The place is empty, except for two characters sitting at the bar having a chat with the bartender. Sitting on one stool is a robot. And next to it, a human-sized t-rex. You can use your imagination for how a t-rex sits on a bar stool.

As Goldilocks pulls up to the bar next to them, she sees the bartender is no normal bartender - he’s a centaur. Half man, half horse. There is a fresh pint sitting in front of the dinosaur, and the three of them are in a deep conversation about how he is going to drink it with his tiny t-rex arms.

The dinosaur, no matter how many times this has failed in the past, believes he can just pick it up and it’ll be fine. “I’ve got it, trust me” he says completely oblivious to the the tiny arms he has had for his entire life.

The robot consults his internal data. “The most efficient solution is a straw.” His machine whirrs and he opens a compartment in his stomach and pulls out a straw he just 3D printed.

The centaur bartender looks at both of them with a wry grin. “I’ve never met a dino who would be okay with sipping beer from a straw.”

“Hey robo, can you make a beer helmet for our friend here?”

The robot whirrs again, and he opens the stomach compartment revealing a specially designed beer helmet just for our dinosaur friend.

As Goldilocks left the bar, she looked back at the dinosaur, the robot and the centaur. She knew which one she wanted to be.

Why it’s more important than ever to be a centaur

I wrote that very thinly veiled story for a very obvious purpose. I could have just launched into this part, but I really wanted to write about a centaur, a dinosaur and a robot at a bar.

This isn’t just a cute story, it’s backed by science.

A Harvard and MIT study involving hundreds of management consultants found three distinct types of AI users. They just didn’t call them robots, dinosaurs and centaurs. That’s on me. There’s the dinosaurs who reject it, and are destined for extinction. There’s the robots who follow it blindly and are destined to be boring. And there’s the centaurs.

The ones who brought their own thinking to the table before engaging AI (centaurs) didn’t just produce better work. They got smarter over time. They expanded their domain. Sorry I couldn’t resist the JJK reference (for those that don’t get it).

The inverse is also true. A 2025 study of 666 participants found a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool use and critical thinking ability. The more people delegated their thinking, the weaker their independent reasoning became.

So how do I become a centaur?

Start by picturing yourself as a centaur. Which parts did you keep, and which parts are a horse?

I imagine everyone will keep their head, except for a few of you actual psychos who will go horse head and torso on human legs.

And there’s a good reason for that. When you choose a human head with horse legs, you get the best parts of both of us. The brain and creativity of a human, with the speed of a horse. The human decides where to go, the horse gets you there faster.

That’s also the easiest way to build a good relationship with AI. Think of the centaur. You should always be the one deciding where to go. Always start human.

That is more than just a prompt, it means you start the thinking. You decide what to say. You come up with the idea. That is the most important moment in the process, where your fingerprint goes on whatever you are doing.

It can sometimes be tough to start human, especially if we’ve been using AI as a crutch and not a tool. Here’s some of the tricks i use.

Five ways to start human

The hardest part of starting human is always the blank page. And it’s also the most tempting time to just turn to AI. My plea to you is spend at least 15 minutes trying yourself before you turn to AI. Here are five of the tricks I use.

1. Just write about whatever. Three sentences about your morning. A description of the room you’re in. An angry letter to someone who pissed you off. The act of writing wakes up pathways and gets that brain juice going.
   

2. Be uncomfortably honest about the topic. If you know that nobody would ever read or see it, what would you actually say? Sometimes removing that social filter helps a lot.
   

3. Ask yourself how you want the reader to feel. When words are hard to find, sometimes emotions can be easier to communicate.
   

4. Write it in the worst way you possibly can. Sometimes when I get stuck, I try to think of the worst idea I could possibly come up with for the brief. Stuck writing a eulogy? Start writing the world’s worst eulogy. It’s not only a fun thing to do, it widens your perspective real quick.
   

5. If all else fails, gtfo. Sometimes the simple act of moving to a different space does some weird magic on your brain and suddenly things click. Or maybe it’s the sugar-infused coffee.

This Week’s Wiggle is About Drawing the Line Between You and AI.

