Creativity: Why You Should Seek Out Unusual or Downright Weird Experiences

“Creativity comes from looking for the unexpected and stepping outside your own experience.”

“Creativity comes from looking for the unexpected and stepping outside your own experience.” ~Masaru Ibuka

Creative people can be a little weird. Great artists are often outsiders: they don’t behave like us, they don’t look like us and they don’t think like us.

True creativity is not the preserve of people who think the same as everyone else. Frequently (but not always) this is the result of lots of weird things happening to them:

“…highly creative individuals often experience a disproportionate number of unusual and unexpected events, such as early parental loss (Martindale, 1972) or having an immigrant status (Goertzel, Goertzel, & Goertzel, 1978). Furthermore, living abroad is linked to creativity in the general population (Leung, Maddux, Galinsky, & Chiu, 2008).” (Ritter et al., 2012)

So perhaps:

“…diversifying experiences help people break their cognitive patterns and thus lead them to think more flexibly and creatively.” (Ritter et al., 2012)

Now there’s experimental support for this idea. In two experiments Ritter et al. found that:

“…comparisons with various control groups showed that a diversifying experience—defined as the active (but not vicarious) involvement in an unusual event—increased cognitive flexibility more than active (or vicarious) involvement in normal experiences.”

So go out this weekend and do something weird: it’ll make you a more creative person (probably!). As former Beatle Paul McCartney said:

“I used to think anyone doing anything weird was weird. Now I know that it is the people that call others weird that are weird”

Just make sure you take an active part in the weirdness and you don’t let the weirdness go too far.

We’ve all met people who are weird-bad rather than weird-good. A creative person may be intentionally weird, but only at times when weird is good.

Have fun!

Image credit: Norma Desmond


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This site is all about scientific research into how the mind works.

It’s mostly written by psychologist and author, Dr Jeremy Dean.

I try to dig up fascinating studies that tell us something about what it means to be human.

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Author: Jeremy Dean

Psychologist, Jeremy Dean, PhD is the founder and author of PsyBlog. He holds a doctorate in psychology from University College London and two other advanced degrees in psychology. He has been writing about scientific research on PsyBlog since 2004. He is also the author of the book "Making Habits, Breaking Habits" (Da Capo, 2013) and several ebooks.