In recent years, neuroscience research has revealed three key facts that may change forever the way we think about and approach creativity:

– Instinct plays a leading role in complex decision making.

– Eighty percent of our grey matter is dedicated to nonconscious thought.

– Imaginative play is one of the most direct means of activating our creativity and problem-solving abilities

These three discoveries open up unprecedented opportunities for progress, creativity, and efficiency, if we only embrace the instinctual and unconscious aspects of the mind and the randomness and chaos of life.

The uncomfortable part of this is that we are not used to relying on instinct and the unconscious, and we are certainly not used to accepting randomness or chaos. We are used to seeing life and reality as linear and logical when they aren’t. Success in modern times mean making a leap from seeing the world as we think it operates to seeing how it really operates. In reality both life and the whole of the human mind operate in a way that is closer to chaos than to linear order.

Excerpted from The Intuitive Compass, Jossey-Bass, 2011.