Becoming a Creative Genius (again): Great News for folks 60+
There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love. When you learn to tap this source you will truly have defeated age. Sophia Loren
After a decades long career as an entrepreneur I have spent the past twenty years helping folks of all sorts—college students and entrepreneurs, creative professionals and military leaders, artists and parents and business managers—grow their creative capacities and develop their entrepreneurial instincts and behaviors.
For the past ten years I have understood this work to be helping folks reclaim their natural born creative genius.
It is only recently that I am coming to appreciate how and why it’s folks entering their 60’s and 70’s who should be most optimistic about achieving that sort of wonderfully restorative creative growth.
As I am learning how the aging brain changes, biologically, I have discovered some significant changes that each invite fresh creative growth and improved entrepreneurial performance.
Collectively these changes suggest an aging brain’s creative growth is limited only by the ambitions of it’s host.
A summary of those changes:
1. The prefrontal lobe and the status quo. The prefrontal lobe is packed with important high-level executive control functions you’ve relied on all your life. But it also fiercely and constantly defends your status quo views and understandings against all unfamiliar intrusion; it is your brain’s inhibitor. The prefrontal lobe begins to abandon that inhibitory role as the brain ages and neuroscientists find it becomes indistinguishable from ‘high creatives’ brain functioning in this vitally important area.
Why vitally important? Because the status quo is the greatest impediment to innovative thinking and fresh creative perspectiveS and so we can enjoy great creative advantage from the fact that an aging brain is naturally shedding its inhibitory qualities.
2. Crystal intelligence. Your crystal intelligence is your ability to effectively mine your lifetime of experiences and knowledge bases to find new relationships, to develop more complex understandings. Your crystal intelligence begins to improve in your late 50’s and peaks in your 70’s and can be maintained at high levels of performance for much longer when regularly exercised.
The best way to have a great idea is to have lots of ideas, and an aging brain’s crystal intelligence is primed and ready to deliver a wide array of options when you exercise it intentionally.
Another important creative intelligence is fluid intelligence—your ability to quickly acquire new knowledge and to detect useful patterns—and yes, it is among the cognitive functions that is on the down side by the time you reach your 40’s. But as with all brain functions, when you keep using it, its retention is extended.
Your fluid intelligence can be improved by entering new fields and taking on unfamiliar challenges, which of course also refreshes your crystal intelligence.
3. Bilateral cognition supports creative thinking. The third change is a creative strength born of our loss. Most brain functions are fairly localized and processed in one or the other hemisphere. But as we age and certain functionality does weaken the brain compensates by re-purposing and integrating brain functions from the opposite hemisphere, as a work around—when your strength to lift something one handed diminishes, you use both hands. This is accomplished efficiently and effectively and previous research has shown that an integrated brain, one where the two hemispheres are working together, is a most creative brain.
One result researchers have discovered from these changes to an aging brain is that your ability to evaluate contradictory ideas and remain objective peaks in your 60’s and of course the ability to make decisions and take action when dealing with ambiguty is vital to successful creative and entrepreneurial work.
And there is evidence that an aging brain is more easily distracted. When you are mindful of that, you can use that to broaden your attention and more inputs and ideas and thoughts can be considered. Again, core to creative success is considering a range of options so this will serve you well on your way to discovering and executing the best creative solutions to your problems or challenges.
Confidence is a key element in creative growth and there’s plenty of reasons here for you to be confident as you set out to become the most creative and entrepreneurial version of yourself on your way to reclaiming your creative genius. In my next article I will share a couple of fun and easy to integrate practices that will accelerate your growth…for now, find a nice block of the color green (you’ll find one at www.creativegenius.carlnordgren.com) and stare at it for 20 to 30 seconds two or three times a day. Research shows this will improve your creative performances by 25%.
