Synthetic vs Creative Imagination: Why What You Call 'Creative' Is Usually Just Pattern-Matching
You probably think you are creative.
You have successfully adapted existing ideas to new contexts. You have brainstormed solutions by recombining what already exists. You have been praised for “thinking outside the box” — which meant thinking outside the box while staying safely within a larger one. You have called this creativity. You have built professional and personal identity around it.
You are probably wrong about what you are doing.
Most of what you call creativity is actually something Hill identified in 1937 and modern neuroscience has confirmed: synthetic imagination — the ability to recombine existing ideas, methods, and materials in novel ways. It is useful. It is trainable. It is not creative imagination.
Creative imagination is a completely different faculty. It is the capacity to receive entirely new insights that seem to originate from beyond your conscious mind. It is not recombination. It is reception. And the gap between what you can currently access and what you can train yourself to access is not a minor skill upgrade. It is the difference between incremental improvement and breakthrough innovation — between solving the problem you can already see and discovering the problem you did not know you were solving.
The people you consider genuinely creative — the inventors, the artists, the founders who moved the needle — almost never built their breakthroughs from synthetic imagination alone. They accessed creative imagination. They learned to tap a different part of their brain. They understood the mechanism. Most importantly, they trained it deliberately.
This post explains the difference Hill drew between these two faculties, why most people develop only one, what your brain actually does during a genuine creative breakthrough, and the exact 7-step system to train creative imagination as a reliable tool.
If you recognize that your “creative breakthroughs” are usually just sophisticated recombinations — that you have hit a ceiling where no amount of brainstorming produces genuine novelty — this post is written for you.
What Is the Difference Between Synthetic and Creative Imagination?
Synthetic Imagination is the ability to recombine existing ideas, methods, and materials in new ways. It solves known problems with existing tools. It is conscious, deliberate, and effortful. Most people develop this naturally through education and work. Brainstorming is synthetic imagination. Adapting a competitor’s strategy to your market is synthetic imagination. Taking three existing solutions and merging them is synthetic imagination.
Creative Imagination is the ability to receive entirely new ideas and insights that seem to originate beyond the conscious mind. It solves unknown problems by accessing solutions that did not previously exist in your experience. It is intuitive, often surprising, and arrives without strain. Most people atrophy this faculty in childhood and never reactivate it. The “aha!” moment when a solution suddenly appears fully formed is creative imagination. The unexpected insight that arrives in the shower is creative imagination. The idea that you cannot rationally justify but that solves the problem elegantly is creative imagination.
The distinction matters because they require different brain states, different preparation, and different activation strategies. They are not the same thing with different names. They are two entirely different mental faculties.
Most high-performers develop only synthetic imagination. Their creative imagination atrophies from disuse. This is why they can brainstorm endlessly but hit a wall when genuine breakthrough is required.
The rest of this article teaches you the distinction Hill made, the neuroscience that proves both exist, and the exact system to awaken and train your creative imagination faculty.
The Distinction: Synthetic Imagination vs Creative Imagination
Hill’s core insight was this: every person has two distinct capacities for imagination, and they operate on completely different principles.
Synthetic Imagination: Recombination and Adaptation
Synthetic imagination is the conscious mind working with materials it already has. You have gathered knowledge, experience, and examples. Your synthetic imagination is what you do when you deliberately combine them into something new — but “new” meaning a combination that did not previously exist, not an idea that did not previously exist.
Example: You see a problem in your customer onboarding. You have read three articles about how other companies solve onboarding. You have observed how your competitors approach it. Your synthetic imagination takes those three models, extracts the most useful elements from each, and recombines them into a hybrid process. It is good work. It is useful. It is not creative imagination. It is intelligent recombination of existing pieces.
Who develops this? Mostly anyone who has had formal education and professional responsibility. You have been trained to do this from childhood. When your teachers said “think creatively,” they almost always meant “recombine existing frameworks in a novel way” — not “access entirely new ideas.” Synthetic imagination is the faculty that modern schooling and work culture actually reinforce.
The ceiling of synthetic imagination is high, but it is visible. You can reach it through persistence and information gathering. The moment you have consumed all the existing models, brainstormed all the recombinations, and tested all the variations, you have exhausted what synthetic imagination can produce.
Creative Imagination: Reception and Access
Creative imagination is fundamentally different. It is not recombination. It is reception. You are not generating the idea from existing components. You are accessing an idea that seems to come from elsewhere — from what Hill called “the deeper field” and what modern psychology might call the subconscious, the Default Mode Network, or the morphic field.
