Train Your Brain For Innovation

"Train your Brain" for innovation
The simple exercises guide to increased creativity
By
Idan Gafni
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Published digitally 2018. Limited to digital distribution. ® All rights reserved to Idan Gafni. © Copyright.
Table of Contents
Preface ........................................................................................................................................... 3
The practice .................................................................................................................................... 5
Exercise 1: Brush your teeth ......................................................................................................... 5
Exercise 2: Draw a sun ................................................................................................................. 6
Exercise 3: Read messages on your phone differently .................................................................... 7
Exercise 4: Write short messages on your phone differently .......................................................... 8
Exercise 5: Learn something new .................................................................................................. 9
Exercise 6: Write a short story .................................................................................................... 10
Exercise 7: "Invent" a word ........................................................................................................ 11
Echo and contemplate ............................................................................................................... 12
The why ....................................................................................................................................... 13
What the exercises achieve ........................................................................................................ 13
Why it is needed? (What are we trying to fix?) ............................................................................ 14
Social feedback ...................................................................................................................... 14
Evolution............................................................................................................................... 15
Efficiency............................................................................................................................... 16
The importance of the training ................................................................................................... 17
Additional resources ..................................................................................................................... 18
Creativity techniques ................................................................................................................. 18
Further reading on related researches ........................................................................................ 19
Creativity test ............................................................................................................................... 20
About the author of this guide ....................................................................................................... 24
2
Preface
Only few decades ago businesses communicated their business processes and efficiency as their
main advantage. The business climate and also the surrounding social factors transformed. We
now see innovation and the ability to be creative as an essential component for success. This
illusive term of success refers to both professional and personal goals. In the workforce and
also in personal life more and more people are required to innovate.
You are required to innovate to solve personal and professional problems, innovate to find new
approaches towards new or familiar subjects, innovate to create something and more.
There are many great methods and techniques that help you solve problems and innovate.
These techniques are much recommended to learn but in order to produce effective results; a
creative mind is always a better standpoint. The ability to nurture a "creative mind” is based on
the brain’s inherent ability of neuroplasticity which is the ability to recognize or add
"connections" in the brain. Neuroplasticity enables your brain to adapt and use a combination
of different areas in your brain with different functions for a specific task. This guide is a
training program for your brain to become more creative and more innovative. A good example
I can provide to show there is no need for techniques or methods to have a creative brain and
that we all have one is to mention children. Children are very creative, they may have imaginary
friends (or monsters), they can develop conversations with dolls or other games and figures,
and sometimes they make up great stories. Children can do that because they don't rely solely
on their own logic to survive and because the society still nourishes and encourages their
creativity.
The practice presented here is aimed to help you better innovate in a fun way with simple
exercises that can take only 5 minutes a day. The more you practice the better you become in
being more creative. Although it is based on many years of experience and years of reading
relevant academic research, this guide is not an academic research. I added a dedicated section
for further reading of relevant techniques and researches for those who are interested to learn
about some of the relevant resources.
We intentionally start with the practice as from my experience not all participants want to
know the trick and understand why it makes you more creative. If you do want to better
understand why the practice is an effective tool, you should read the why (which comes after
the exercises section).
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A creativity test that combines various methods of creativity measurement is also added here
for you to test your creativity before and after the practice.
4
The practice
All 7 exercises below combined are the optimal fun training program for innovation I
developed.
The exercises are not difficult, no preparations required, and no need for prior experience or
knowledge on the subject.
You should see noticeable results within several weeks.
If you choose to commit to fewer exercises, please make sure you do at least 3 of the exercises
on a daily basis and switch them every now and then to have a noticeable effect on your
abilities.
Brush your teeth
1. Brush your teeth using irregular angles and order
Besides the hygiene benefit, when you consciously brush your teeth in a different way every
day while using different hands, different teeth order, different angles from an awareness
state, it pushes your brain to adapt and to find ways to do a recognized task in a different way.
This action requires your brain to control your muscles in a different way and not just as an
automatic task (coordination and movement planning and control) and also the preparation
means you need to find new ways to do a familiar task. The combination of these changes to
the routine action make your brain choose different paths than the familiar ones and to actually
“think” and calculate the operation.
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Draw a sun
1. Draw a unique sun
Yes, you read right :-) Draw a new variation of a sun every day. Change the technique, change
the method, the order you draw it, the details, the colors, the proportions whatever you want,
but make sure you create a new version every day. Make sure that there is awareness to the
process and that you actually try to think of ways to draw something new and not just an
automatic general drawing with simple variations. The benefit from this exercise comes from
the analysis of what you have already drawn, what aspects can be controlled, and finding the
combination you haven’t tried yet. You practice observation, memory, analysis, decision
making, and problem solving in a fun easy way.
6
Read messages on your phone differently
1. Turn your phone's auto-rotation off

