by Annette
19. March 2007
G. Pascal Zachary's NYT article Is the Key to Creativity in Your Pillbox, or in your PC? sites two potential trends in enhancing personal creativity at work. The first is drugs. An ancient solution but one with lots of progressive forms. He lists caffeine, Provigil, Cephalon and others that promote mental acuity and energy. The second trend is the optimization of information technology. Higher order search functions that process creative solutions, collective creativity enabled by Web 2.0 applications and fantasy worlds that allow us to change our mental frames.
Call me a Girl Scout, but the only drug on the list that I've tried is caffeine. The mental benefits I get don't stack up to the inability to type for jittering hands. I wonder what subterranean side effects lurk behind Provigil and Cephalon? Dry mouth, nausea, frequent urination? So, let's just deselect the drug option and move onto the PC.
I'm interested in all the ideas listed here and would like to hear from you on how you use any of these for enhanced creative performance. For example, Leo Burnett, a unit of Publicis Groupe uses Second Life as a place to ideate and share new thinking in an "Idea Hub". Wiki-enabled corporate innovation sites? Any advanced applications that allow you personalize your creative connections?
One beta site I'm watching closely is Cha-Cha. It's a search function that allows you to chat with a "guide" to help you navigate the web. I've been looking for some specific information about teaching the Japanese language and had spent about 20 minutes floundering on Google. I chatted with the Cha-Cha guide and she found 3 citations I hadn't in about 2 minutes. Interesting that the innovation here is a combination of a new search algorithm paired with an analog human being.
Scientists believe it will be decades before we are able to replicate the creative functions of the human brain. Some wonder if it will be possible at all. In the interim, we probably do best to enhance our own brains by thinking differently, living differently and believing we can be more creatively powerful than a PC.