When creative imagination activates, the experience is distinctive. The idea does not arrive through conscious effort. It arrives despite conscious effort stopping. It appears fully formed, often surprising you with its elegance and applicability. You cannot rationally explain where it came from, but you can clearly verify that it works.
Example: Same customer onboarding problem. You have gathered raw materials (studied music composition, observed children learning, watched how nature systems self-organize). You have done active brainstorming (synthetic imagination). Then you stop. You take a walk. You sit quietly. Three days later, while showering, the insight arrives: design the onboarding like a musical score, with rhythm and pacing, not like a checklist. The solution was not a recombination of the three models you studied. It was something entirely new that integrated all of them in a way your conscious mind could not have designed.
Who develops this? Almost nobody, past the age of twelve. Because creative imagination requires receptivity, silence, and permission to access something beyond logical analysis — and modern culture trains these out of us. We are taught to think, to analyze, to push. We are not taught to listen, to receive, to let ideas come.
This is the core reason most high-performers hit a ceiling. They have developed synthetic imagination to mastery. Creative imagination has atrophied completely.
Why Most People Develop Only One: The Childhood Ceiling Installation
Every person has what Chapter 6 calls a “creative ceiling” — a point beyond which generating new ideas becomes nearly impossible. Usually, this ceiling was installed in childhood.
Someone in authority — a parent, teacher, coach — told you that your ideas were not practical, not how things were done, too risky, or simply not your kind of thing. The specific words do not matter. The message was: your natural creative impulses are wrong. You learned to suppress them. Your creative imagination began to atrophy.
By the time you reached adulthood, you had developed a highly refined synthetic imagination (praised as “practical creativity”) and a dormant creative imagination (trained out of you as “impractical daydreaming”).
The tragedy is that this ceiling was never real. It was installed. And installed ceilings can be removed.
The neuroscience is clear on this: the brain that has stopped accessing creative imagination is not permanently broken. It is just following learned patterns. Activate different neural circuits through deliberate practice, and creative imagination wakes up.
The Neuroscience: What Actually Happens During a Real Creative Breakthrough
To understand how to develop creative imagination, you need to understand what your brain is actually doing during a genuine breakthrough moment.
Right-Brain Insight Generation (The Bowden & Jung-Beeman Finding)
In a landmark 2007 study, neuroscientists Bowden and Jung-Beeman tracked brain activity in people solving creative problems. They were looking for where insight actually happens.
The finding was striking: genuine “aha!” moments correlated with sudden activation in the right anterior superior temporal gyrus — not the left prefrontal cortex where logical analysis happens.
What this means: Your conscious, analytical left brain is not where creative breakthrough occurs. Your right brain is. The breakthrough comes not from harder thinking, but from a different kind of thinking entirely.
This explains why “trying harder” at a creative block often makes it worse. You are over-activating the wrong hemisphere. The answer is almost always the opposite: step back, relax the left brain, and create the conditions for right-brain activation.
The Default Mode Network: Creative Processing Happens When You Stop Focusing
Your brain has multiple processing modes. When you are focused on external tasks — answering emails, executing a plan, solving a logical problem — your Task Positive Network is active.
When you relax, daydream, or let your mind wander, your Default Mode Network (DMN) activates. The DMN is associated with creative thinking, pattern integration, and self-reflection. Counterintuitively, your brain is more creative when you are not trying to be focused.
When you deliberately activate creative imagination through meditation, visualization, or receptive awareness, you are activating the DMN. You are shifting from left-brain effort to right-brain reception. The quality of ideas that emerge is fundamentally different.
This is why your best ideas come during walks, in the shower, just before sleep. In these moments, your Task Positive Network quiets and your DMN activates. You are not trying to solve the problem. You are giving your subconscious permission to solve it.
Incubation and Pattern Integration: Why Stepping Back Actually Works
One of the most robust findings in creative research is that taking a break between problem preparation and solution attempts improves solution quality significantly.
In a meta-analysis of 117 empirical studies, Sio & Ormerod (2009) found that incubation — deliberately stepping away from a problem — improved solution quality by 40% on average. This is not a minor effect. This is the single most impactful component of the creative process.
Why? During incubation, your subconscious is integrating patterns from all the raw materials you gathered. Your conscious mind cannot hold dozens of variables and find the novel connections between them. Your subconscious can. When you step back and do something completely unrelated, you give your subconscious the working space to do this integration without interference.