2. Rotate your phone to an unusual angle to your eyes
3. Read a short message / article while the phone is still rotated
Choose to read a short article or even a message while the phone is upside down, sideways, or
other rotation angles (while automatic screen rotation is turned off). You need to read the text
while you are in unnatural angles from the text. You can also do this using a newspaper or a
book. The reading will stretch your brain to handle familiar patterns in an unfamiliar orientation
which means it will need to “translate” the reading to the known patterns.
7
Write short messages on your phone differently
1. Turn your phone's auto-rotation off

2. Rotate your phone to an unusual angle to your eyes
3. Write a short message while the phone is still rotated
Write the messages while your phone is sideways or upside down (just like in the previous
exercise with the screen auto rotation turned off). This exercise challenges your brain both
visually and in coordination where you need to locate the keyboard letters and touch them in
unfamiliar relations.
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Learn something new
1. Find an unfamiliar subject

2. Perform a short research about the subject
Find something you don’t know, it can be a word or a fact, an event from history or any other
non-news item you find and make a short research on it. The proactive learning of new
information keeps your research and learning capabilities in shape and in addition to the other
exercises improves this skill and let you learn new information in a way which is more suitable
for innovation.
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Write a short story
1. Find a subject
2. Write a unique short story (50-100 words)
Open an article, a book, a newspaper, whatever random source of words you choose (the less
familiar subject the better) and make a random word from that source your first word in a 50-
100 words short story. Make sure you use no pattern for the different stories; each story must
be unique in its storytelling and content. This exercise is a very powerful practice for innovation
and it is usually used in group sessions where each participant contributes a small sentence and
the next person needs to promptly continue the story from that point and add another
sentence. This is a great adaptation practice that also increases self confidence in your
creativity abilities.
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"Invent" a word
1. Find the subject

2. Create a word to describe the subject
Find the subject which can be an unfamiliar object, a landscape, a dot on the map, an action, an
unfamiliar animal or any other “thing” you can assign a word to and just invent a word that
describes it. No matter what your new word is, it should not be a word you already know (like
calling a landscape a cat). You can base it on a sound you feel relevant to your subject, to a
similar “thing” you already know and change according to the changes you see fit from the
original word. Just feel free to really create a new word. You can forget it 10 minutes later but
the process of creating the word and finding the reasoning to that specific word is the wanted
process to encourage elasticity in your brain.
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Echo and contemplate
This is not really an exercise but it reinforces the exercise you have done during the day. Think
about the exercises you have done during the day just before you go to sleep. This is done to
encourage your brain to echo the results of the training to your sleep time as well. It was shown
in researches that the reflection over night of creative tasks contributes to the creativity.
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The why
What the exercises achieve
"Train your brain" for innovation challenges your brain and performs these actions:
● Add various contexts, rewire and re-index existing data

