Silver Linings: For the love of reading, and my Kindle

As a child, reading was one of my favorite pass-times. I bonded with one of my best friends as we discovered we both liked the same author. During the summer holidays, I could easily sit in the garden all day long,reading a book.

And then I went to university, and something I called "letter-fatigue" struck me. After finishing reading in a course book, my eyes were tired of seeing letters and I couldn't bring myself back to reading. I'd only read during a week in summer, and that'd be all for a year.

I gradually started to pick up the pace again during my time at Georgia Tech, and afterwards, as I was flying back and forth between Europe and the US more frequently. I started to trade in the in-flight movies for books. I discovered some contemporary satire that I deeply enjoyed. I started to track my reading in Goodreads, and browsing for suggestions.

And then, about 4 months ago, I got my Kindle. At first, I was planning to only use the device during trips abroad in airports and during flights. I'd still carry paper books for the part of the flight during which electronic devices can't be used.

However, I started reading tons on my Kindle: fiction, papers, my own writing as a second screen now that I am only using my laptop, e-books and more. My Kindle is hands-down one of the best purchases I've made in a long time. Not just for my personal enjoyment, but I comes in useful for my research too.

I love books. I love the smell of books, having paper in my hand - and I was terribly skeptical of using an e-reader. My fear and scepsis turned out to prove me wrong.

For us researchers, reading is almost as important as writing - and you can't have one without the other. I've stated it before: reading sparks creativity. Or as my favorite tweet of a few weeks ago mentioned:

@evalantsoght @NSRiazat @lifehackorg @writtenbykrissy The best way to become a better writer is to become a better reader.
— U.S. Dhuga (@USDhuga) August 8, 2013

 One of the best features of a dedicated e-reader as a Kindle, is that it basically is just meant for reading. Unlike a tablet pc where you might want to hop from app to app, the Kindle keeps your attention to your reading. Some critics might fear that we'd hop from book to book and lose the ability to get lost in a fantasy world while reading, but my experience is that I get as much engrossed in a paper book as in a digital book - the story is what matters.

Also, since the Kindle is small, it fits my smallest purse, and I've been dragging it along to many different locations. You can spot me in waiting in line, engrossed in the Kindle.

The color of the screen doesn't seem to tire my eyes, I enjoy the option of highlighting text as I read and I appreciate the fact that I can increase the font - I am by far a very happy Kindle user.

Do you enjoy reading? Do you use an e-reader? And do you also use the e-reader for your research?

Silver Linings: Creativity and Meditation

Flickr image under CC license by HaPe_Gera

I've frequently written here on the benefits of meditation for your brain and your heart, how you can make meditation a habit and my personal explorations.

In my opinion, meditation is the necessary exercise for your mind, just like you would work out your body, and a must for all knowledge workers such as researchers.

When I stumbled upon this heartfelt speech of David Lynch on what meditation means to his life, and his creativity, it resonated with how I feel much clearer in thinking thanks to meditation.

You can watch his speech here:

Discomfort, Friction and Creative Blocks

In our fast-paced, instant-solution-oriented society, we are focused on a quick fix and a hit of stimulant. We seek comfort and ease as much as we can.

Yet, if we embark upon long-term projects, such as PhD research, our habits of getting quick fixes and preference for the shortcuts might leave us unable to dive deeper into our work.

The unsettling ugly truth is that we need to seek the area of discomfort, of hard thinking and of creative blocks in order to push our research forward.

We are not used to unpleasant experiences and discomfort - but these elements are part of life. If we learn to simply be with the feeling of comfort or discomfort at any given time, we can make progress.

For myself, I like to think of these moments of discomfort in terms of two elements in contact with each other:

To make the two planes slide, you need to build up some friction first.

In other words, to make a step forwards, you will always get stuck in that ugly dark place of discomfort and creativity blocks.
This insight stimulated me to spend more time trying to do the difficult thing I'd otherwise put off.

