of us – they’ve just developed a set of habits that allow to generate creative results more consistently.

What are the takeaways?

Undoubtedly memory is something that can be trained. So can we take that concept and what we now know about how it is linked to creativity, and apply it in some way?

Creativity is driven by memory.  Meaning that for any given creative task or problem solving exercise, it is crucial to find memories that will help you to perform the task.

So by training your memory you are in fact also increasing your capacity for being creative and generating innovative ideas. And vice versa.

Both memory and creativity are all about connecting things you already know with new information that you don’t know yet.

Takeaway: You can become a powerful creative thinker if you focus on developing some strategies to improve your memory.

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