How creative is your brain?

What if I asked you to give me a flower? Most people would think of a rose but why? Just look at this experiment done by the Brain Games crew at National Geographic Channel to find out:

If you are asked to do something like putting words in alphabetical order or calling out every sixth number from100 backwards, we are forcing your brain to get back to the stored patterns it has. We tend to store information in clusters, and all of these clusters have a "most typical" item (eg. hammer for the tools, rose for flowers, red for colours etc.). When you are asked to quickly tell an item from a category you will most probably name this typical item of the category. The more rigid these categories are, the less chance is to give a creative answer. But you can "train" your brain to be more creative. There are a bunch of little games that can "loosen up" these strict associations, eg. just look at an object and quickly shout out a wrong name for it. Try to name a word from a different category each time (eg. look at a chair and tell mushroom, look at a pencil and tell a smile, look at a carrot and tell a mouse etc.). Make it as quick as possible without repeating categories... it will be probably quite hard for the first time but gets more and more easy after a time.