Because the best way to draw the line, is literally to draw it. And plus it’s a lot of fun. Take as long as you need. And you can draw on an ipad, on a piece of paper, or you can even prompt it to Ai to create the drawing as long as you are clear in your mind what you as a centaur looks like.

One Last Thing

You already know you want to be a centaur. I mean who wouldn’t. But the hard part is being conscious about deciding where to draw the line, and practicing it in your every day. Not just at work, but in everything that you do. Every brief, every message, every small human moment where the easy thing is to just open a chat window and let AI take the wheel.

About This Project

Creativity is Human is a weekly newsletter about the small acts of creativity that keep us human in the age of AI. If this resonated, subscribe and send it to someone who you believe can make the world a little better through their everyday creativity. If this sounds like something you’d like to keep reading about, subscribe below.

I have done a deep dive into the study of this subject and uncovered 10 types of creativity that we use every day.

Problem Solving
Storytelling
Making
Feeling
Collaborating
Imagining
Shaping
Visualising
Moving
Innovating

In this issue I’ll briefly explain each aspect of human creativity, give an example of how we use it in everyday life and then give a short exercise for you to practice it. Now, 10 is a lot - so we’ll be breaking this up into 2 issues so stay tuned for part 2 coming in the near future.

The first 5 types of human creativity.

1. Storytelling

Picture two people getting off the same rollercoaster. One says it was the most exhilarating thing they’ve ever done. The other says it was terrifying and they wanted to vomit.

Same ride. Completely different story.

That’s what storytelling is. Not writing. Not performance. Just the way each of us puts our own vision onto a moment, a thought, an idea and makes it ours.

We do it every day without realising it. The message you send a friend about your day. The presentation at work. The memory you share about someone you love. These are all stories. And they become something only through the human creativity you bring to them.

Which is exactly why this is the type of creativity most threatened by AI.

When you outsource the story, it’s not your story anymore.

The Storytelling Wiggle

2. Imagining

Lord of the Rings was a language before it was ever a world, and a world before it was ever a book.

Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, and language was his first love, not storytelling. He began constructing Elvish (specifically what became Quenya) as early as 1910, years before any of the stories existed.

The world of Middle Earth grew around the languages because, as he put it, a language needs a people to speak it, and a people need a world to live in.

Mountains. Rivers. Entire histories of peoples who never existed. Rules of magic. The weight of a ring. Decades of work, all because he asked what if.

Today, entire communities exist around a world that came entirely from one person’s imagination.

Tolkien called imagination a natural human activity.

Not a special gift of the writers of great fantasy novels. It lives in the child who builds an entire civilization out of LEGO on a Saturday morning. In the person who lies awake picturing a life that doesn’t exist yet. In anyone who has ever looked at the world and thought: but what if it was different?

When we stop asking that question and let the algorithm suggest what’s next, a world or idea that could have existed never gets built.

The Imagination Wiggle

3. Visualising

Cézanne painted apples. So did Renoir. So did Caravaggio. So did a thousand art students in a thousand studios across a thousand years.

And yet, they ended up as completely different paintings. Because each of us sees with our own eyes, and everyone’s eyes are a unique lens into the world.

That’s visualising. The creative eye that each of us has, that is entirely our own.

It shows up far beyond painting. It’s the photographer who finds a frame nobody else found. The person who sketches something on a napkin to work out what they think. The way you arrange things on a shelf without knowing you’re doing it, because something in you knows what looks right.

It’s our chance to shape the world in our own vision, just a little bit.

The Visualisation Wiggle

4. Feeling

This is slightly embarrassing. But my wife and I were watching a cheesy Korean reality dating show. For some reason I connected with some particular cast members and when they finally got together, I got emotional. I may have even shed a tear.

Then I looked over at my wife, expecting that she would be equally invested and emotional. She couldn’t have cared less.

And I realised we both processed that moment entirely differently based on how we connected with the characters and their journeys, and how they connected to our own feelings and experiences.

