Why do these otherwise helpful articles have to be so damn pompous:
Priming Your Creativity – by Michael Michalko
Your creative thinking performance can be primed with certain images and pictures.
Experimental social psychologists have conducted numerous experiments that demonstrate how behavior and performance can be “primed” by showing participants certain objects and pictures. In one study, participants who were primed with pictures associated with business — such as briefcases, pens, pictures of people dressed in business clothes, commuter trains, and so on — became more competitive. The social psychologist Michael Slepian and colleagues at Tufts University noticed during a study on “bright ideas” that participants became more insightful and creative when they were primed with an exposed light bulb. In short, they found that even exposure to an illuminating light bulb primes creativity.
Primes have been reported to influence nearly every facet of social life. Yale University psychologist John Bargh had college students unscramble sentences that, for one group, contained words related to stereotypes about the elderly, such as wrinkle and Florida. Upon finishing, participants who had read old age–related words took seconds longer to walk down an exit hallway than peers who had perused age-neutral words. In other experiments, cues about money and wealth nudged people to become more self-oriented and less helpful to others. And people holding hot cups of coffee were more apt to judge strangers as having warm personalities. [The Hot and Cold of Priming by Bruce Bower. Science News. May 19th, 2012; Vol.181 #10]
3 cheers for Michael Michalko’s brother-in-law…but shouldn’t he still be worried about the most creative effort most of us engage in – making a living? Oh, Christ, I’ve turned into my father!