● Acquire new information in a broader perspective
● Pushes your brain to avoid choosing only familiar paths
● Train your brain to harness disorder and uncertainty
I use the same mechanisms in the brain that are used for learning and for recovery after stroke
or brain injury to improve our brain's ability to innovate. The directed/controlled re-wiring and
re-indexing works as a catalyst to neuroplasticity. There are documented cases that show that
innovative people use "more parts" of their brain to think (measured with E.E.G) and cases
where blind people operate their brain's "vision areas" to support an enhanced sense of sound
and sense of touch. These documented researches findings are proof to the remarkable ability
of the brain of elasticity. With the exercises above we merely push the brain to open up to
creativity and adapt better to an innovation demanding situation.
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Why it is needed? (What are we trying to fix?)
Social feedback
Our brain is conditioned through social conditioning and social feedback towards conformation
to the “norms”. Creativity is encouraged when we are children and when a child manifests a
creative behavior we automatically provide a positive feedback and see it as a “cute” thing. At a
later point in time society starts to discourage such behaviors, be it the will to reason with the
child, to fight creativity based fears like the monsters in a closet, or just because we want to be
able to rely on the stories and to be able to better predict the child’s behavior. We do not do it
intentionally to limit the creativity but the result is that we give bad feedback to creativity too
many times until it is actually discouraged. We learn through these behavioral conditioning not
to be “too creative” or not to be creative at all in some aspects. The exercises provide an
intrinsic (and extrinsic) positive feedback to creativity thus reverses the negative effect of the
social feedback. As adults we do know where creativity is encouraged and we can choose to use
it only in proper situations.
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Evolution
The human brain evolved to the shape and size that we all carry around 300,000 years ago and
stabilized almost to the same form we all have about 100,000 – 35,000 years ago. In historic
times, risk taking or doing things out of the ordinary was not encouraged in terms of survival. A
strict routine and following the “known” ways usually resulted in better survival chances. Trying
to find a new food source, a new path, or a new habitat was in most cases more risky and that
meant the survival path did not include doing new things and being creative most of the times.
We are not the same “creature” that had these rules fixed in his brain but our brain did not
evolve dramatically since then and therefore we still operate by the same standards that the
brain sets for us in order to keep us safe. The combination of creativity exercises and the fact
we “survive the change” assist our brain to understand creativity is less of a risk to survival and
it opens up our brain to adjust to a more creative behavior.
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Efficiency
The brain like most mechanisms in our body aspires to be efficient. This attribute is great for
memory purposes and for identifying the familiar from the unknown. It is used in our social
skills, orientation, and mainly our survival. The goal of doing things efficiently means the first
information you pull is the most familiar most “connected” piece if information. It also
determines the way we acquire and store memories and “data”. The same goes with routes
that include various pieces of data and their context. We acquire information and assign
“importance” with familiar mechanisms. We only add contexts and “strength” to a piece of
information after many repetitions or impactful meaningful experiences surrounding the same
piece of information. Our brain’s efficiency reduces the context we remember, the information
we gather, and the ways our information is stored. If you look at an event your brain will bias
your memory to only remember some of the things you saw based on its experience of what is
important. The nature of this behavior is just the opposite from innovation and creating new
unfamiliar things which requires creating new contexts, new routes and new data or new ideas.
The exercises intentionally create awareness to more contexts, to the way our information is
stored and resurface, and more importantly the way our brain sorts and connects the acquired
information.
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The importance of the training
A famous quote usually attributed to Albert Einstein (probably by mistake as it was probably
created by someone from the Alcoholics Anonymous Organization somewhere around 1930s)
says “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting
different results”
If we want to get new results and to innovate, we need to disrupt our thinking methods and the
way our brain stores the information it already holds and the new information it acquires. We
need to get our brain familiarized with uncertainty and to train our brain to be as elastic as
possible. The set of exercises gathers various ways to challenge our brain’s weaknesses in
relation to creativity and uses built in mechanisms in our brain that are used to adapt and
acquire new information. We try to change the way our brain is operated in order to benefit
from these abilities for all our stored information. The exercises train our brain to be able to
retrieve information in a way that is more suitable to creativity, to store the information in a
more connected formation, and to adopt disorder in order to create new paths and routes as
we attempt problem solving and innovation. We harness our brain’s strengths and natural
abilities to elevate creativity and to make the innovation process much more fluent.
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Additional resources
Creativity techniques
1. Mind mapping - The process of creating a mind map, a graphic rich visual presentation
used to record and organize information from the brain. Popularized by British
Psychologist Tony Buzan, there are records demonstrating the use of such technique
centuries ago. The mapping of the information with contexts, details, and associations
achieves an "image" of the current state of the information but also assists in building
additional layers of information and connections due to the rich graphic nature of the
map.
2. Six thinking hats – A method based on sessions where virtual hats are used to change
perspective and roles. The technique was developed by Edward de Bono, a Maltese
psychologist, published in 1995 in a book with the same title. The method uses various
role descriptions that encourage the participant to analyze, review, enrich, and more in
order to validate, improve, and strengthen the idea/problem.
3. TRIZ – An analytical approach based on the study of hundreds of thousands of patents
which formulated relevant points that were common in many inventions from many
fields. The Soviet inventor, Genrich Altshuller, with several colleagues mapped
inventions according to many attributes and isolated elements that try to direct to