This explains why forcing a solution never works, and why stepping back almost always does.
The Prepared Mind and Alpha-Wave Activation
Kounios et al. (2008) discovered something counterintuitive: creative insight is preceded by a burst of alpha-band brain wave activity in the right anterior superior temporal region. Alpha waves indicate a shift from focused attention to diffuse, relaxed attention.
What this means: The brain state most conducive to creative insight is not a state of intense focus. It is a state of relaxed receptivity. You do not think your way to breakthroughs. You relax your way to them.
Hill understood this in 1937. He called it “incubation.” He advised visualizing, sitting quietly with problems, and “sleeping on” decisions. Modern neuroscience confirms that this was exactly right. The practice itself — meditation, visualization, receptive silence — directly produces the brain wave state where breakthrough becomes possible.
The Subconscious Processing Advantage
Dijksterhuis & Meurs (2006) compared conscious analytical thinking to unconscious processing on complex, multivariable problems. The finding: unconscious thought produced superior creative solutions.
Why? Your conscious mind can hold approximately 3-5 variables in active awareness simultaneously. Your unconscious mind processes dozens of variables in parallel, finding novel patterns that your conscious mind could never consciously construct.
For complex problems — which is to say, for most problems worth solving — unconscious processing is literally more intelligent than conscious effort. Hill’s entire framework for imagination is built on mobilizing this deeper, more capable processing.
The Five Principles of Creative Imagination Development
Hill identified five core principles that explain how creative imagination works and how to develop it. Here is what each means and how to apply it to your work.
Principle 1: The Bicameral Creative Mind
Your left brain primarily handles sequential, logical, recombinatory thinking — this is synthetic imagination. Your right brain integrates patterns, synthesizes wholes from parts, and accesses intuitive knowing — this is creative imagination.
Most people over-develop their left brain through years of education that reward logical problem-solving. Meanwhile, their right brain creative access atrophies.
Application: When you hit a creative block, consciously shift hemispheres. Stop the analytical effort. Slow your breathing. Relax your forehead. Imagine solutions as if you are perceiving them rather than figuring them out. Do not push. Just observe. The shift from effort to reception is the shift from synthetic to creative imagination.
Principle 2: The Subconscious Mind as Idea Machine
The subconscious mind has access to patterns, solutions, and creative recombinations that the conscious mind cannot generate through logic alone. Every wisdom tradition has a version of this: the buddhi in Hindu Vedanta, the unconscious in Jungian psychology, the “deeper self” in transpersonal psychology.
Application: When you face a genuine problem, state it clearly to your subconscious: “I am working on [specific problem]. My deeper mind is solving this.” Then deliberately stop thinking about it. Give your subconscious permission to work in the background. Notice what emerges in the next 24-48 hours.
Principle 3: Creative Receptivity and the Meditative State
Creativity thrives in states of receptive awareness — in meditation, contemplation, in the silence between thoughts. In these states, the conscious mind’s constant chatter quiets and deeper knowing becomes accessible.
The scientific name for this optimal state is Alpha-Theta wave activation — the brain state associated with relaxed focus, creative flow, and integration.
Application: Even 5 minutes of focused silence creates the conditions for creative breakthrough. Sit quietly. Let your eyes unfocus. Allow your mind to wander. Do not try to solve your problem. Observe whatever arises spontaneously. Write down anything that appears. You are practicing creative receptivity.
Principle 4: Incubation and the Pattern-Integration Mechanism
The creative process has a predictable arc: preparation (gathering raw materials), incubation (stepping back), illumination (breakthrough), and verification (testing).
Most people rush from preparation directly to forcing a solution. Hill understood that incubation is not laziness. It is the essential neurological mechanism of creative integration.
Application: When you hit a creative block, the answer is almost never to push harder. It is to step back. Engage in unrelated activities — walking, showering, sleeping, exercise. Let your deeper mind continue integrating the raw materials you have gathered. The incubation period is where the actual integration happens.
Principle 5: Access to the Field of Possibilities
At the deepest level, Hill’s teaching points to a profound claim: all ideas, all solutions, all possibilities exist in a universal field. Creative imagination is not generation — it is tuning. A creator does not invent from nothing. They access ideas by tuning their mind to the frequency where those ideas already exist.
