Category: Creativity

It can enhance mental flexibility.

Creativity can be unlocked by ‘microdoses’ of psychedelics, new research suggests.

Taking very small amounts of psychoactive substances, like magic mushrooms or truffles — known as ‘microdosing’ — is thought to avoid the ‘bad trip’, but still provide creative benefits.

Microdosing has become fashionable among Silicon Valley workers and others looking for a creative boost.

Now, the first study of the phenomenon suggests microdosing might be effective.

The study involved giving 36 people a microdose of psychedelic truffles (0.37g).

They were then given tests of creativity and intelligence.

The results showed that people were more creative after consuming the microdose of truffles.

Ms Luisa Prochazkova, the study’s first author, said:

“Taken together, our results suggest that consuming a microdose of truffles allowed participants to create more out-of-the-box alternative solutions for a problem, thus providing preliminary support for the assumption that microdosing improves divergent thinking.

Moreover, we also observed an improvement in convergent thinking, that is, increased performance on a task that requires the convergence on one single correct or best solution.”

However, the microdose did not affect their intelligence or analytical abilities.

Ms Prochazkova said:

“Apart from its benefits as a potential cognitive enhancement technique, microdosing could be further investigated for its therapeutic efficacy to help individuals who suffer from rigid thought patterns or behavior such as individuals with depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder.”

However, note that the study had no control group, so the results could be down to expectations: what’s usually called the placebo effect.

In other words, it is possible people believed they were going to be more creative after microdosing, and so they were.

The study was published in the journal Psychopharmacology (Prochazkova et al., 2018).

Being rejected socially, can give you this outsider advantage.

Being rejected socially makes people more creative, research finds.

Feeling outside the group helps people generate more novel ideas.

It may help to explain why so many great artists were outsiders — people who lived separate lives in order to produce works that would surprise and delight the rest of us.

The study’s authors call it the ‘outsider advantage’.

Professor Jack Goncalo, who led the study, said:

“If you have the right way of managing rejection, feeling different can help you reach creative solutions.

Unlike people who have a strong need to belong, some socially rejected people shrug off rejection with an attitude of ‘normal people don’t get me and I am meant for something better.’

Our paper shows how that works.”

For the study, half the participants were told they were not selected for a group and had to do a creativity task on their own.

These people subsequently came up with more novel, unusual solutions to creative problems.

Professor Goncalo said:

“We’re note dismissing the negative consequences rejection has on many individuals, but for some people, the rejection has a golden lining.

For the socially rejected, creativity may be the best revenge.”

The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (Kim et al., 2012).

Both visually and verbally creative people report this type of sleep.

People who are more creative go to sleep later, get up later and have worse sleep overall, research finds.

Both visually and verbally creative people reported worse sleep.

Their sleep was more disturbed during the night and they had more problems functioning during the day as a result.

Neta Ram-Vlasov, the study’s first author, said:

“Visually creative people reported disturbed sleep leading to difficulties in daytime functioning.

In the case of verbally creative people, we found that they sleep more hours and go to sleep and get up later.

In other words, the two types of creativity were associated with different sleep patterns.

This strengthens the hypothesis that the processing and expression of visual creativity involves different psychobiological mechanisms to those found in verbal creativity.”

The study included 37 students, half of whom were studying art, and the other half were concentrating on the social sciences.

All had their sleep measured and recorded as well as taking tests of visual and verbal creativity.

Those who were more creative — no matter what they studied — slept the worst.

The art students, though, tended to sleep the most, but this did not mean they felt the most rested the next day.

This could suggest their sleep quality is not what it could be.

It is not known exactly why creative people may have worse sleep, but the study’s authors speculate:

“It is possible that a ‘surplus’ of visual creativity makes the individual more alert, and this could lead to sleep disturbances.

On the other hand, it is possible that it is protracted sleep among verbally creativity individuals that facilitates processes that support the creative process while they are awake.

In any case, these findings are further evidence of the fact that creativity is not a uniform concept.

Visual creativity is activated by — and activates — different cerebral mechanisms than verbal creativity.”

The study was published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (Ram-Vlasov et al., 2016).

This type of music helps you search longer and harder for a creative solution.

Listening to happy, energetic music increases people’s creativity, a new study finds.

Researchers found that listening to the violin concerto “The Four Seasons” by Antonio Vivaldi helped their divergent creativity.

Divergent creativity refers to creating lots of potential answers to a problem.

For example, try to think of as many uses as you can for a brick.

Building a house is the obvious one, but you might also list sitting on it, using it to smash open a coconut, or painting a face on it and using it as a puppet (admittedly not a very expressive puppet!).

The more you can come up with, the more divergent creativity you display.

Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” was compared with, among other pieces, Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for String”, which is a sad and melancholic piece by comparison.

The study’s authors explain their results:

“The main conclusion of the results we obtained is that listening to ‘happy music’ (i.e., classical music that elicits positive mood and is high on arousal), as compared to a silence control condition, is associated with an increase in divergent thinking, but not convergent creativity.”

Convergent creativity is the type where you are trying to reach one specific solution.

Examples of this might include a math problem, a riddle or a crossword.

Here your brain is trying to ‘converge’ on the solution.

Happy classical music had little effect on this type of creativity.

Why, then, does upbeat music have this effect on divergent creativity?

The study’s authors write:

“…creative ideation is a function of persistence and flexibility, and that situational variables can influence creativity either through their effects on persistence, on flexibility, or on both.”

In other words: happy music encourages you to try harder for longer and to search in more places.

The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE (Ritter & Ferguson, 2017).

There are two types of mind wandering — each with a different experience.

Mind wandering tends to be seen in a negative way, but zoning out on purpose can help creative thinking and problems solving.

Now a new study identifies a vital difference between intentional and unintentional mind wandering.

It reveals how intentional mind wandering feels different from accidental mind wandering.

Dr Paul Seli, the study’s first author, said:

“In recent years, there has been an enormous increase in the number of studies examining mind wandering.

The general assumption has been that people’s experiences of mind wandering exclusively reflect their attention unintentionally drifting away from a task.

Based on our everyday experiences, however, it seems that people frequently intentionally mind-wander.”

The study gave people various tasks to do — some of which were easy and others more difficult.

Regularly throughout the study people indicated whether their mind was wandering, intentionally, unintentionally or if they were on-task.

The study’s authors write:

“We suspect that when people are completing an easy task, they may be inclined to deliberately disengage from the task and engage in mind wandering.

This might be the case because easy tasks tend to be rather boring, or because people realize that they can get away with mind wandering without sacrificing performance.

Conversely, when completing a difficult task, people really need to focus on the task in order to perform well, so if they do mind-wander, their mind wandering should be more likely to occur unintentionally.”

And this was exactly the pattern they observed.

The difficult task produced more unintentional mind wandering while the easy task produced more intentional mind wandering.

Dr Seli said:

“These results challenge the common view that all mind wandering is unintentional.

Importantly, this result indicates that intentional and unintentional mind wandering are unique cognitive experiences that sometimes behave differently.

In turn, this suggests that researchers ought to distinguish between these two unique subtypes of mind wandering in future work.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Seli et al., 2016).

Relaxing office image from Shutterstock