Instead of seeking an escape and procrastinate a bit, I imagine the two planes firmly pressed together, building up friction, and getting ready to move forward.

Your take home message for today:

A block, a dead point in your research does not equal a stand-still in your work. 
You are building up the necessary strength to take a leap forward!

The Creative Process: Essential Components of Creative Acts

When you force yourself to work on a research problem, until you find the solution, you might be putting too much pressure on yourself and actually hurting your creative process.

Instead, you should try to take a few days of distance from your problem and let your inner gears do their work.

You can take a break by working on a different problem, or by spending time preparing teaching duties, but you could also simply take a weekend off.

Are you surprised to read that continuous deep work might hurt your creative process?

To understand why you need some time off, it is necessary to have a closer look at the essential components of creative acts. Graham Wallas [1] analyzed reports of scientists like Poincare to understand the components that are found in all creative acts. He identified four components:

1. Preparation

This step involves a long period of intense conscious work, without success. In this stage, potentially useful ideas are considered. Others might identify this stage as the point where you hit a blockage.

2. Incubation

The problem is put aside and not thought about or worked at consciously. Within the unconscious, potentially useful ideas from the preparation stage are combined in new and unexpected ways.

3. Illumination

If the incubation is successful, a sudden illumination occurs: the researcher experiences a sudden insight into the solution. This event can be considered as an unexpected leap forwards, but is simply the outcome of your brain doing some background work while you are not fully focused on it.
In this stage, true creative work is done as the researcher manages to cut through his/her blockage.

4. Verification

The illumination stage produces an insight that needs further work. In the verification stage, the new insight is tried and tested.

[1] Wallas, G., 1926, The art of thought, Harcourt Brace, New York.

PhD Talk on Brazen Careerist

Head over to Brazen today for my guest post on creativity!

Giving you a little appetizer of the post here:

The Creative Process: Creativity Without Borders

Floris Visser postulates that scientists are artists – and his opinion hit a nerve for me. An opinion that also fits perfectly in my series about the Creative process.

Too often, we seem to draw a line between the professions and interests. However, when we take a step back, there are common grounds. Just like artists, scientists need to be very creative people in order to make discoveries and advance their field.

The very essence of science is as creative as art – but also the outcome and the observations in science can show an artistic beauty. You might think, for example, of beautiful repetitive patterns in nature, which can either inspire scientists and researchers to take a similar step (remember the bacteria in self-healing concrete that are inspired by the terraces of Pamukkale?) or can inspire artists to achieve, amongst others, the perfect proportions which we see repeated in nature.

You can improve your creativity by developing your creative habit. But today, I'm asking you to take this idea one step further. I'd like to invite you to share a link between art or nature and your profession or research topic in the comments section below. Please share, and inspire others!

This post is an adaptation of an earlier post for TEDx Delft

The Creative Process: The Importance of Questions

Find the interesting ideas behind the trees

This post is another addition to my series on The Creative Process. We've looked at the conditions and the creative habit previously, and now we look at how important questions are. As James Thurber said:

"It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. "

When carrying out creative research work, asking yourself the right questions is key. Questions are the best tool for actually pointing out a lack in our knowledge. Wondering why certain assumptions are chosen is key to critical analysis of the literature.

Let's look at why you should challenge yourself to ask questions when you are carrying out your literature review or when you are carrying out theoretical work.

1. Taking away pressure

Although the end result might be the same, there is a difference in mindset when it comes -on the one hand- to just trying to figure out the answer to a few questions, because it's fun and you're curious, and -on the other hand- feeling the burden of having to come up with a theory.  

2. Breaking down a problem

Asking questions, and identifying what you need to know precisely and study in depth further is the key to problem-solving. While you are imagining you are only formulating questions, you are already moving towards the answer. If you make your questions precise, you already narrow down your search and identify how to get started on solving the actual larger problem.  

