Warm Up Your Mood to Boost Creativity

Warming up is clearly important for safety and high performance in physical activities and competitive sports. The same is true for mental activity and cognitive sports.

In an earlier post we discussed how having a friendly social conversation for 10 minutes to warm up your brain will improve cognitive performance. Now CNN Health reports on two recent studies that show humor or positive mood  can improve creativity and puzzle solving ability.

More specifically, one study found that watching YouTube videos that put you in a good mode (watching a happy baby) increases your ability to learn a rule to categorize a problem.

This suggests simple mood elevating techniques can warm up your brain and improve cognitive performance. Need to be creative? Take time out to laugh.

Source: Happy Baby Image