Creative Reaction

This post from Kathy Sierra’s archives points out a subtle difference from a previous Creative Reaction post from last June, entitled (Too Much) Time Pressure Affects Creativity. In Creativity on Speed, she writes, “One of the best ways to be truly creative–breakthrough creative–is to be forced to go fast. Really, really, really fast From the brain’s perspective, it makes sense that extreme speed can unlock creativity. When forced to come up with something under extreme time constraints, we’re forced to rely on the more intuitive, subconscious parts of our brain. The time pressure can help suppress the logical/rational/critical parts of your brain.” Now she’s the brain expert, so there’s little need for me to comment, except to say that this doesn’t necessarily contradict the research studying time pressure. As she explains, “I’m not talking about the kind of time pressure we get from trying to get real work done under unreasonable deadlines. I’m talking about a specific technique for using speed as a creativity driver.” She then goes on to describe a number of “creativity deathmatches”. Lots of great information and links as well.