Which, to me, is emotional creativity. Not just about experiencing emotions, but connecting them to our own experiences, our own stories and our own past. The meaning we layer onto a moment, a song, a memory, a loss. Two people at the same funeral, crying for completely different reasons. Two people falling in love with the same city for entirely different feelings about what it represents.

We are not passive receivers of emotion, we are its creators.

What is particularly important about this type of creativity is that it’s something that is immensely valuable and unique to us when we put it back into the world. This is our vulnerability, our empathy and one of the things that makes us connect with each other the most.

The danger is, when everything is optimised for engagement, when we let AI communicate and think or feel on our behalf, we are not injecting our emotion into the things we do.

It’s one of the reasons you can read or watch a beautifully composed piece by AI and still feel nothing.

The Feeling Wiggle

5. Moving

I’ve been coaching ice hockey for years. And one of the things I’ve come to love most about the game is watching the way different players skate.

Some have quick, choppy strides. They are sharp and darting in their movement, constantly changing direction all over the ice. Others are long and lean, covering distance in slow but powerful sweeps. Some players are pure speed. Others are stable and strong on their skates, impossible to move or knock over.

All of these people share the same ice, but express themselves so differently.

That movement is creativity. It’s personal. It’s irreplaceable. It’s why the best coaches I’ve known don’t push every player toward the same stride. They find what’s already there, and they bring it out.

This doesn’t only live in sport. It lives in the way someone dances when they think nobody is watching. In the yoga practice that looks completely different from the person on the mat next to them. Even in the way you walk into a room. If you think about it, you can probably recognize a lot of people you know just from the way they move or walk.

We express ourselves through our bodies constantly. Most of us just never think of it as creativity.

The Moving Wiggle

That’s the first five aspects of human creativity. Now, breathe.

It takes energy to work through so many aspects of your human creativity. How was it for you? Did you realise something about yourself and your own creativity that you weren’t quite aware of?

In a future issue we will go into the next five, with five more exercises. Problem Solving, Making, Shaping, Collaborating, Innovating.

If you don’t want to miss it, subscribe below. It’ll land directly in your inbox.

Creativity is Human is a weekly newsletter about the small acts of creativity that keep us human in the age of AI. If this resonated, subscribe and send it to someone who you believe can make the world a little better through their everyday creativity.

Subscribe now

Then one day we were playing in gym class and a classmate went up for a rebound, came down, and landed directly on my foot.

I tried to walk it off. I couldn’t. The nurse took off my shoe to find that my foot had not only ballooned, but turned more colours of purple than Tokyo’s beautiful dusk sky. Broken arch. My foot was broken, and I’d be in a cast and crutches for a couple of months.

When the cast finally came off, the size difference between my two legs was arresting. Just a couple of months and the muscle had almost disappeared. It was a pretty shocking visualisation of what happens when we don’t use something.

Here’s the thing.

With physical muscles, we can see it. We can feel it. The evidence is right there when the cast comes off.

But what happens when the muscle isn’t so obvious and we don’t realise we aren’t using it?

That’s what happens when we use AI not a tool, but as a crutch for our creativity. And the line is much finer than we think.

The science behind creative atrophy is real.

Creativity is not just about talent. It is a trainable cognitive process, one that follows the same biological rules as every other function in the brain. Basically it’s a muscle.

The brain rewires itself constantly based on the challenges it faces. The pathways you use regularly grow stronger. The ones you neglect are quietly eliminated through a process called synaptic pruning. Yes, kind of like a bonsai. It’s the same rule that governs every muscle in your body. ¹

So when divergent thinking, imagination, and emotional expression go unused, those circuits weaken.

Creative disuse accelerates aging in the parts of the brain most responsible for attention, coordination, and complex decision-making. The creative muscle doesn’t just stagnate. It regresses.

But we can also protect our creative muscle.

A 2025 study published in Nature Communications analysed brain data from over 1,400 people across 13 countries across a white variety of expressions. From tango dancers, to musicians, to visual artists, and even to gamers.

People with sustained creative engagement had measurably younger brains. Tango dancers showed brain ages more than seven years younger than non-practitioners. Musicians and visual artists five to six years younger. Gamers four years younger. Just 30 hours shifted participants’ brain clocks backward by two to three years. ²

Is AI really becoming a crutch?

