Boost Your Creativity, Think on Your Feet, and Improve Mental Agility with Divergent Thinking

Struggling to come up with ideas or think quickly?

A lack of mental agility or creative skills makes life dull and uninteresting.

Plus, if you can’t come up with ideas on the spot, you’ll likely suffer in any situations where fresh perspectives are valuable.

Divergent thinking is a guaranteed way to boost creativity and mental flexibility.

Unlock new ideas and bring more excitement and inspiration into life with the guide below.

What is divergent thinking?

First, you need a starting point – a stimulus. The stimulus can be anything – an object, an idea, a colour, a sound, and so on.

To diverge means to separate from or go in a different direction.

Divergent thinking involves radiating outwards from a stimulus and coming up with as many situations, properties, characteristics, events, and so on that you can think of.

For instance, if your stimulus is a pen, divergent thinking could involve coming up with as many uses for it as possible. A pen could be used as a bookmark, a ruler, a weapon, etc.

If your stimulus is an image of someone running, it could involve coming up with as many things as you can think of based on the image. You might say:

• Running away from something to survive

• Determination and resilience

• The abstract idea of movement towards a common goal

All are equally valid.

Imagination is encouraged

You could also use varying degrees of detail or elaboration for more imaginative answers. For instance, rather than simply running away from something to survive in the above example, you could say running away from one of the world’s last leopards in a Russian national park.

More imaginative ideas are encouraged, and exhibit strong divergent thinking and creative skills.

Come up with as many answers as possible

Divergent thinking underlies idea generation and rests on the principle that more than one idea is correct. 

In fact, the more ideas you have, the better you’re doing it.

In theory, any answer goes, although some are more interesting and revealing than others.

There should be some link

There aren’t many constraints to divergent thinking, but for your answer to be interesting in any meaningful way, there should be some connection to the original stimulus in your brain or another’s, no matter how tenuous or obscure it is. 

Otherwise, whatever you come up with is just random, and there’s not much value in that.

Even when answers are diverse and distant, the most compelling ones will likely have some link to the initial object of focus.

The answers you find most interesting are likely to be ones where the connection isn’t obvious or simple, as they’ll reveal something fundamental about both ideas.

That’s because you’ve likely landed on a rule or link that connects both things. 

Even if the connection is incredibly vague, it’ll reveal something interesting. This is when you land on truly creative ideas.

You need building blocks to create

When thinking divergently, it’s as if you go on a mental exploration of all your knowledge, memories, and experiences.

You wander through the mind and pull out whatever springs up in your awareness.

As a result, it’s important that you have the building blocks in place – the mental library of images and experiences to parse through and call forth.

With that in mind, if you want to be creative you should be foraging for information, particularly structured information.

We’ve all heard some variation of ‘you have to understand the rules before you break them’.

The same applies here. You need an understanding of the basic structure of a thing if you’re to play with it. From artists and musicians to architects and scientists, all require fundamental knowledge of their field if they’re to develop and implement new ideas.

Virtuosos and creative geniuses are no different, and often have years of experience understanding the building blocks of their area of expertise before they become masters.

Summary

Divergent thinking initiates creativity. Radiate outwards from your given stimulus and come up with as many ideas as you can. 

It’s a playful activity, and while you may want to land on a good idea, it doesn’t have to have a strict purpose.

The more you practise, the better you get, and the more you’ll improve your mental flexibility.

I got all the information for this article from Andrew Huberman’s video on divergent thinking, so I’ve included a link to see it for yourself.