Fostering Creative Thinking Skills Through the Unconscious: A Novel Approach

This study introduces an innovative and experimental approach to promoting creative thinking. Prevailing methodologies predominantly emphasize conscious cognition mediated by the executive network, yet logical convergent and divergent thinking represent only a subset of the broader creative spectrum. A critical review of recent neuropsychological research indicates that unconscious cognitive processes originating in the default network constitute a significant source of creative thought. Accordingly, we propose the Six Step Cycle of creativity as a novel framework that explicitly harnesses unconscious processes to generate novel and unexpected insights. The method’s efficacy was previously evaluated in a controlled study by researchers at Radboud University (Netherlands) with 198 participants, using standard psychometric assessments, and yielded statistically significant improvements.