Brain Candy
August Six Word Photo Story Challenge: “Food”
Recognizing Brain Candy, the thinker’s reward
I eat to live, stay healthy, and encourage my brain to think creatively. To me, creativity comes when two independent thoughts registered in my mind collide and become a new idea. New ideas can lead to new products, services, or publications that can make our lives better.
I coined the name brain candy for the feeling I get when a collision of thoughts becomes the seed of a new idea. Brain candy comes to me in many forms. Sometimes, it is a quiet ah-ha while reading or talking with others. Sometimes, brain candy wakes me out of a dream and demands to be further analyzed. Sometimes, it is a jolt that feels like lightning arcing between the two sides of my brain. Not all brain candy signals good ideas. I distrust the lightning arc, especially when it involves love interests, but that is a story for another time.
To be clear, there are no drugs required to experience brain candy. However, the closest description I have read of what I call brain candy is what some people say they experienced when tripping on LSD. LSD and creativity have been studied since the 1950s with mixed results. Research conducted in the 70s concluded that LSD users may experience new ideas while tripping. However, the thoughts that contributed to those ideas were already stored in their brains before the trip. In other words, the ideas produced under LSD could have been produced without the drug.
If you want to be creative, educate yourself. Fill your mind with the best sources of data available by reading and talking with people in your field of interest. As you reflect on the information you have gathered see if you can recognize your own form of brain candy when the new ideas come. If you are wondering what proof there is that this process will work, I asked a group of creative friends and colleagues to preview this article. The people in the group currently hold 499 issued patents, with others in the works. One colleague said, “The term “brain candy” does seem to capture the concept you describe in the article.” Another said, “Brain candy is real. The article gives the reader a vivid portrayal of a place rarely visited.”
And remember, not all ideas are good ones. You will only know how good your ideas are by doing the work to turn them from ideas into new products, services, or publications. That can take years of hard work, so be careful to distinguish between great ideas and hallucinations before investing time and effort.