This is the metaphysical foundation that Sheldrake’s theory of Morphic Resonance addresses — the idea that living systems have access to a field containing accumulated forms and behaviors of a species.
Application: Instead of “trying to come up with” an idea, shift to “trying to tune in to” an idea that already exists. This shift from generation to reception often removes the desperation and force that block creative access. Say to yourself: “The answer to this already exists. I am tuning my mind to receive it.” Do not push. Simply listen.
The 7-Day System: Installing Creative Imagination as a Daily Tool
This is the framework from Chapter 6, Module 3 of The Architecture of Reality. The system takes seven days and trains your brain to access creative imagination deliberately.
Day 1: Define Your Creative Target
Specificity first. “I want to be more creative” is not a target. “I want to redesign how my customers onboard to increase retention by 30%” is. Your subconscious cannot work with fuzzy goals. It needs precision.
Write: - The specific problem you want to solve - What a creative breakthrough on this problem would look like - What constraints you have - Who would notice if you succeeded brilliantly
Days 2-3: Gather Raw Materials
Creative imagination is sophisticated recombination of diverse elements. You must first gather raw materials aggressively. Read, observe, study, collect ideas, talk to unexpected people.
Crucially: include adjacent domains. If designing a user experience, study architecture, music, nature, cooking. Your deeper mind will weave diverse elements together in ways your conscious mind could never plan.
Days 3-4: Prime Your Subconscious
After gathering raw materials, explicitly hand your creative problem to your subconscious. Write your problem in one clear sentence. Before sleep for three consecutive nights, read it aloud and say: “My deeper mind is solving this. I trust it completely.”
The hand-off itself matters. You are activating the receptive state.
Days 4-6: Daily Synthetic Imagination Activation
Spend 10 minutes every morning deliberately brainstorming. Use the “yes, and” technique: every idea you generate, you extend with “and if we also…”
- Days 1-2 of brainstorming: Unconstrained. Capture everything.
- Days 3-4: Add one constraint (budget, time, technology)
- Days 5-7: Review all brainstorms. Which unexpected combinations spark something?
After active brainstorming, shift to receptive mode. Spend 5 minutes in receptive silence. Do not think about solutions. Simply hold the question gently in your awareness. Notice what arises. Write it down immediately.
Day 6: The Incubation Break
By Day 6, you have prepared and primed your deeper mind. Now stop completely. Do something entirely unrelated for a full day. Exercise. Take walks. Sleep extra. Let the integration happen in the background.
Do NOT work on this problem on Day 6. This is the single most critical step.
Day 7: Return and Receive
Return to your creative target with fresh eyes. What has emerged? What new insights are available? Often the solution appears fully formed. Sometimes it comes as a single next step.
Write: - What new insights emerged during this week? - What surprised you? - What is your next step?
The Instructor’s Confession: Why Avoiding Proven Structures Kills Your Creativity
Before moving to common mistakes, I want to include the exact story from Chapter 6, because it cuts to the heart of where creative blocks actually come from.
“For a long time, I avoided building anything that followed a proven structure. When I created something, I wanted it to be completely original. I didn’t want it to look like anything that already existed. So instead of studying what worked, I tried to come up with everything from scratch.
What that actually led to was a lot of unfinished or ineffective work. Projects that felt different, but didn’t really land. The cost was time spent creating things that didn’t connect or perform the way I expected.
I told myself I was being creative and thinking independently. What was actually true is that I was avoiding learning from what already worked, because it felt less impressive to follow a structure than to invent one.”
This is the shadow side of creative imagination. It appears as “I want to be original” but it is actually “I am afraid that using a proven structure means I am not creative.” The result: you reject the raw materials that would actually strengthen your creative work. You isolate yourself from the patterns that could be integrated into breakthrough solutions.
Genuine creative imagination is not about avoiding structures. It is about mastering existing structures so deeply that you can integrate them into something new. The musician must know harmony before she can break it. The founder must understand business models before he can invent a new one. The artist must study composition before her unique vision can fully emerge.
Synthetic imagination (mastering existing structures) is not the enemy of creative imagination. It is the necessary foundation for it.
Common Mistakes When Developing Creative Imagination
Four mistakes show up repeatedly in people attempting to awaken their creative imagination.
Mistake 1: Confusing Brainstorming with Creative Breakthrough
Brainstorming is conscious, effortful, and generative. Creative breakthrough is receptive, intuitive, and often arrives unbidden. Most people develop only brainstorming skills and miss genuine creative access entirely.
