Is Your Smart Phone Killing Your Creativity?
Sure, your beloved gadget allows you
to work during every spare moment, but is the price of increased productivity
dramatically lower creativity?
Here's
the good news: your smartphone allows you to be constantly busy with productive
work (or, let's be honest, the occasional stress-busting round of Angry Birds).
So what's the bad news? Your smart phone allows you to be constantly busy.
Huh?
If
you're an over-scheduled business owner this scene probably sounds familiar:
You're standing in line at the grocery store but while you wait to pay for your
milk, you're tapping away at your phone sending just one more quick email. For
the productivity conscious these snatched moments are, of course, a win, but
according to a long post on ReadWrite Mobile recently, if you're in the market
for fresh ideas, killing off every last moment of absent minded musing
(otherwise known as boredom) in this way is probably counter productive.
In
the post, Brian S. Hall confesses the intimate details of his own relationship
with his iPhone and bravely faces up to the fact that while he loves his device, it's probably killing his
creativity:
Numerous
studies and much accepted wisdom suggest that time spent doing nothing, being
bored, is beneficial for sparking and sustaining creativity. With our iPhone in
hand - or any smartphone, really - our minds, always engaged, always fixed on
that tiny screen, may simply never get bored. And our creativity suffers….
Spending
so much time texting and updating, tweeting and watching, calling and playing
at every free moment, from every location, never alone with our thoughts, never
allowing our thoughts to drift, impacts our creativity, which in turn can limit
our full potential.
Edward
de Bono, business consultant and self-described "father of
lateral thinking"
has authored numerous works on creative thinking. de Bono calls moments of
boredom "creative pauses," which allows the mind to drift, and
avails the person to new forms of input and understanding.
Is
Hall right? He's certainly not alone in worrying. He rounds up expert thinking on the issue and also delves into the
particular effects of smart phone use on young brains. And elsewhere on the
Web, plenty of other voices are seconding his concerns about the unintended
effects of our intense attachment to our smartphones.
Recent
research has indicated that smartphone use actually teaches our brains to become bored
more easily by
eroding our ability to focus, driving a vicious circle in which constant
stimulation reduces our ability to entertain ourselves which in turn pushes us
to seek out yet more intense stimulation and so on. Or, if you have more of an
artistic than scientific bent, then you can turn to Monty Python comic John
Cleese for confirmation of Hall's concerns. In this talk, Cleese warns that constant busyness is a surfire way to
muffle your natural creativity.
Jessica Stillman http://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/is-your-smart-phone-killing-your-creativity.html?cid=em01019week14c
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