i'd like to second this reading recommendation and add that in the first few paragraphs of this book i found one of the more inspired and simple brain hacks i've ever tried (paraphrasing here ... the book's on a 6-degrees loan somewhere):
"to free your mind of its cluttered and stunted awareness, walk around the room calling out at the objects you see, but use different names for everything. look at the chair and say 'banana', then the door and say, out loud, 'desk', and so on. go on walking and calling things by their wrong name out loud. it takes a few minutes, maybe 10, but soon you might notice something happening. maybe a kind of brightness falls over the objects in the room around you. suddenly things appear more vivid, fresh and new, for no particular reason. it's like an adrenaline shot for your creative mind. getting into this state takes deliberate effort at first, but gets easier with practice."
if you're familiar with it, there's a scene from the remake of 'the manchurian candidate' that uses a similar lighting effect to signal an altered state of mind for key characters. but it's nothing like that. those are the movies. -- just to set the right expectation.
"to free your mind of its cluttered and stunted awareness, walk around the room calling out at the objects you see, but use different names for everything. look at the chair and say 'banana', then the door and say, out loud, 'desk', and so on. go on walking and calling things by their wrong name out loud. it takes a few minutes, maybe 10, but soon you might notice something happening. maybe a kind of brightness falls over the objects in the room around you. suddenly things appear more vivid, fresh and new, for no particular reason. it's like an adrenaline shot for your creative mind. getting into this state takes deliberate effort at first, but gets easier with practice."
if you're familiar with it, there's a scene from the remake of 'the manchurian candidate' that uses a similar lighting effect to signal an altered state of mind for key characters. but it's nothing like that. those are the movies. -- just to set the right expectation.