3. Identifying key points

Again, asking questions and defining what you still need to know, can help you identify key points. When you are doing creative work in science, you will have a few issues that need to be fleshed out. Issues for which you need to sit down and think deeply. But again, these issues fit into a larger framework. Formulating questions can help you those particular key points for which you need to unleash your analytical spirit.

And I challenge you - go and formulate questions!

1) Next time you read an article, do not only jot down your summary, but also come up with 3 questions you think need some further exploration.

2) Next time when you attend a presentation or lecture, try to form 2 questions in your mind. You don't need to raise your hand and actually ask them (which is another barrier to cross if you hate speaking up in public), but this exercise will stimulate your critical thinking.

3) Try to solve a problem by breaking it down in a set of questions you need to answer.

The Creative Process: Reading Sparks Creativity

Reading as part of the creative process? I've discussed reading, and reading loads at length in a previous series of posts discussing archiving, understanding different levels of reading and keeping up with the output.

Reading a lot and keeping up with your field is not only important to have an understanding of what is going on, but it actually fuels your creativity. One of the big wins I noticed during the development of my theoretical work, is that I immediately could link a question to a paper I had read in the past 3 years.

Let me give you an overview of the different ways in which a good understanding of the literature can help you in your creative work:

1. Don't do double work

It might sound obvious, but you wouldn't want to figure out that somebody has already done precisely what you were working on for the past months or maybe years, and has published that work already. Carrying out a literature review before starting is key to understand what has already been done.

2. Identify the boundaries of the current knowledge

So you are going to develop a theory that explains Life, the Universe and Everything in your field... And thus you sit down in a cabin in the woods with paper and pencil and work on your brilliant idea, right? Well, to have a clue where you should get started, provided that you want to advance your field, you need to know what has been done. And you should critically revise the work that has been done, testing the assumptions and wondering where the caveats lie. Through such an analysis, you can determine where to start from with your own work, by working on an open question that you come across when studying the state of the art. Asking questions with regard to the existing work can teach you much more than what is purely written in the existing papers.

3. Know where to find important bits and pieces

Developing theoretical work requires you to look up parts of theories that are already fully developed. If you have carried out a proper literature review, then you have a good overview of these theories. Once you need to implement these in your own model, it is crucial to have read and understood that material. A good background knowledge is of the utmost importance when trying to come up with a novel theory. If you run into an obstacle in your creative work, it is important to be able to quickly go through your memory to see if you've already come across a similar problem in the past.

The Creative Process: The Creative Habit

In a first post on this series about the creative process, we looked at the conditions you need for creativity. In this post, we focus on a long-term way to find more creative solutions to research questions.

Some people might be naturally more creative than others, some people might seem to enjoy to be creating things and ideas all the time and some people might think that creativity is just not for them. Well I think creativity is something you can develop over time.


Here are a few ways you can use to foster "The Creative Habit", and train your mind to think out of the box:

1. Creativity over a whole spectrum

Pick up an artistic hobby, start blogging and journaling, sketch, get interested in fashion, arts, literature or anything that helps you break out of the bubble of your regular thinking. Debate politics and read up on history. Get your grey matter working!

When you get used to divert your thoughts and focus on other topics, pulling ideas together by looking at them from a different perspective becomes easier as well.

2. Daily creativity

Creativity comes when you make it a habit, when you train it on a daily basis. Try to break out of your research shell on a daily basis.

You can for example schedule activities (music classes, photography classes, painting workshop...) that push you to take time to be creative. Or you can pick up a challenge, like a 365 photography project, or try to write a set of poems within a few months.

3. List ideas 

When you are solving a problem in research, don't immediately go with your first idea. Try to sit down and look at the problem from every possible angle. Make a list of possible approaches, and notice that once you start thinking about different possibilities to solve a problem, you will start generating more ideas on how to approach it differently. Again, it's all about the mindset, and knowing that you don't have to come *snap* with a solution, but can sit and reflect.

4. Mindmap ideas

Mindmapping itself involves sketching and drawing, and is in essence a creative process as well. When mapping out ideas, try to explore all the tentacles of your mindmap spider web and explore them just a little deeper to try and seep out some additional thoughts and ideas.

