Airplanes facilitate creative thinking. And I want to ponder that a moment. Today, I'm flying from my home to San Diego, for a talk tomorrow morning. The first flight was Wilmington, NC to Atlanta. Now I sit on the second plane and what will be the long flight. But I've already had that experience, frequent to me on planes at altitude, of enhanced creativity. Is it the solitude, the absence of constant email and messages, or is it oxygen deprivation?
Wouldn't it be wild if creative thinking is enhanced by a mild lack of oxygen to the brain? Maybe, without the normal fuel supply, the normality of function is interrupted and something new can happen. But then creativity experts have been telling us for years that disruption can be beneficial. Get out of your routine. Do something different - especially if it's really different - shake up your normal cognition, and new thoughts can appear. Anything novel can crack the shell, and as philosopher CD Broad once said about famous mystics, "Maybe you have to be a little cracked to let the light shine through."
Oops, airplane mode announcement! More later!
