Creative Thinking Puzzles
Creativity. What does it bring to mind? Just answering that question requires you to be creative on some level. Whenever we are set a challenge and are required to come up with an answer, our creativity is challenged.Creativity is not just the domain of whacky artists, even if you will never stretch your creativity to the realm of shoving a sheep in formaldehyde and getting rich as a result, there is a lot to be said for improving your creativity.
Just like many things in life, becoming more creative requires practice at being creative, and what better way to do that than with some puzzles to get your mental juices flowing?
One simple puzzle is to look at the room you are in, and to imagine that there is a deep, dark secret hidden behind a particular object you fix your mind on. What is that secret, and more to the point what is it? Once you have your answer, pat yourself on the back (or get an imaginary friend you created to do it for you), as you've just been creative!
Now here's another creative thinking puzzle for you, that requires a little bit of drawing, but you don't need to be an artist for this to work!
Get a plain white piece of paper, and draw a square on it. Next, draw a picture of a stick man in the bottom middle of the empty square. Now ask yourself what will happen to the stick man if he were to jump in the air.
You will probably come up with solution straight away, but there is at least one other possible option - see how many you can find. Once you've come up with all the ideas that you can, or you get stuck - read onto the next paragraph!
This puzzle was all about showing one of the main barriers to creativity - that is, assumptions! You see most people assume that the man is in our natural and familiar environment, on the earth, and therefore assume that when the man jumps he will fall back to earth due to gravity.
However, he is in a blank square, and there is nothing around him at all. Unless he's in a plain and padded cell, it could be he is actually floating in space and so he can't jump, or he's on the edge of a space station or surface of the moon and so if he jumps he will go much higher and come back slowly, or indeed if in space will simply keep on floating! The point is our brains often fill in details about surroundings and make assumptions, but in order to be really creative sometimes we just have to release and let go of all our assumptions.
If you have any other creative thinking puzzles or came up with novel answers to the question above, we would love to hear them!