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D-Thinking & Meditation

Recent Research reveals Meditation induces a cognitive control state that promotes divergent thinking
- Lorenza Colzato, Leiden University in Frontiers of Cognition



  • Importance of Divergent Thinking in Creative Problem Solving



    Creative production is often characterized by the divergent nature of human thought and action. Divergence is usually indicated by the ability to generate many, or more complex or complicated, ideas from one idea or from simple ideas or triggers. Traditionally the eight elements below are ones commonly thought of as inherent elements of creative production, as well as attributes associated with creative problem solving abilities.

    Fluency  - The ability to generate a number of ideas so that there is an increase of possible solutions or related products.
    Flexibility - The ability to produce different categories or perceptions whereby there are a variety of different ideas about the same problem or thing.
    Elaboration - The ability to add to, embellish, or build off of an idea or product.
    Originality - The ability to create fresh, unique, unusual, totally new, or extremely different ideas or products
    Complexity - The ability to conceptualize difficult, intricate, many layered or multifaceted ideas or products.
    Risk-taking  - The willingness to be courageous, adventuresome, daring -- trying new things or taking risks in order to stand apart.
    Imagination - The ability to dream up, invent, or to see, to think, to conceptualize new ideas or products - to be ingenious.
    Curiosity - The trait of exhibiting probing behaviors, asking and posing questions, searching, being able to look deeper into ideas, and the wanting to know more about something.

On the divergent thinking process - http://creativegibberish.org/439/divergent-thinking/

Also look related discussion at

OM Meditation improves Divergent Thinking


ScienceDaily (Apr. 2012) — Certain meditation techniques can promote creative thinking. This is the outcome of a study by cognitive psychologist Lorenza Colzato and her fellow researchers at Leiden University, published 19 April in Frontiers in Cognition.



Meditate to create: the impact of focused-attention and open-monitoring training on convergent and divergent thinking

  • Institute for Psychological Research and Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands
The practice of meditation has seen a tremendous increase in the western world since the 60s. Scientific interest in meditation has also significantly grown in the past years; however, so far, it has neglected the idea that different type of meditations may drive specific cognitive-control states. In this study we investigate the possible impact of meditation based on focused-attention (FA) and meditation based on open-monitoring (OM) on creativity tasks tapping into convergent and divergent thinking. We show that FA meditation and OM meditation exert specific effect on creativity. First, OM meditation induces a control state that promotes divergent thinking, a style of thinking that allows many new ideas of being generated. Second, FA meditation does not sustain convergent thinking, the process of generating one possible solution to a particular problem. We suggest that the enhancement of positive mood induced by meditating has boosted the effect in the first case and counteracted in the second case.

What is Open Monitoring (OM) Meditation

In “open monitoring meditation” one begins to practice “awareness of thinking.” All we must do to practice this form of meditation is to be aware of our thoughts and feelings and observe them without attachment. In many ways the meditator becomes a scientific observer of the workings of his or her own mind, and begins to have an increasing awareness of just what thoughts bring about changes in emotions: what makes them happy and what makes them sad.

http://psychologyofwellbeing.com/201101/open-your-mind-with-open-monitoring-meditation.html

I will be sharing the results of my own experiments on this front in future blog posts.

Comments

  1. Meditation helps to Multi-task better

    http://www.futurity.org/society-culture/to-multitask-better-learn-to-meditate-first/

    ReplyDelete

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