Instead of forcing creativity, recognise when the structure itself is limiting new ideas, writes Barbara Salopek Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias that limits our ability to see novel uses for ...

In a fascinating 2007 social experiment, the Grammy-winning violinist Joshua Bell posed as a street musician busking at the Washington, D.C., Metro station. Despite typically attracting standing-room ...

Stuck solving a problem? Seek the obscure, says a psychologist. "There's a classic obstacle to innovation called 'functional fixedness,' which is the tendency to fixate on the common use of an object ...

In the corporate team-building exercise known as 100 Uses For A Brick, employees are presented with an ordinary brick, then asked to come up with 100 ways to restrain their rage at being forced to ...

To become more inventive, new research suggests, we should start thinking about common items in terms of their component parts, decoupling their names from their uses. When we think of an object—a ...

Stuck solving a problem? Seek the obscure, says Tony McCaffrey, a psychology PhD from the University of Massachusetts. "There's a classic obstacle to innovation called 'functional fixedness,' which is ...