Let Your Brain Create

Have you ever had an idea that popped into your mind and when you tried to go back and recall it later on, it was gone?

It happens to me way too much.

We think of our brain as a memory bank, and while the hippocampus stores episodic memories aka specific events from our life, our brain is better served as a source of ideas. Allow your brain to use its memory storage unit for the experiences in life, not the ideas that come and go throughout the day. 

In his book, The Creative Way, Rick Rubin shares the idea that we all have antennas within us that are the receptors of ideas from the Higher Power he calls The Source. Call the Higher Power sourcing your ideas whatever you want but the idea that we receive ideas from that Higher Power, which is why they pop into our head, is not too far fetched. Rubin also explains why we sometimes have an idea that we never execute and see someone else bring that same idea to life–the Higher Power shifted the idea to someone who was ready for it at that moment. 

This could also be an explanation as to why the idea you are trying to recall is no longer there when you return to it later–it’s moved on to someone else. 

Give yourself more time with those ideas with an easy solution; prevent losing that next great idea, that next great blog post, or that next great video idea by simplifying writing it down.

WRITE IT DOWN

Carry a notebook with you. Use your Notes app on your phone. Use a dictation app. By any means necessary, capture that idea with a few short notes to bring you back to the moment it popped into your mind.

Before long you will have an index of ideas to help you in your creative process and you can allow your collection of ideas and thoughts to call to you when it is time to bring them to life. There’s no guarantee that all of the ideas you write down will come to life at a later date, but they’ll have a chance because you can revisit them and there is the possibility the collection of ideas will spark a new idea.

The benefit of writing down the random (or maybe not so random) ideas that inspire you is it frees up your brain’s memory units to focus on the experiences of your life and allows your antennae to continue to pull in new ideas for you to sort through.

This note is the product of writing down ideas to come back to later. I originally wrote it in my notebook last week but wasn’t able to bring it to life until today–it was an easy note to write because the time had come and I had everything I needed in my notebook to revisit the emotions and my thought process from when it originally came to me.

It works.

See you tomorrow and keep pursuing,

JC