10 Best Rubber Boots For Hiking

Best Rubber Boots For Hiking in 2023

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How to Use a Rubber Ball to Stimulate Your Creativity

Ever gotten stuck when attempting something creative? Whatever your creative ambition, this simple activity using nothing more than a rubber ball and a wall may be just the thing you need to get stimulate a tsunami of creative thinking.

The uninitiated may view the scene in Stanley Kubrick's film "The Shining" where Jack Nicholson's character, Jack Torrance, is bouncing a ball off the monumental interior walls inside the lavish Overlook Hotel as an indication of the frustrated writer's descent into madness and the special type of laziness that results in reams of paper wasted on variations of "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." Those of us who have found creative inspiration in the simple act of tossing a rubber ball against a wall and then catching it know different.

During her first romantic entanglement with Leonard in "The Big Bang Theory" Penny arrives in the living room after spending the night with her super-smart boyfriend to find the show's resident eccentric genius facing away from a board on which he has written a complicated scientific formula. Sheldon quickly tosses his head back for a momentary glimpse of his equation and then faces away again. When asked, Dr. Cooper replies that he is "attempting to view my work as a fleeting peripheral image so as to engage the superior colliculus of my brain."

Rather than viewing the scene of Jack Torrance tossing that ball (in yet another superior example of the sound editing to be found throughout "The Shining") as a penetration into the wounded psyche of Nicholson's character, one might well consider it from Sheldon Cooper's perspective. The part of the brain necessary for a wealth of higher critical thinking, including artistic creativity, gets stuck for watever reason, but when you engage in a repetitive activity which the primal parts the brain are geared for taking care of what seem to be our immediate needs as a evolution mechanism.

Millions of years of biological development have provided us with something akin to a computer humming along unnoticed in the brackground. This computerized work of the brain is not terribly unlike the central air conditioner unit that knows when to kick on to keep things cool and when to shut off to keep you from freezing. The body swings in concert with this primal process that focuses on the things it determines to be essential survival skills without you even being aware of it. This is what is known in athletics as being "in the zone."

Or so I think. Hey, I'm not a scientist, but I can speak from experience. I was never much of a batter, but I had a glove on me like Graig Nettles or Brooks Robinson. When I throw a rubber ball against a wall I can make spectacularly quick adjustments and successfully catch a ball that I have no business being able to retrieve at my age. At the same time I reach that point, my creative thinking skills seem to kick into high gear. I'm not here to use terms like superior collilucus to describe what's going on because, frankly, I have no idea. For all I know, it could be a 100% placebo effect.

I do know I'm not alone in this process proving useful. I can't recall specific instances at the moment, but I know that Jack Torrance is not the first creative artist in a movie I've seen throwing a rubber ball against a wall. It is almost a totemic experience. Maybe it is subconsciously inserted into cinematic works by writers barely aware of the cognitive connection between empty-minded repetition and the engagement with their higher thought processes. Or maybe those writers are even more scientifically aware than I.

Here's what I know: when I mindlessly toss a rubber ball against a vertical surface for extended periods of time, my reflexes become noticeably more acute. Once that experience commonly referred to as being "in the zone" kicks in, my creativity expands. I am painfully aware that a great deal of my writing is hardly worthy of being considered flights of extreme creativity. I also know that when I am cognitively "in the zone" my ability to string words together comes more easily, I don't need to refer to a thesaurus as often and my natural inclination toward metaphor and simile reaches a deeper level of connectivity. n the past

In the past, I was engaging in this process when I working on a novel that eventually became "Antichrist, Superstar!: The Musical." I can recall zoning out to a greater degree than usual because it seemed like I never missed the ball. I think my lower mind was so seamlessly integrated with the rhythmic return of the ball because my higher mind was working at an equally attuned degree. From out of nowhere I imagined almost fully complete in my mind an entire chapter in which a minor character was having a conversation with her sister, who was a major character. Unbidden by conscious mind, this conversation completely transformed the direction my writing was taking and instantly turned both sisters into key characters.

The rubber ball has been the key that unlocks more logical creative connections as well. I was working on a paper in college and not really even trying to use the process. I was just killing time waiting for the class after lunch break to start and me and a guy named Kevin who was also in the class just happened to find a rubber ball on the grounds and started tossing the ball against the wall with me catching his throw and vice versa. Normally, I recommend this to be a solo process, but on this particular occasion even the awareness of another person didn't interfere. Less than two minutes into our little game and over the course of about two more minutes I came up with a connection between Gulliver's adventures in the land of the giants and the psychological theory of sexual sublimation.

What I am saying is that if you find yourself stuck creatively, you should try this out. It won't work every time, but I think that most of you who work in a field requiring higher level thought that can be accurately termed creativity will find it to be pleasantly surprising. You may even become so addicted to bouncing a ball against a wall that you regularly engage in the activity as part of your work process. Some of you may even take it to the next level and sign up for handball or racquetball. Imagine the ability to stimulate your imagination and lose weight at the same time!

My assumption is that the process of throwing and catch the rubber ball could be adjusted to suit your own particular talents. At the same time, I can only assume that this method of sparking the creative fire works best when as much of your physical body is attuned to the repetitive acts possible. I would also caution against getting competitive since you want to disengage as much of your higher thinking skills as possible from the repetitive action. The goal really is to make a split second adjustment to catch a ball that has made a weird bounce without your even thinking about the adjustment because at that very same instance you just had a eureka moment.

I must also say that there seems to be something going on between the efficiency of cognition and that instantly identifiable made when ball bounces off a wall. Not sure at al what's going on there, but I know from experience that my success with this activity varies substantially based on the different types of balls used. At the same time, however, I must also add that it seems to work with a baseball thrown against a backpitch in which there is no thwopping sound at all.