Creative Thought ,Part Three of Three- Focusing

As the cycle of creative thought matures, we enter the second “focusing” stage and move from identifying correlated items to causally related items. During this phase, we refine the idea, gradually narrowing our options as we seek to arrive at a conclusion. We also move into the realm of direct, conscious thought in the working memory space, and we let the mind direct its higher cognitive functions to consider the potential solution for appropriateness and validity. However, working memory is self-limiting for efficiency, and can hold a handful of items at most. We can extend its capacity through representing its output graphically, thereby preserving the creative idea and offloading the burden from working memory to a medium that we can still leverage. The use of imagery specifically can produce greater success than text alone, as our minds are extremely well suited for image recognition and recall. Since the vast majority of the experiential content that we encounter everyday is made up of shapes, colors, spatial relationships and other non-textual inputs, the mind needs to store much more than just words. The creation of a graphic artifact can increase comprehensibility of a concept or problem through pictorially representing things that are harder to store in short-term (working) memory if presented textually. Again, working memory is limited, so a bulleted list detailing the physical characteristics of a person is less efficient than a simple drawing, which conveys the same information but in a format that is a better fit with the cognitive power of the mind. The visualization of the creative thought has further benefits in that working memory can now better analyze the output…missing items are more obvious, new connections can be made, and causal relationships made evident.