I just read an article about two psychologists from the University of Amsterdam - Ap Dijksterhuis and Teun Meurs - who have done some great work on the role of consciousness and cognition in relation to creativity.

They want you to imagine going in to a room and asking two guys to come up with ideas for advertising a chocolate bar - one guy is very creative but extremely shy and the other is clever, not as creative but far more domineering.

The output is dominated by the louder guy resulting in the ideas being good but not that innovative.

They then ask you to imagine a second scenario where you go in and brief the same two guys but this time you distract the loud, domineering guy, allowing the quieter, more creative guy to be heard. This time you walk away with more innovative ideas.

This analogy explains how your conscious mind dominates your unconscious mind shutting out your more creative side.

Ap Dijksterhuis and Teun Meurs did a test with students where they split the students in to two groups and asked both groups to come up with new pasta names. To help the groups, the professors provided 5 names all ending in 'i' as is typical in pasta names. One group were given the assignment and then asked to respond within 3 minutes. The second group were also given the assignment but then asked to forget about it and instead play a game of following a dot for 3 minutes. After following the dot for 3 minutes, they were then asked to list names.

The results were really interesting. The first group provided names that were dominated with words ending in the letter 'i' therefore being swayed by the stimulus - the conscious mind, while the second group provided more than twice as many unusual names than the first group.

So next time you are challenged to come up with ideas, write down the challenge, go and play Sodoku and then come back to the challenge.