I've been trying to find ways to improve life aboard the planet Earth, and am always interested in finding new information about innovation or the psychology of creativity. Found this informative article on WSJ:

Jonas Lehrer on "How to Be Creative".

"Creativity is a spark. It can be excruciating when we're rubbing two rocks together and getting nothing. And it can be intensely satisfying when the flame catches and a new idea sweeps around the world.

For the first time in human history, it's becoming possible to see how to throw off more sparks and how to make sure that more of them catch fire. And yet, we must also be honest: The creative process will never be easy, no matter how much we learn about it. Our inventions will always be shadowed by uncertainty, by the serendipity of brain cells making a new connection.

Every creative story is different. And yet every creative story is the same: There was nothing, now there is something. It's almost like magic."

The interviewee also notes a study indicating that alcohol can help improve performance on insight-related problems by interrupting the spotlight of attention and allowing non-linear thought processes to solve the problem at hand. Personally I feel cann-a-bis works better for this, but that question needs a whole new study to resolve.

Perhaps I'm nitpicking, but "something" doesn't come from "nothing", at least the way I understand it. Creativity is a function of the synthesis of divergent thinking and convergent thinking. In divergent thinking, the mind reaches out for as many possibilities as possible. Convergent thinking is then employed to bring distinct possibilities together. Divergent thinking is a right hemisphere "ability" and convergent thinking is a left hemisphere ability. In this sense, creativity is the result of a synchronization of the hemispheres, and its been shown that attempting to synchronize the hemispheres in other ways leads to enhanced creativity.

^^^good point, the article says something to the same effect, then contradicts itself somewhat in the end. There's a good list at the end of the article, suggesting more hacks to improve performance on creativity tests; living abroad, moving to a metropolis, and physically sitting outside of a 5 foot square box all have been shown to improve results on creativity tests, for example.