A 1-minute practice to boost creativity

Every day for the past week I’ve been trying out a new practice given to me as “homework” by my writing workshop instructor. It’s simple.

Notice 5 things.

Sitting at a local cafe I noticed a constellation of shining dewdrops…

…a weather-worn plate on a bench honoring a loved one, and a surprising lamppost-turned-birdfeeder hiding amongst the bushes (can you spot it?).

I’m surprised at how much I’m enjoying it. So it’s got me wondering…

Why does the simple act of noticing feel so nice?

The psychologist in me says because it’s rare. Our brains are efficient. They have to be. Brains, typically only 2% of our body weight, consume, on average, 20% of our energy.

So often we’re operating on autopilot. Rather than do the hard work of constantly noticing everything, our brains create simulations of predictable environments (and people). This means we’re often interacting with a simulation rather than with reality. I don’t really notice the cutlery in the drawer every time I open it. I simply reach for where I know the forks always are. It’s efficient but it’s also dull.

Alternatively, we can get so focused on one thing that we tune out all irrelevant information, a phenomenon psychologists call inattentional blindness. In a classic experiment participants were asked to count the number of times a basketball was passed in a video. They were typically so focused on the task that they literally didn’t see a person in a gorilla suit walk across the basketball court.

In a real life variation on this, the Washington Post decided to run an experiment to see if “in a banal setting at an inconvenient time” would people notice exceptional beauty? Grammy-winning violinist Joshua Bell, used to playing to standing-room-only audiences in venues that charge upwards of $100 for a decent seat, stood in a DC Metro station during rush hour and played masterpieces like Bach’s Chaconne on a Stradivari worth $3.5 million.

(Why not listen to Joshua Bell’s Chaconne while you read on)

In his 45 minutes of playing, 1,097 people passed by. How many people stopped to listen for even a minute?

Seven.

That means 99% of people were too busy or distracted or disinterested to stop for just a minute to listen to one of the world’s best musicians play some of humanity’s greatest music on one of the most iconic instruments of all time.

Describing this phenomenon of being ignored, the article’s author, Pulitzer Prize winning Gene Weingarten remarked:

The fiddler’s movements remain fluid and graceful; he seems so apart from his audience — unseen, unheard, otherworldly — that you find yourself thinking that he’s not really there. A ghost. Only then do you see it: He is the one who is real. They are the ghosts.

But we aren’t born that way. He notes there were no observable demographic differences about the people who noticed the violinist and those who did not. Except for one.

Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

I try really hard to support my daughter’s noticing (and thus her attention span!). But I have to admit in Paris last weekend I scooted her past a street musician. She wanted to stop to listen and the music was lovely, but we didn’t have any change to offer him so I thought it would be rude to listen without offering something in exchange. But in retrospect, perhaps if we had given him the gift of an attentive and appreciative audience for a few minutes, he may not have begrudged us the lack of a few euros…

I keep this story of the violinist in the DC Metro as a cautionary tale. I aspire to a life where I have the level of noticing to be stopped in my tracks by beauty and the level of spaciousness where I can always afford at least a minute to stop and take it in.

And so I feel committed to continue this practice of noticing.

So far I’ve identified three main benefits:

1. Noticing puts me in the present. In order to notice I need to condense myself down from the cloud of abstraction where I spend most of my time. It is only by coming into my body that I can access the senses that give me access to noticing. Noticing is always grounded in the present moment and rooted in a particular place.
2. Noticing helps me access appreciation. We are trained in school and work to experience life with an evaluative lens. While I’m a big fan of critical thinking, life gets pretty dull pretty quickly when we get stuck in the stance of the critic. When I try to notice 5 things, my awareness automatically alights on something beautiful or interesting. My habitual problem-seeking mode puts me at war with reality and is a recipe for chronic dissatisfaction. Balancing it out by also taking time to appreciate tiny wonders helps me befriend life as it is, giving me more energy to tackle the problems that genuinely need addressing and more openness to the possibility that there might not be a problem to solve.
3. Noticing idiosyncrasy inspires creativity. The essence of creativity is novelty. We talk a lot about how novelty comes from creative thinking, brainstorming, making connections between seemingly disparate ideas. But novelty is also found in uniqueness, in the idiosyncrasy of everyday objects or moments or places or people. Remember, in the whole world no two leaves are exactly the same. It is the uniqueness of a person that makes them a muse to an artist. The uniqueness of a piece of stone that inspires the sculptor. The uniqueness of a landscape that inspires the architect.

Are you feeling inspired to join me in the act of noticing? Are there other benefits you enjoy from the practice of noticing?