Don’t be inhibited­

One thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis, or heroic his imagination, is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him. Thomas Schelling (Nobel Laureate in Economics)

Task: Try and think of as many white things as you can. To make it easier, here are two to start you off – Snow, Milk… Take a minute and list as many others as you can.
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How many did you get? Most people find this a lot harder than they think it will be – and come with a fairly short list. A particularly interesting finding, though, is that one way to make this task much easier is not to start people off with Snow or Milk. Experiments show that one you have the starters, you’re likely to think of fewer total items.

This phenomenon is called inhibition. Once the link between white and milk is activated in your mind every time you think things that are white that activated link draws you right back to milk; all other things white are actually inhibited and made harder to reach – and you draw a blank. Milk is such a common, typically white object that once activated it actually crowds out any others. This basic feature of the mind – that is works via connections that line just under our conscious awareness – is usually a bonus. By allowing us to focus our attention on what’s relevant and important it saves a great deal of effort, but it can go wrong.

I’d speculate that inhibition is behind a little-known problem around the idea of brainstorming. Psychologist Alex Osborne defined brainstorming as an open process whereby teams would try to produce as many ideas as possible simply by sharing thoughts; the idea would be to produce ideas as creative as possible by building on each other’s ideas, and avoiding passing judgment on each other’s ideas. Osborne claimed that groups produce twice as many ideas as individuals, and this idea seems to have passed into common consciousness – everyone knows about group brainstorming.

The only trouble is that Osborne’s findings have never been duplicated; in fact, they have proven wrong on multiple occasions. One case involved groups of four brainstorming “practical benefits or difficulties if everyone were to have an extra thumb” (yes, really). There were two sections – real groups who brainstormed together; and virtual groups – where four individuals generated ideas separately, and the researchers combined the ideas at the end. Surprisingly, real groups generated only half the number of ideas they would have generated had the individuals pondered the problem by themselves; even more surprisingly, the quality of ideas was judged to be much higher in virtual groups! As one company puts it, done wrong, brainstorming is an idea killer! I wonder if this is because without a structure for thinking, any initial new ideas actually inhibit further ones; and I guess that’s the purpose of the very familiar meeting agenda and lesson plan – to prevent conversation pursuing only whatever ideas happen to be activated first.

The good news is that the brainstorming problem can easily be solved to get the best from individual creativity and group collaboration (a quick search for collaborative protocols yields gold). My take-away here, though, is the familiar idea that in helping students come up with new ideas, and indeed in our own professional meetings, sometimes the melting pot of group dynamics needs very careful and active management if our thinking is not be be inhibited.