Ohlsson’s research shows that people have to stop themselves from thinking along one path before they can find a new idea. “The projection of prior experience has to be actively suppressed and inhibited,” Ohlsson explains. “This is surprising, as we tend to think that inhibition is a bad thing, that it will lower your creativity. But as long as your prior approach is most dominant, has the highest level of activation, you will get more refined variations of the same approach, but nothing genuinely new comes to the fore.”
