Five Star Mind: Games & Puzzles to Stimulate Your Creativity & Imagination

Riзa Night is an associate editor of the Canadian Book Review Annual.

Five Star Mind explores creativity and how to nurture it.
Wujec—Creative Director of the Royal Ontario Museum’s Digital Media
Services—maintains that everyone is naturally creative and that “the
more [we] use [our] creative powers, the stronger they grow.”

Using an extended restaurant metaphor (the “creative kitchen” that
rates five stars in tour guides), he presents a smorgasbord of “fun
ways to cook up an idea,” offering lucid explanations liberally
seasoned with creativity-stimulating games, puzzles, worksheets,
anecdotes, and quotations. Because “[w]e learn best by doing,” he
exhorts us to “participate in the creative process, rather than just
think about it.” While the book fairly brims with useful suggestions,
the cooking theme becomes rather strained after a while: perhaps it’s
a little overdone.

For anyone familiar with the copious literature already available on
this subject (Wujec acknowledges an impressive list of other authors,
including de Bono, Buzan, and von Oech, but regrettably provides no
bibliography), there’s not much new material here. Still, for someone
seeking an accessible guide to “creat[ing] an environment in which
creativity is likely to thrive,” Five Star Mind (also available on
CD-ROM) should serve splendidly.

In an engaging, jargon-free style, Wujec skilfully blends practical
advice with plenty of practice. A few comments sacrifice clarity or
complexity for brevity—for example, the unsupported claim that
“[y]ou can become thrilled about anything ... merely by deciding
to.” Mostly, though, he strikes a suitable balance between clever
sizzle (“Your mind naturally attempts to answer questions, doesn’t
it?”) and hearty steak.

An appropriately unconventional design—odd-sized pages, double
ragged-right columns of sans-serif type, and lots of graphics—lends an
airy approachability. Only occasionally does this visual eccentricity
inhibit readability. Language lapses (especially misplaced commas) also
detract somewhat from this otherwise fine production. And the answer
key, with its cursory, often confusing notes, seems uncharacteristically
slapdash.

Such relatively minor quibbles aside, though, Wujec succeeds admirably
in demystifying the creative process, effectively showing how to
“develop your creative gifts, ... explore your creative spirit in new
ways, ... increase your ability to invent new ideas and perspectives and
apply your creative powers to many aspects of life.” A deceptively
light but ultimately nourishing “meal”: recommended.