A simple word game reveals higher levels of divergent thinking, a critical component of creativity.
How to take the ‘road less travelled’.
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).
The missing link in the creative process.
For more creative insight, it is better to work in silence or with only steady background noise.
For more creative insight, it is better to work in silence or with only steady background noise.
Many people believe that music can enhance creativity, but a recent study finds the reverse.
Instead of boosting creativity, people are less creative while listening to music, psychologists have found.
Unlike background noise, music may distract from a creative task, rather than enhance it.
For more creative insight, it is better to work in silence or with only steady background noise.
The conclusions come from a study in which people took a standard psychological test of verbal insight.
People were given three words, such as ‘dress’, ‘dial’ and ‘flower’.
They are asked to find another single word that can be put with all three to make three new words or phrases.
[See the bottom of the article for the answer.]The researchers then tested three different types of background music:
All of these they compared to the steady, but quiet, background noise you might get in a library.
The results showed that all the different types of music — even instrumental without lyrics — impaired people’s ability on the creativity test.
Dr Neil McLatchie, study co-author, said:
“We found strong evidence of impaired performance when playing background music in comparison to quiet background conditions.”
A further study tested if it made any difference if people regularly listened to music while working and if the music put them in a better mood.
The results still showed that for creativity, it was better to work in silence or with a ‘steady state’ background noise.
The study’s authors write:
“To conclude, the findings here challenge the popular view that music enhances creativity, and instead demonstrate that music, regardless of the presence of semantic content (no lyrics, familiar lyrics or unfamiliar lyrics), consistently disrupts creative performance in insight problem solving.”
→ The answer is ‘sun’, making sundress, sundial and sunflower.
The study was published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology (Threadgold et al., 2019).
Tried and tested solutions have their place, but they also limit creativity.
The effect of caffeine on creativity and problem-solving abilities.
People often find it hard to work out which of their ideas is the most creative.
Certain games help stimulate positive human attributes, such as creativity.
Habitual thinking leads to the same answers.
It can enhance mental flexibility.
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).
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