A 2025 study of 666 participants across diverse age groups found a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool use and critical thinking ability. The more people delegated their thinking to AI, the weaker their independent reasoning became. ³

The mechanism mirrors exactly what happened to my foot when I used the crutch to replace what the muscles were meant to do.

When we use AI to fill the blank page, give us the idea, or to find the words for us, we skip the neural firing that builds the skill. That challenge, or friction is the workout.

We’re handing our brain a crutch every time we open a chat window and ask AI to think for us. And unlike a broken foot, nobody is going to tell us when to put it down.

Why I started this project.

I believe deeply in the necessity of human creativity. It is not a luxury nor is it a talent, it is the most important part of our DNA.

And AI is not going anywhere. So we better learn to work with it the right way, and also to practice our creativity so the we don’t lost it in a world with AI.

The good news is that the same science that describes creative atrophy also confirms that we can build that muscle back up again. The creative muscle responds to practice, challenge and well, rehab.

The first step was realising there was even a problem to begin with.

So this week’s wiggle is a bit of a test.

This week’s Wiggle

Sources

¹ Neuroplasticity and synaptic pruning:

https://www.brainfutures.org/neuroplasticity-101/

² Creative engagement and brain age — Nature Communications, 2025:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-64173-9

Plain English version:

https://theconversation.com/creativity-is-good-for-the-brain-and-might-even-slow-down-its-ageing-new-study-267797

³ AI cognitive offloading and critical thinking — Gerlich, MDPI Societies, 2025:

https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/1/6

We had just taken a new brief, and as always nowadays the timeline was tight. I decided to get a head start over lunch and brought my pen and notebook. I sat down, flipped open the notebook and prepared to get started.

That blank page hit me like a right hand to the jaw from Anthony Joshua.

Dazed like Jake Paul, I just sat there staring into space. My brain, usually a hyperactive jazz club filled with hushed voices, music, centaurs and bad jokes was quiet.

At that moment I realised nothing scared me more than, well, nothing.

It didn’t take me too long to figure out what had happened. In just a few short weeks of using AI as a crutch, I had completely changed the way my brain worked.

And I wanted to change it back.

There’s no creativity doctor out there.
No gym I can go to to train to get it back.

So I turned to my ice hockey experience.

There is no position more mental in sports than being an ice hockey goalie.

And every now and then your brain goes a little off the rails and you lose yourself.

Shots you used to stop just fly by, your instincts get all muddled up and your confidence gets shattered.

When that happens the recipe to fix it is really simple.

Grind the basics.

So that’s what I decided to do to fix my creative brain.

No apps, no gurus, no AI and no shortcuts.

Every day, every brief, every idea started with a blank page and a pen for at least 30 minutes.

The first few days was tough.

For anyone that has been injured and had to work their way back - that’s exactly how it felt.

That slow torture where the things you used to be able to do easily take longer and are much harder.

But just like recovering from an injury, if you stick with it you reach a turning point.

One day, I woke up and the jazz club in my brain was back.

It wasn’t as loud. The conversation was a little muffled. There were no centaurs. The jokes were still as bad. But it was there.

Within a month I was back to normal.

For me the lesson was pretty clear.

ChatGPT has no jagged teeth, Claude has no sharp edges, Perplexity no hazard tape and Gemini has no warning label.

AI is an amazing tool, but like any tool there are right and wrong ways to use it.

A chainsaw when used wrongly might lop off an arm, but AI when used wrongly rips out your soul.

That slightly morbid image brings us to today’s wiggle.
Just like I went back to the basics of a notebook, a pen and a blank page, I’m going to ask you to do the same.

Think of it more like a test.
Is your creative brain still what it used to be?

A quick note. Wiggles are usually not aimed at ‘creative agency types’ - but given the nature of this week’s article, it felt suitable. So this one’s for my fellow advertising creatives.

This week’s Wiggle

Creativity is Human is a weekly newsletter about the small acts of creativity that keep us human in the age of AI.

