The Blog

Metaphorically speaking, THECUBE is a garden. A herb garden, a fruit garden – whichever garden you’d prefer to imagine, but it’s a garden nonetheless. And it’s a very fertile garden, ideafruits drop off branches like there’s no tomorrow. So what’s the secret to our soil? What makes us promote growth, fertility and production in all of our memberplants and membertrees?

Well, it has a lot to do with your brain. I won’t get into it now, but it’s more versatile and subject to your environment than you probably give it credit for. I would say it’s like a sponge, but not only has that been done to death, it’s also not terribly accurate. Instead, here’s a different simile: Your brain is like oasis. Not the drink, not the desert anomalies, but the foam that’s used for flower arranging and growing flowers.

Oasis is special because it absorbs and holds water – not just that which is directly poured into it, but moisture in the air too. From this the plants that are stuck into it can grow very well. It’s a great invention. Sponges don’t hold the water they absorb, so try to take it out of your vocabulary when talking about the brain.

But then how does all this relate to THECUBE? Firstly, as I mentioned earlier, your environment shapes you in ways that you’d have to read an entire back catalogue of psychological and sociological tracts in order to completely understand. With this in mind, we can link the moisture that’s absorbed by oasis bricks – and which subsequently becomes the aqua vita for plants or flowers – to the atmosphere at THECUBE that’s absorbed by our members’ brains.

Don’t be alarmed that I’ve just said atmosphere is the reason we are so fertile with regards to ideas. Reading this now you may be thinking, “OK, he’s lost me now” – but please, stay with me.

The atmosphere at THECUBE is a very social one. Now, I know that naturally any coworking space there is a certain degree of sociability – it’s in the name. What’s different about THECUBE is that we take it a step further – we encourage collaborations and sociability between diverse people and different levels of experience.  There are people at THECUBE that are engineers, medical researchers, fashion designers, web developers, and we also have retired CEO’s in their fifties right down to 21 year old graduates.

Why is this type of sociability important? It’s so we can produce better ideas. How? Because neurologist have liked sociability with dopamine neurotransmission. One of the pathways for dopamine in the brain is the mesolimbic pathway. When dopamine is rushing through here, like floods water through a drainage system after torrents of rain, it increases arousal and ‘goal-directed’ behaviours, and decreases your latent inhibition (which is basically the tendency to learn things but disregard them without consequence). All three of these effects increase your creative drive; your idea generation skyrockets.

Think of those torrents of rain I mentioned as the dopamine transmitted as a result of being sociable at THECUBE – all dopamine pathways are inundated with the increase, and the mesolimbic one is no exception. Yes. By simply being at THECUBE, by a kind of social osmosis your creativity pulses with ideas, your ideas flourish. The stems stuck in the oasis grow and they branch out, pregnant and heavy with delicious fruit and wonderful seeds for more plants.

This is the crux of how ideas are grown at THECUBE. Other, lesser factors may include simply being around people who are all working in creative professions, or at least working creatively, which makes this the status quo of the space – something that, especially when you are a paying member of someplace, people don’t really like to upset; or it may be that we have friendly members who like to sound their ideas off of each other; it may on another be that we’re all competing with each other!

We all have the potential to be more creative, to be inundated with ideas, to be managing projects in more of the areas we are interested in. Our little selves flicker like sycamore seeds in the sun, driven by fateful winds. Some land unfortunately and don’t grow. Some land in shallow soil and enjoy limited growth. Some fly right in through our door onto our deeply fertile patch, and we use every chance we get to give them a little extra water and minerals in addition to what they already receive, and these plants never stop growing.