The two require different brain states and different strategies. When you need genuine breakthrough, brainstorming alone will not get you there. You have to shift to receptivity.
Fix: After 2-3 days of brainstorming, stop pushing. Move to the receptive phase. Sit quietly. Listen. Do not force solutions.
Mistake 2: Pushing Through Creative Blocks Instead of Stepping Back
When you hit a creative wall, your instinct is to push harder. This is exactly backward. The more you push, the more you over-activate your left brain and shut down your right-brain creative access. You are digging deeper into the wrong hemisphere.
The answer is almost always to step back, take a walk, sleep, and let incubation happen. The 40% improvement from incubation is not incidental. It is the most impactful intervention available.
Fix: When blocked, schedule a complete break. 24-48 hours minimum. Do not think about the problem. Let your subconscious work in the background.
Mistake 3: Waiting for Inspiration Without Cultivating the Conditions for It
Inspiration is not a random gift from the muses. It is a trainable state that arises from preparation, incubation, and receptive awareness.
People say “I am waiting for inspiration to strike.” What they actually mean is “I am waiting for my right brain to spontaneously activate without any of the conditions that would activate it.”
This is like waiting for plants to grow without watering them.
Fix: Stop waiting. Start practicing. The 7-day system works because it deliberately cultivates the exact conditions where inspiration becomes likely.
Mistake 4: Assuming Creativity Is a Fixed Trait You Either Have or Do Not
This is completely false. Hill understood creativity as a learnable, trainable skill. You do not develop it by being naturally gifted. You develop it through deliberate practice, meditation, visualization, and receptive awareness.
The person you think is “naturally creative” is almost certainly someone who has spent more time in receptive states and trained their creative imagination more deliberately than people around them.
Fix: Treat creative imagination as a trainable skill. The 7-day system works. The research backs it. Your brain can be trained.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How long before I notice results from the 7-day system?
A: Most people report first breakthroughs within 3-5 days of consistent practice. However, the real test is whether you apply the insights to your actual challenges. Insight without application is just entertainment.
Q: What if my mind goes completely blank during meditation or receptive practice?
A: That is not failure. That is exactly what should happen. When your conscious mind quiets, you create space for deeper knowing. The solutions that arrive after complete mental silence are often the most powerful.
Q: Can I use this for any kind of problem, or just creative ones?
A: The system works for any challenge: business, personal, relational, health, spiritual. Anywhere you need wisdom beyond conscious analysis. Some of your most important life decisions are too complex for pure rational thought. This is where creative imagination becomes essential.
Q: If I do not believe in the field or morphic resonance, will this still work?
A: Yes. Whether or not you believe in the metaphysical framework, the neuroscience is solid. Your Default Mode Network is real. Your subconscious processing is real. Your right-brain creativity is real. You do not need to believe in the field for the mechanisms to work.
Q: What is the difference between visualization and daydreaming?
A: Effective visualization engages all five senses and produces a measurable physical response in your body. If you can visualize your creative breakthrough without your pulse changing, your breathing shifting, or your posture adjusting, you are daydreaming. The emotional and physiological component is the mechanism. Without it, you are just thinking pleasant thoughts.
Q: What if I am too analytical to access creative imagination?
A: This is a common belief among engineers, scientists, and left-brain dominant people. It is also not true. If anything, analytical people who learn to access creative imagination often produce the most powerful breakthroughs because they combine left-brain rigor with right-brain insight. The 7-day system works for anyone willing to practice it.
Q: How do I integrate this with my normal work day?
A: Morning brainstorming (10 min synthetic imagination), receptive practice at midday or evening (5-10 min creative imagination), incubation breaks when stuck (complete work breaks of 24+ hours). You do not need blocks of uninterrupted time. The key is daily rhythm and intentional incubation when you hit blocks.
Q: Should I tell people about my creative projects before I break through?
A: No. Announcing a project to a large audience produces a feeling of completion that substitutes for actually doing the work. Tell one to three trusted accountability partners privately. Do not broadcast. The cognitive cost of privacy is what keeps you committed.
What Synthetic Imagination Alone Cannot Do
Before the CTA, it is important to be clear about what this system is not.
Developing creative imagination gives you access to novel ideas, genuine breakthroughs, and solutions that your conscious mind could not generate. It does not, by itself, build the external skills required to actually deliver on those ideas.