If this resonated, subscribe and send it to someone who you believe can make the world a little better through their everyday creativity.

Subscribe now

And you’ve got nothing.

No witty one liners. No clever puns. Not even an insightful little comment to spark some interest. You can’t even muster up a “hey.”

So you do what every, single, other person out there is doing now.

You go to ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini and you ask it for an opening line.

And you get something like this:

The only problem is, that person probably has another 12 messages like it just sitting in their inbox. Unread.

Also written by ChatGPT.

Because you’re definitely not the only person who got scared off by the empty white box.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, this isn’t an article about dating or dating advice.

It’s about the fear of the white box, and the easy way out. I get why it’s so tempting to choose AI.

But take it from someone who met their wife on Tinder. (And trust me, I had no smooth or particularly witty opening line. It was probably pretty lame. But it was me.)

It’s better to be imperfectly you, than perfectly not.

So do not fear the white box, the blinking cursor or the empty page.

Take a minute, and that’s all it takes, to put yourself into these everyday moments.

Because that white box isn’t just on Tinder.

It’s the birthday card sitting on your desk with the pen hovering over it. The text to a friend you haven’t spoken to in months. The apology that needs to sound like you mean it. The joke at the end of a speech.

Every one of those white boxes is an opportunity for you to be creative. To have an idea.

If you think of it, we need to come up with thousands of ideas per day.

That tinder first line, it’s an idea.

That new recipe out of the random things left in the fridge, an idea.

A funny joke to add at the end of a birthday card, an idea.

And we should not be letting AI come up with ideas for us. That’s our job. And I’d argue, it’s our responsibility.

So this week, let’s end with a wiggle that’s meant to have you tackle that white box.

This week’s Wiggle

Creativity is Human is a weekly newsletter about the small acts of creativity that keep us human in the age of AI.

If this resonated, subscribe and send it to someone who you believe can make the world a little better through their everyday creativity.

Subscribe now

No doubt that had a lot to do with my love of words, and the person I became today.

My Mum wasn’t the best writer. But that was never the point. What she brought to our stories was her humour, her imagination and her unique way of seeing the world. And with every story we wrote together, she shared a small part of that with me.

Of course I didn’t know it at the time, I thought she was just keeping me entertained. But what my Mum was actually doing was passing something of who she was directly into who I was becoming. I carry those stories with me still. And even now that she’s thousands of miles away, her stories stay with me wherever I go

As I observe how the world has been moving lately, I’ve been thinking about those moments and stories a lot.

What if AI were around back then?

Maybe they would have been better. We could have written so many more. With richer vocabulary, tighter structure, more twists. With generated cover art and more.

But I’m pretty sure something would have been missing.

I’m 46. I belong to a strange, specific generation.

Old enough to have grown up without the internet. Young enough to have spent most of my adult life inside it. And I’ve noticed that technology has a pattern.

For every extraordinary thing it gives us, it takes something away in return.

We navigated much better before google maps.
We remembered much better before search.
We connected much more sincerely before social media.

Now we are entering the age of AI, with the capability to amplify every one of us a thousand times over.

But what will the cost be?

My belief is, it’s our creativity that is at risk.

Not for professional creatives, but for everyone else.

The bed time story written by Mum. The message in a birthday card. The eulogy for someone who mattered.

Wedding vows. Jokes. Tinder Profiles. Songwriting. Baby names.

What we might lose is that little wiggle of creativity that we use every day, that puts a little bit of ourselves out there into the world. And in doing so, changes the world every so slightly.

That’s the type of creativity I’m afraid we lose.

And that’s why I’m starting this project.

To remind us that every little creative wiggle matters, and to help us practice our creativity, before we lose it.

So this won’t just be a newsletter about creativity. It’ll also be a place to practise it.

Each week, I’ll end with what I call a Wiggle.

A simple creative practice that anyone can do. Here’s the first one.

Creativity is Human is a weekly newsletter about the small acts of creativity that keep us human in the age of AI.

If this resonated, subscribe and send it to someone who you believe can make the world a little better through their everyday creativity.

Subscribe now

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