possible answers. Many times this method uses an actual diagram of potential solutions
or a computerized system that receives information about the problem and suggests
relevant solutions based on an existing database.
4. Object pairing – Creativity technique that is based on dedicated cards and a game-like
operation where various objects, attributes, and images are used to increase
perspective. The method was created by Idan Gafni aims to provoke thoughts and
emotions based on associations and a list of factors to be considered which are all
presented on 7 mandatory cards and 5 optional cards that need to be created by the
participant. The generalization in this method is not absolute which means some of the
mentioned attributes to be considered do not apply to the specific task. The addition of
the 5 optional cards is meant to cover domain specific factors which may be crucial to
the subject or as a tool to enrich specific factors and gain more focus on them.
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Further reading on related researches
1. Functional and Evolutionary Insights into Human Brain Development through Global
Transcriptome Analysis - Matthew B.Johnson, Yuka Imamura Kawasawa, Christopher E.
Mason, Željka Krsnik, Giovanni Coppola, Darko Bogdanović, Daniel H. Geschwind,
Shrikant M. Mane, Matthew W. State, Nenad Šestan - 2009
2. The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain
Science - Norman Doidge - 2010
3. The creative brain: Investigation of brain activity during creative problem solving by
means of EEG and FMRI - Andreas Fink, Roland H. Grabner, Mathias Benedek, Gernot
Reishofer, Verena Hauswirth,Maria Fally, Christa Neuper, Franz Ebner, Aljoscha C.
Neubauer - 2008
4. Art and brain: insights from neuropsychology, biology and evolution - Dahlia W. Zaidel -
2010
5. Training‐induced Neuroplasticity in Young Children - Gottfried Schlaug, Marie Forgeard,
Lin Zhu, Andrea Norton, Andrew Norton, Ellen Winner - 2009
6. On the neurobiology of creativity. Differences in frontal activity between high and low
creative subjects - Ingegerd Carlsson, Peter E. Wendt, Jarl Risberg - 1999
7. Learning in the Fast Lane: New Insights into Neuroplasticity - Yaniv Sagi, Ido Tavor, Shir
Hofstetter, Shimrit Tzur-Moryosef, TamarB lumenfeld-Katzir, Yaniv Assaf - 2016
8. Training your brain to be more creative: brain functional and structural changes induced
by divergent thinking training - Jiangzhou Sun, Qunlin Chen, Qinglin Zhang, Yadan Li,
Haijiang Li, Dongtao Wei, Wenjing Yang, Jiang Qiu - 2016
9. Enhancing creativity by means of cognitive stimulation: Evidence from an fMRI study -
Andreas Fink, Roland H. Grabner, Daniela Gebauer, Gernot Reishofer, Karl Koschutnig,
Franz Ebner – 2010
10. Good morning creativity: task reactivation during sleep enhances beneficial effect of
sleep on creative performance - Simone M. Ritter, Madelijn Strick, Maarten W. Bos, Rick
B. Van Baaren, AP Dijksterhuis – 2012
11. Neural Reorganization Following Sensory Loss: The Opportunity Of Change - Lotfi B.
Merabet, Alvaro Pascual-Leone - 2014
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Creativity test
Creativity measurement is definitely not an exact science as you can probably understand.
Some psychologists attempted to measure and rate creativity but there is no standard of
measurement and no common coherent way to determine one's creativity. Recent studies
of the brain use various techniques to measure brain activity while performing problem
solving but there is no unified way to measure creativity in these tests as well. The following
tests are popular ways to test creativity and can assist you with the evaluation of your
progress. Each method has instructions and an explanation on how to determine your
"score".
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1. Incomplete drawing. Complete the drawing in each of the 6 boxes to a non-abstract
drawing while using all the existing elements.
How to measure: The measurement of your creativity using this test is done by
analyzing each of the boxes. The elements that are considered in the scoring are:
a. The amount of time it took you to find what you can draw using the given
elements (the shorter the better)
b. The amount of details used in the final result (the more details the better score
you get)
c. The category of the subject. Things you see regularly and from familiar subjects
get fewer points than unordinary perspective and subjects.
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2. Create a logical sentence that includes all words for each words combination:
a. dream – file – toxicity
b. goat – canvas – humanity
c. theme – generator – tan
d. exploration – score – line
e. lightning – garbage – calendar
The scoring here is based on:
a. The time it took you to find the sentence
b. The coherence of the sentence
c. The type of relations between the words.
"I dream about a toxicity file" for the first combination is an obvious option but it gets a
lower score than the sentence "I once read a file describing the possible psychological
toxicity of a dream for a person who suffers from PTSD".
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3. Find as many ways to use these objects (1 minute thinking per object)
a. shirt
b. pencil
c. drinking glass
d. light bulb
e. leaf
The scoring here is based on:
a. The number of ways you find for each object
b. The category of the use (Wearing a shirt is an obvious usage for a shirt and
therefore it also decreases the score per use case)
c. The number of categories of uses (wearing a shirt and using a tied shirt as a hat
are different ways to wear the shirt which means less creativity needed for these
ideas and fewer points scored)
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About the author of this guide
Idan Gafni is an award winning entrepreneur, innovator, and author. Idan

supports many start-up companies and various corporate companies with their
innovation and problem solving efforts as a consultant / advisor. His innovation
consultancy is usually coupled with courses and lectures on creativity and
problem solving where he also teaches the "Object Pairing" creativity technique
he created. He uses the understanding of the brain, and practical psychology aspects to create
stories and educational activities for infants and children. Children who create and innovate
strengthen their self-confidence, their ability to react, and their hunger for knowledge. The
dynamic nature of the future requires different approaches towards education and the tools
Idan creates for children better prepare them for whatever future they will need to operate in.
You can contact Idan for Innovation and problem solving consultancy and courses.
Contact / follow here:
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"Train your Brain" for innovation

The simple exercises guide to increased creativity

Brush your teeth

1. Brush your teeth using irregular angles and order

1. Draw a unique sun

1. Turn your phone's auto-rotation off

1. Turn your phone's auto-rotation off

1. Find an unfamiliar subject

1. Find the subject

● Add various contexts, rewire and re-index existing data

Idan Gafni is an award winning entrepreneur, innovator, and author. Idan

Contact / follow here:

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