If your creative breakthrough is a new business model, you also need the skills of business execution: sales, positioning, operations, financial management. If your breakthrough is an artistic concept, you need the craft skills to manifest it. If your creative insight is an organizational innovation, you need the political and leadership skills to implement it.
These external skills are not optional. Creative imagination without execution skills produces a highly self-aware person who cannot do things. Execution skills without creative imagination produce a highly skilled person who self-sabotages at threshold moments.
The full framework from The Architecture of Reality calls this the Inner Track + Outer Track model. Creative imagination development is the Inner Track. Deliberate skill acquisition is the Outer Track. Both run in parallel. Skip either one and your work stalls.
The moment you finish a 7-day creative breakthrough, write the list of three to five external skills the realized idea demands. Identify your two largest gaps. That is your execution roadmap for the next twelve weeks.
Continue Reading the Series
This post is part of a 16-chapter exploration of The Architecture of Reality — a modern, evidence-based rebuild of Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. Each post stands alone, but they compound when read in sequence.
← Previous: Chapter 5 — General Knowledge Feels Like Progress (Specialized Knowledge Wins)
→ Next: Chapter 7 — Organized Planning: Why 91% of Plans Fail
Related in the series:
- Chapter 14 — Trained Intuition Is Pattern Recognition
- Chapter 1 — What a Definite Major Purpose Actually Is (start here if you’re new to the framework)
Get the Free Chapter 1 Workbook (PDF)
The article you just read gives you the diagnostic (synthetic vs. creative imagination), the neuroscience (Default Mode Network, right-hemisphere insight, incubation), the framework (the 5 principles), and the common mistakes. What it did not give you is the foundational exercise that makes any of the imagination work actually compound: the Definite Major Purpose that gives your creative imagination something specific to receive for.
Creative imagination without a target is just daydreaming. With a target, it is the workshop where worlds get built.
The full Chapter 1 of The Architecture of Reality is a 24-page fillable PDF workbook containing the complete Definite Major Purpose exercise, the Belief Saturation protocol, the Bridge-Burning Inventory, the 7-Day Tracker, and the Outer Track Skills Audit. Download it free below — no upsell, no email gauntlet, just the workbook.
→ Download Chapter 1: “Thoughts Are Things” — Free PDF Workbook
Includes the complete Definite Major Purpose exercise, the 7-day belief tracker, the bridge-burning inventory, and the Outer Track skills audit. Print it. Fill it in. Keep it where you’ll see it every morning.
The workbook is the first chapter of the full sixteen-week course, The Architecture of Reality — a metaphysical rebuild of Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich combining ancient wisdom traditions, modern neuroscience, and Hill’s 1937 framework into a single 16-chapter installation protocol. Chapter 1 is yours regardless of whether you ever take the rest. It is built to stand on its own.
If you complete the Chapter 1 workbook and want the rest, you will know where to find it.
Your Next Move
You have now read the distinction Hill made between synthetic and creative imagination, the neuroscience that proves both exist as distinct faculties, the five principles that explain how they work, and the 7-day system to develop creative imagination deliberately.
The only remaining step is practice.
Choose one actual creative challenge you face in your work or life. Not a hypothetical. Real. Specific enough that you can name exactly what breakthrough would look like.
Begin the 7-day system tomorrow.
Your synthetic imagination has probably served you well. It has gotten you this far. But the ceiling you have hit — the sense that you are recombining known pieces rather than accessing genuinely new solutions — that ceiling is not your actual ceiling. It is the ceiling of one faculty.
The other faculty is waiting. The research is clear. The mechanism is proven. The system is simple.
What remains is your commitment to practice it.
Sources cited in this article: Bowden, E. M., & Jung-Beeman, M. (2007), “Aha! Insight experience correlates with solution activation in the right anterior superior temporal gyrus,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience; Dijksterhuis, A., & Meurs, T. (2006), “Where creativity resides: The generative power of unconscious thought,” Consciousness and Cognition; Sio, U. N., & Ormerod, T. C. (2009), “Does incubation enhance problem solving? A meta-analytic review,” Psychological Bulletin; Kounios, J., et al. (2008), “The prepared mind: Neural activity prior to problem presentation predicts subsequent solution by sudden insight,” Psychological Science; Raichle, M. E., et al. (2001), “A default mode of brain function,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; Hill, N. (1937), Think and Grow Rich; Sheldrake, R. (2009), Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation; Pink, D. H. (2006), A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future.