5. Courses on creative thinking

If you're completely stuck, or can't find a way to think in creative ways, know that there are courses out there that are especially aimed at creative thinking for scientists. I haven't followed any of these courses, so I can't come up with a recommendation (I'm the kind of person with more ideas than time to develop them, so a lot of bubbling is always going on up in my mind). The NWO in the Netherlands used to offer classes, it'd be good if they'd bring them back!

How do you develop your creative habit?

The Creative Process: Conditions

Inspired by my recent theoretical work, I'd like to dedicate a series of posts to the creative process.

The first idea I'd like to discuss is which conditions you need for creative work? Before you get started on developing a new theory, or developing a new design, it is necessary to reflect on what we need for creativity.

In my opinion, you need very little to deliver creative work. As Feynman discussed, you don't need a cabin in the woods and all the time in the world to come up with good ideas.

Now let's look at what I think you need to push forward creative work:

1. Scheduled time

You don't need all the time in the world; I think 2 hours of undisturbed time in your planning can be enough. The key here is to claim that time, free up your schedule and plan those 2 hours - and use that time to the maximum. Use it for creative work, don't start using the "free" time to clean out your mailbox, or catch up on administration work.

2. Comfort

You don't need a cabin in the woods, but to help yourself getting into the right zone, you might like to sharpen your pencil, have space on your desk, have all material ready, a cup of coffee and music to block out the (lab) noise.

3. Mindset

For creative work, your mindset is key. I had been building up quite some tension with regard to my theoretical work - in fact, I hadn't been doing anything yet since all my time was devoted to experimental work, and my promotor had conveyed the message I really had to get started on it because it would take a long time and a lot of effort and searching and frustration. The mere thought of all that brought me panic and lots of impostor thoughts.

Then, I decided to turn around my entire mindset. I thought to myself: "I am just going to answer a question." My entire chapter 6 is the result of a smart question of my co-promotor, which I decided to flesh out completely. So, for my theoretical work, I decided to ask myself questions, and answer them, and if the answer would bring up another question, then I'd continue with answering that question.

Changing my mindset took away most of the pressure I was feeling, and it woke up my curious inner child.

Which conditions do you think are necessary for creative work? I'd love to hear about your experiences!

Lack of sleep - Part two

I previously wrote about how lack of sleep can influence your creativity.

Since I've started to do some efforts to get more sleep, I've noticed additional benefits. Although I still struggle to set boundaries and end the day while I "still have so much things to do", I've been making progress. Here are 5 additional benefits of getting enough sleep.

1. More time during the weekends

I used to cut back on sleep during the week and then sleep in during the weekends, usually until noon. I'd end up unable to sleep on Sunday night, and start the week tired already. I now suddenly have the mornings of the weekend available as well, which I can use for work, or to go to the gym, or arrange some things in my house. It feels as if my weekend has become longer.

2. Performing better at work

I'm simply sharper, more able to focus and I have more power and energy to work in the lab. I'm not depending on coffee at all anymore - I've switched to an occasional cup of green tea and water for the rest of the day. Only when I'm having a snack with chocolate, I get coffee because I like the combination of the taste of chocolate and coffee. I don't need to fuel myself with caffeine to soldier through the day anymore.

3. Feeling less tempted to procrastinate

As a result of the previous, I can get through an entire afternoon of reading with only 2 or 3 random internet browsing sessions. That's quite an improvement for me!

4. Feeling more fit and healthy

Waking up after a decent night of sleep, helps me to feel fit from the start of the day. I've noticed that I have more energy since I am now biking faster uphill, performing better at the gym, carrying heavier objects in the lab and running up the stairs instead of taking the elevator.

5. Having the feeling of accomplishment

I'm still logging my bedtimes, and whenever I manage to log a time before 11pm (giving me 8 hours of sleep), I add a little smiley next to my time. In weeks during which I see 4 smileys, I feel I've made progress with my resolution. That gives me a sense of accomplishment, and boosts my self-esteem as I am taking myself and my resolution serious.

