“Trendy issues require trendy options”. In a quickly altering world we face many challenges, from local weather change to pandemics, famine, and wars. All of them require us to invent, create, and suppose exterior the field: a course of known as divergent considering.
Up to now, improvements comparable to electrical energy, vehicles, anaesthetics, and antibiotics have proven how scientific creativity can change human lives eternally. On this context, divergent considering performs a key position. It means producing concepts and discovering a number of options to an issue, whereas combining current data with unrelated issues in a novel and significant approach. In our trendy world we must be artistic: suppose exterior the field and discover modern options. If we wish to save the planet, treatment ailments, combat starvation, and set up peace, divergent considering could possibly be extra vital than ever.
That is particularly important in academic settings, comparable to colleges and universities, the place creativity and divergent considering sadly typically fall brief. Throughout the strict necessities of a hard and fast curriculum, consideration tends to be restricted to convergent considering: discovering the “right” reply to an issue. This raises the query of how lecturers can foster divergent considering and artistic problem-solving whereas nonetheless having sufficient time to cowl all requirements of this system.
Apart from standard strategies to stimulate divergent considering, comparable to brainstorming, analysis suggests a brand new approach of constructing folks suppose in novel methods: Open-Monitoring-Meditation (OMM). Research present that 20 minutes of OMM-focused yoga can have constructive results on originality and suppleness of divergent considering, even in folks with out prior expertise. This may sound counterintuitive, on condition that OMM doesn’t give attention to actively considering and discovering options, however relatively on the alternative: passively letting ideas wander in a non-judgmental approach.
So, how does OMM result in higher divergent considering?
The fixedness of our mind patterns…
All through our lives, our mind adapts to the world round us. What’s perceived is the mind’s greatest prediction of the atmosphere. As we attempt to make sense of the folks and atmosphere surrounding us, we develop mounted thought patterns that tie us to considering in recognized and acquainted methods. Equally, we’re unable to make use of objects in a non-traditional approach: a bias termed “useful fixedness”. Although these psychological fixations are adaptive and vital for processing info in an environment friendly approach, they cut back our creativity and direct us to widespread and recognized options, making it tough to suppose out of the field.
…is weakened by way of meditation
Nevertheless, meditation appears to “weaken” these top-down management processes. In OMM, ideas can wander in a random, non-forced, and new method, facilitating a novel stream of ideas, which isn’t certain to acquired and stuck thought patterns. This enhancement of cognitive flexibility helps to beat these ingrained processes and facilitates divergent considering, which makes it simpler to mix current data and novel issues in a significant method.
Furthermore, the ‘non-reactive consciousness’ of our automatized responses to the atmosphere in OMM may contribute to divergent considering. In different phrases, we usually are likely to assign a price to our ideas and experiences, which makes us simply discard options that don’t at first sight appear believable and invaluable. Nevertheless, meditation has been proven to cut back this routine response. By letting ideas wander in a non-judgmental approach, we’d grow to be extra open to non-habitual, unfounded, and implausible streams of thought.
Meditation as a part of the curriculum
These findings recommend that meditation must be carried out extra, particularly in academic settings the place the main target continues to be typically on factual data, grades, and standardized checks. This appears significantly ironic, on condition that our youngsters shall be these preventing in opposition to the ever-worsening results of local weather change, overpopulation, famine, and wars. It’s time that academic establishments left extra room for fostering creativity and divergent considering by making meditation an inherent a part of folks’s schedules and on a regular basis lives. Solely then we are going to increase kids that may address the aggressive nature and rising challenges of this world.
