GETTING MORE CREATIVE

Humour can also loosen up our minds,allowing us to play around with ideas and be more creative.That's according to years of psychological studies,many of which got people to laugh,then asked them to come up with creative things to fo with brick.After years of bricks studies,pshychologists were still skeptical,so in 1987,Alice Isen,PhD,a professor psychology and management at cornell university,began using what she say's is a better measure of creativity:she challenged undergraduates to nail a burning candle to a corkboard.More specifically,Isen and her colleagues gave subjects a candle,matches,a box of nails and ten minutes,and told them to attach the candle to the wall without dripping any wax. People who were not amused spent most of their time trying repeatedly to tack the candle to the crockboard."Thats won't work because the candle is too thick," Isen says ,"besides,the wall would catch fire."But subjects who had just watched funny outtakes from old TV shows were more than three times as likely to find the correct and creative,answer : Dump the nails from the box,nail the box to the corkboard,and use the attached box as a candle holder .