Magritte

Last Sunday, I -finally- visited the Magritte museum in Brussels. I would highly recommend everyone to visit this relatively young (open since 2009) museum. Details can be found here.

Although I grew up with an admiration for Magritte, I didn't know anything about his two "other" styles: besides his surrealist works, he also painted some impressionist works (during the second world war) and in a "periode vache" (after the second world war).

Impressionist work by Magritte

Work from Magritte's "periode vache"

These works were not that popular, and Magritte's gallery holder in Paris told him to return to his old style. That must have been the best advice someone ever gave to the painter. He returned to his surrealist style, and produced some of my favorite paintings.

Magritte challenges our perception of day and night
I truly love how Magritte's paintings challenge our perception of reality. They make me think and reflect on our world.

At the exhibition, booklets with citations of Magritte (which are displayed in French on the walls) are available. As food for thought, here are five citations of Magritte:

All that I desire is to be enriched by intensely exciting new thoughts.

The real value of art is measured by its capacity for liberating revelation.

Surrealism is the immediate knowledge of reality.

We mustn't fear sunlight just because it almost always serves to illuminate a miserable world.

To be surrealist is to banish the notion of 'deja-vu' and seek out the not yet seen.

The silent creativity killer: lack of sleep

I was reading this article today: Silent Career Killer: Sleep and I was simply astonished to read the numbers (150 billions dollars of revenue loss per year due to the effects of sleep deprivation).

For someone like me, who's life is composed of critically analyzing literature, thinking about the mechanical model I want to develop for shear, writing papers and running around the lab and taking lab-related decisions for my project, it is incredibly important to be able to:
- think and judge clearly;
- come up with creative ideas;
- always be one step ahead of what is going on in the lab now to make sure we have a continuous stream of experimental work;
- find the missing links in what has been done up to now; and
- keep the overall picture in mind.

This list of skills I need on a day to day basis completely contradict with the results of sleep deprivation from the article:
- decreased quality and accuracy of work;
- inability to think and judge clearly;
- reduced ability to make decisions, particularly ones that require both emotional and mental thought; and
- diminished memory of important details.

This, among other signals, shows how important it is to get a decent share of sleep. But somehow, this seems to be much more difficult than it seems. I always end up in bed a bit later than planned, nibbling away my much-needed sleep. The main reasons why I never sleep enough during the week are:
- not taking into account the time it takes to pack my bag for the next day and prepare lunch and sometimes dinner to take to university;
- random clicking around the internet;
- wanting to finish some work while I'm already tired; and
- being unable to sleep right after coming home from choir practice or another social event and needing to spend some downtime first.

Another reason why I've been neglecting my need for sleep for quite some time is that I actually never took it serious. When I was 18, I read a newspaper article, claiming that if you sleep more than 8 hours you'd become lazy. Ever since then, I've regarded getting enough sleep as something for "people who have time for it" and "weak people". Slowly though, I start to realize that idea is wrong. Especially for the creative thinking I need on a day-to-day basis, a clear and rested mind are more than necessary.

Since January 4th, I've started tracking the time at which I go to bed and on that list I've highlighted the days at which I managed to go to bed before 11pm (leaving me 8 hours to sleep) with a smiley face. As for now, I have 3 smiley faces since that day for weekdays, which shows how far I am from actually sleeping enough.

And then, still, the question remains how much sleep is actually enough. For years, I've been in a pattern of sleep deprivation during the weekdays, and then sleeping in during the weekends (sometimes sleeping 12 hours per night). On Sunday night, I am not tired then, but when I need to wake up on Monday, I feel immediately that I am not fully rested.
The first thing I'm trying out now is to sleep and rise earlier during the weekend, to create a more steady sleeping pattern.

Over time, I hope to achieve that I can wake up before my alarm clock, and feeling rested and able to focus very well during the day.