Does googling things right away decrease our brain’s creativity? I have wanted to design a new sigil for my future family. Thoughts about starting this project have been at the forefront of my mind lately. I recently had one of my nights where thoughts raced around my brain all night, and when I was about to wake up the following day, my brain ended up on my family sigil project. What happened next really gave me a pause, and I wanted to give words to my thoughts.

When I thought about getting started with my sigil project, my brain did not start by listing out the things I wanted to be portrayed in the sigil, nor did it start by thinking of ways I wanted the sigil to look no. The first thought in my brain was, “let me google how to create a new family sigil.” Is this habit of googling for answers before anything else reducing my creativity? I think it does. For at least half of the questions that pop in my head during the day, I barely spend any time these days between a question popping in my head and me ‘googling’ for the answers. And for the answers I get even after ‘googling,’ I tend to forget right away. Instead of reaching out to Google for a thundering quick response presented to me in a bite-sized knowledge card, should I ponder upon my questions to develop a basic understanding and only use google to fill in the gaps? I think so!

One could argue that I would be “wasting time” if I wandered across my neural pathways in search of answers to my own questions, that I am trying to reinvent the wheel. To them, I would say, ‘I hear you.’ But am I willing to give up my creativity in efficiency for answers that only tend to be short-lived in my brain? The answer is NO! I am not reinventing the wheel; I am trying to see how tall, how wide, how strong, and how colorful MY wheel needs to be.