A truly creative brain needs training. The Alice in Wonderland Challenge is a weekly training for everybody who wants to increase the brain’s capacity, think faster, more freely and critical (why should this work?).
Feel free to participate. If you want the challenge coming to your mailbox every week, just send me an email to aiwchallenge@gmail.com.
“I can’t believe THAT!” said Alice. “Can’t you?’ the Queen said in a pitying tone.
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), Lewis Carroll
“Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.” Alice laughed. “There is no use trying,” she said: “one CAN’T believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had
much practice,” said the Queen.
“When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Rules:
- Every Wednesday at 5.30 am a new challenge is posted on this page
- Before you have breakfast you have to come up with minimum six ideas
- do NOT try to produce a great/unique/creative idea
- Along with every challenge comes a template to help you create ideas – using it is optional (print it, copy it with pen and paper, create your own, use it digitally …)
- Create one idea per template/paper/canvas and make a picture of each
- Send the pictures to aiwchallenge@gmail.com. Do NOT mention you as the author in the picture. Every week’s results will be visible in the archive so you can get inspired by other people’s thoughts.
- Read more about this rules and the benefits in the FAQs below
This week’s challenge:
Create six bizarre swearwords before breakfast.
Wednesday, October 23rd 2019
next Challenge will be posted Wednesday, October 30th 2019 at 5.30am
This week’s template:
Check out the last challenges and results to get inspired
Frequently Asked Questions
Why will this help me think?
Creativity is not about being good in arts. It is our ability to create anything. No matter if you want to solve a wicked problem or just plan your holiday – your brain uses it’s creative abilities to create the solution. The brain works integrative. It fires strong, lateral networks and connects a diverse range of pathways in both sides (forget about the right brain/left brain thing – this idea died already in the 90s).
Just as a muscle the brain works better with training. Just as you are doing your repetitions in the gym to gain muscle power, you can train your brain by repeating thinking tasks.
Why should I think of impossible things?
As kids we are creative. We loose a lot of our creativity while growing up. We learn how the world works, we learn about economic and physical rules, we learn about history, meet people make experiences.
Our brain is a lazy thing, it always tries to make things as easy as possible. So it becomes harder and harder to think „out of the box“. With the Alice in Wonderland Challenge you can train your brain to be able to think „out of the box“ again, by allowing it to think of the impossible, weird and crazy.
Why can’t I mention myself as the author of an idea?
Alice in Wonderland Challenge’s goal is to train our brains. The goal is NOT to create great ideas. Our world is focused on performance, but the pressure to perform better than others will decreases our creative thinking skills.
Why even publish the results?
Creativity works best as a network of influences. Seeing the output of others will help you to get new ideas and inspiration.