Category: Creativity

Can you stretch your imagination this far?

Being able to imagine situations that are far away in time and space is a sign that you are highly creative, research finds.

Creative people are better able to think 500 years into the future, transcending the here and now.

Surprisingly, creative experts use a totally different part of the brain to think beyond the present, in comparison to less creative people.

Dr Meghan L. Meyer, the study’s first author, said:

“For most people, it is difficult to transcend the here and now, but creative experts are able to imagine distal experiences much more vividly than others.

They draw on a neural mechanism, which other experts may not be able to engage as easily for this type of thinking.”

The conclusions come from a series of three studies.

In one study, 300 people were asked to “imagine what the world will be like in 500 years”, along with other similar exercises.

The results showed that more creative people were better at this imaginative exercise.

A second study compared creative and non-creative professionals.

This found that creative professionals were better at imagining the future.

Dr Meyer explained:

“Creative experts and control participants showed the same level of career success.

Yet, the creative experts demonstrated greater distal imagination.

The results illustrate that it’s the creative pursuits and not just career success, which appears to enhance transcending the here and now.”

A third study carried out scans to look at what happens in the brain when creative experts imagine a far-off future.

For distant events, experts used the dorsal medial default network, which non-experts did not use.

This area of the brain is important for empathy and thinking about other people.

Dr Meyer said:

“Many of the problems facing our society today, whether it be identifying solutions to address climate change or working with others who may have different political views, are essentially challenges that require distal thinking.

They demand that you get outside of your present point of view and try to think about how things could be different from your immediate experience.

Identifying the underlying neural mechanisms associated with this type of imagination will hopefully help us better understand the key ingredients that may be needed to solve these kinds of complex, societal problems.”

The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Meyer et al., 2019).

How to take the ‘road less travelled’.

Incentives can help people be more creative, if they are followed by time to think, research finds.

An ‘incubation period’ is key to producing the most creative results.

In fact, when people are incentivised to be creative they do not come up with more ideas straight away.

Stepping away from the problem for a period — even 20 minutes is enough — allows people to produce more creative solutions.

Together, incentives plus a rest period produce more creative results, the study found.

Professor Steven Kachelmeier, the study’s first author, said:

“Creativity is not instantaneous, but if incentives promote enough ideas as seeds for thought, creativity eventually emerges.”

For the study, one group of participants were paid based on the number of ideas they came up with, another group were given a fixed sum.

When given a creativity test straight away there was no difference in the number of ideas they came up with

However, they returned 10 days later to try the creativity task again.

The results showed that people who were paid based on how many ideas they came up with were more creative when they returned.

A further study showed that a 20-minute walk was enough of a gape to boost the creativity of people who were already incentivised.

Professor Kachelmeier said:

“You need to rest, take a break and detach yourself — even if that detachment is just 20 minutes.

The recipe for creativity is try — and get frustrated because it’s not going to happen.

Relax, sit back, and then it happens.”

Incentives appear to encourage people to come up with ideas that are more divergent.

In other words, despite initially coming up with roughly the same number of ideas, the ideas themselves were more different from each other.

The study was published in the Accounting Review (Kachelmeier et al., 2019).

Creativity is not the exclusive domain of youth.

There are two peaks for creativity across the lifespan, new research finds.

One occurs — as you might imagine — in the mid-20s and a second comes later, in the mid-50s.

At least, these are the ages at which people are most likely to do the work that bags them a Nobel Prize.

Professor Bruce Weinberg, the study’s first author, said:

“Many people believe that creativity is exclusively associated with youth, but it really depends on what kind of creativity you’re talking about.”

The conclusions come from an analysis of Nobel Prize winners in Economics over the years, although Professor Weinberg thinks the results apply to creativity generally.

‘Conceptual’ innovators tended to do their best work in their 20s, the results revealed.

Experimentalists, though, were more likely to get the Nobel Prize for work done in their 50s.

Professor Weinberg said:

“Whether you hit your creative peak early or late in your career depends on whether you have a conceptual or experimental approach.”

The probable reason is that being new to a field helps conceptualists, because they are not yet bogged down with accepted views.

Experimentalists, though, need time to accumulate their findings, digging slowly, layer after layer, until they unearth the mother lode.

The same is likely true for other areas of creativity outside the sciences.

Breakthrough ideas are more likely to come from the young, but older people have more time to perfect their art.

Creative peak

Other studies have compared different disciplines to look for creative peaks.

These have generally found that scientific creativity peaks in people’s mid-30s to early 40s.

Professor Weinberg said:

“These studies attribute differences in creative peaks to the nature of the scientific fields themselves, not to the scientists doing the work.

Our research suggests than when you’re most creative is less a product of the scientific field that you’re in and is more about how you approach the work you do.”

The study was published in the journal De Economist (Weinberg & Galenson, 2019).