Category: Creativity

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).

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).

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).

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