How our modern understanding of neuroscience has led to a significant change in the way brainstorming sessions are conducted.

1. Neuroscience & New Ways
for Brainstorming
Sunil Maulik, Ph.D.
sunil.maulik@gmail.com

2. Most (traditional) brainstorming is useless

4. Limitations of Traditional Brainstorming
• Not everyone has a good grasp of the problem to be
solved and history of the issue.
• Volume and not quality of ideas wastes mental
energy and time.
• Team members have to wait their turn to share their
ideas, sometimes those ideas get lost in the process.
• Strong ideas can get diluted down.
• Not being allowed to criticize or blending the ‘best’
ideas tends to create compromised solutions.
• Nobody is responsible for coming up with a
breakthrough solution and so ‘free-riding’ is
encouraged.

5. Neuroscience & Creativity
• You’re only aware of less than 1% of your
brain activity, and most creativity happens in
the other 99%
• If you want to stimulate an idea, you need to
give your brain time to go “off-line”
• Creativity is not a “team sport” – most
creativity occurs in quiet periods
• Execution of ideas is more important than
generation, and knowledge from previous
failures helps

6. Our System 1 & System 2 Minds
Daniel Kahnemann “Thinking
Fast & Slow”

7. How the two Systems work

8. Examples of System 1 Thinking
• Detect that one object is more distant than
another.
• Orient to the source of a sudden sound.
• Complete the phrase “bread and . . .”
• Detect hostility in a voice.
• Read words on large billboards.
• Drive a car on an empty road.
• Understand simple sentences.

9. Examples of System 2 Thinking
• Focus attention on the clowns in the circus.
• Focus on the voice of a particular person in a
crowded and noisy room.
• Look for a woman with white hair.
• Maintain a faster walking speed than is natural for
you.
• Count the occurrences of the letter a in a page of
text.
• Fill out a tax form.
• Check the validity of a complex logical argument.
• Calculate 247 x 183 in your head

10. System 1 Thinking:
QUICK! If a bat and a ball together cost $1.10, and the bat costs $1
more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?

11. System 2 Thinking
Let the Bat be B(t)
Let the Ball be B(a)
Then:
B(t) + B(a) = 1.10
B(t) – B(a) = 1.0
Adding:
2B(t) = 2.10
B(t) = $1.05
B(a) = $0.05

12. It’s important to tap into System 1 and System 2
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We
have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” – Albert
Einstein.
“The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do, they use
their intuition instead, and the intuition is far more developed than in the rest of
the world… Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my
opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.” – Steve Jobs
“Facts and ideas are dead in themselves and it is the imagination that gives life to
them. But dreams and speculations are idle fantasies unless reason turns them to
useful purpose. Vague ideas captured on flights of fancy have to be reduced to
specific propositions and hypotheses.” – W.I.B. Beverage

13. Famous examples
• Einstein used to take long walks in Zurich and
Princeton. (Steve Jobs would walk around Palo
Alto!)
• Kekule fell asleep and dreamed he saw a snake
biting its own tail – and hypothesized the
structure of Benzene.
• Richard Feynman played the drums (and drew
pictures of nudes!)
• Mendeleev fell asleep in front of index-cards
and dreamed up the Periodic Table.

14. Applications to Brainstorming
• Pre-encoding: clarify what the agenda of the meeting is, what it will entail for the
participants, and what the output will look like.
• Quiet Time: enable participants to spend time on their own coming up with ideas
before they share them with others.
• Relational connection: Share a personal story that will help people connect to you.
• Oxygen & glucose: Take some deep breaths, walk around, do some jumping-jacks, eat
some chocolate.
• Encourage (polite) dissent: Dissent, when provided in a non-threatening way,
encourages greater creativity.
• Get in the flow: Try any rhythmic behavior (walking, drumming your fingers, chewing
gum, taking a shower) to get into alpha-state.

15. New Ways to Brainstorm
• Define Goals: e.g. "60 new ideas from one session"
• Stimulate Creativity: e.g. View highlights from research, strategy, or
landscape analysis
• Ideate Individually First: Allow people to write down their own ideas
• Share, Expand & Critique: Ask "how might we…?" Questions
• Categorize & Synthesize: Use a rating matrix and/or dot voting

16. Structured Brainstorming Sessions
• People take 10 minutes to individually write
down ideas on cards (Moderator will explain)
• Ideas will be put on white-board
• People will add to ideas with new ideas
• Ideas will be grouped
• Groups will be ranked
• Ranked groups will be sorted and voted upon
• Winning groups will be used as starting points
for problem definition