Creativity - Page 7 of 8

How Borderline Personality Disorder Affects The Brain

Why people with borderline personality disorder have poor relationships.

Why people with borderline personality disorder have poor relationships.

People with borderline personality disorder find it difficult to empathise, a new study finds.

Dr Brian Haas, the study’s lead author, said:

“Our results showed that people with BPD traits had reduced activity in brain regions that support empathy.
This reduced activation may suggest that people with more BPD traits have a more difficult time understanding and/or predicting how others feel, at least compared to individuals with fewer BPD traits.”

The results come from 80 participants who were given a test of borderline personality disorder (BPD).

Like all personality traits, it exists on a continuum: you can be a little BPD or a lot.

Dr Haas explained:

“Oftentimes, borderline personality disorder is considered a binary phenomenon.
Either you have it or you don’t.
But for our study, we conceptualized and measured it in a more continuous way such that individuals can vary along a continuum of no traits to very many BPD traits.”

In the brain scanner, people carried out a task which required them to think about other people’s emotional states.

The researchers found that those with more traits of BPD had less activity in two areas of the brain linked to empathic processing.

Dr Joshua Miller, who co-authored the study, said:

“Borderline personality disorder is considered one of the most severe and troubling personality disorders.
BPD can make it difficult to have successful friendships and romantic relationships.
These findings could help explain why that is.”

The research was published in the journal Personality Disorders (Haas & Miller, 2015).

• Read on: Borderline Personality Disorder: 8 Classic Signs You Should Know

Network brain image from Shutterstock

An Everyday Activity That Boosts Brain Size And Flexible Thinking

How to think more flexibly and grow a larger brain.

How to think more flexibly and grow a larger brain.

Adults who are more physically active have greater mental flexibility, new research reports.

On top of this, those who do more exercise have larger brain volumes and more intact white matter.

The new research found that moderate or vigorous physical activity was linked to more variable brain activity in older adults.

It’s known that variable brain activity is linked to performing better on complex cognitive tasks.

Professor Agnieszka Burzynska, who led the research said:

“We looked at 100 adults between the ages of 60 and 80, and we used accelerometers to objectively measure their physical activity over a week.

We found that spontaneous brain activity showed more moment-to-moment fluctuations in the more-active adults.
In a previous study, we showed that in some of the same regions of the brain, those people who have higher brain variability also performed better on complex cognitive tasks, especially on intelligence tasks and memory.”

Participants had their brains scanned and the amount of exercise they’d done over a week recorded.

The microscopic integrity of the brain’s white-matter fibres was also examined.

The white matter is the brain’s cabling: it transmits signals between different areas.

Professor Art Kramer, also a study author, said:

“Our study, when viewed in the context of previous studies that have examined behavioral variability in cognitive tasks, suggests that more-fit older adults are more flexible, both cognitively and in terms of brain function, than their less-fit peers.”

Not only does the study underline the mental benefits of exercise, it also provides another way to assess brain health in aging.

Professor Burzynska said:

“We want to know how the brain relates to the body, and how physical health influences mental and brain health in aging.
Here, instead of a structural measure, we are taking a functional measure of brain health.
And we are finding that tracking changes in blood-oxygenation levels over time is useful for predicting cognitive functioning and physical health in aging.”

One day it may be possible to tell how physically fit a person is by imaging the brain.

The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE (Burzynska et al., 2015).

Network brain image from Shutterstock

The Surprising Mental Benefit To Glancing At a Grassy Rooftop for 40 Seconds

The surprising effect of glancing at a grassy rooftop for just 40 seconds.

The surprising effect of glancing at a grassy rooftop for just 40 seconds.

Taking a 40 second break to glance at a grassy rooftop boosts concentration and reduces mental errors, a new study finds.

Dr Kate Lee, of the University of Melbourne Faculty of Science, who led the study, said:

“We know that green roofs are great for the environment, but now we can say that they boost attention too.
Imagine the impact that has for thousands of employees working in nearby offices.
This study showed us that looking at an image of nature for less than a minute was all it took to help people perform better on our task.

Dr Lee continued:

“It’s really important to have micro-breaks.
It’s something that a lot of us do naturally when we’re stressed or mentally fatigued.
There’s a reason you look out the window and seek nature, it can help you concentrate on your work and to maintain performance across the workday.
Certainly this study has implications for workplace well-being and adds extra impetus to continue greening our cities.
City planners around the world are switching on to these benefits of green roofs and we hope the future of our cities will be a very green one.”

The study was published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology (Lee et al., 2015)

Network brain image from Shutterstock

Creativity Boost From Method That May Also Treat Depression

New method found to increase creativity and could be used to treat depression.

New method found to increase creativity and could be used to treat depression.

A small amount of electricity applied to the brain can increase creativity, a new study finds.

Electricity applied at the correct frequency to the scalp can enhance the brain’s natural alpha rhythms.

Dr Flavio Frohlich, PhD, one of the study’s authors, said:

“We’ve provided the first evidence that specifically enhancing alpha oscillations is a causal trigger of a specific and complex behavior — in this case, creativity.
But our goal is to use this approach to help people with neurological and psychiatric illnesses.
For instance, there is strong evidence that people with depression have impaired alpha oscillations.
If we could enhance these brain activity patterns, then we could potentially help many people.”

The researchers are now running studies to test the effect on depression.

Dr Frohlich continued:

“The fact that we’ve managed to enhance creativity in a frequency-specific way — in a carefully-done double-blinded placebo-controlled study — doesn’t mean that we can definitely treat people with depression.
But if people with depression are stuck in a thought pattern and fail to appropriately engage with reality, then we think it’s possible that enhancing alpha oscillations could be a meaningful, noninvasive, and inexpensive treatment paradigm for them — similar to how it enhanced creativity in healthy participants.”

The research comes as a result of a revolution in how scientists think about alpha waves.

Originally discovered by Hans Berger in 1929, alpha waves are most prominent when we shut off sensory stimuli by, for example, closing our eyes.

Dr Frohlich said:

“For a long time, people thought alpha waves represented the brain idling.
But over the past 20 years we’ve developed much better insight.
Our brains are not wasting energy, creating these patterns for nothing.
When the brain is decoupled from the environment, it still does important things.”

Treat depression

For the study, researchers placed two electrodes over the frontal cortex and one at the back.

They found that people were much more creative when the current was applied at the correct frequency of 10 Hertz.

In comparison 40 Hertz oscillations did nothing for people.

Dr Frohlich said:

“Using 40 Hertz, we saw no effect on creativity.
The effect we saw was specific to the 10-hertz alpha oscillations.
There’s no statistical trickery.
You just have to look at each participant’s test to see these effects.”

Frohlich said, though, that their focus was on finding a treatment for depression:

“There are people that are cognitively impaired and need help, and sometimes there are no medications that help or the drugs have serious side effects.
Helping these populations of people is why we do this kind of research.”

The study was published in the journal Cortex (Lustenberger et al., 2015).

Lightbulb image from Shutterstock

The Creative Therapy Which Reduces Depression in Young and Old Alike

Boosts to self-esteem and depression from this creative therapy, new study finds.

Boosts to self-esteem and depression from this creative therapy, new study finds.

Music therapy can reduce depression in children and adolescents with emotional and behavioural problems, a large new study finds.

It comes soon after a positive review of the evidence for music therapy in older people.

The new three-year study followed 251 children who were split into two groups: around half were given care as normal, while the other half were given normal care plus musical therapy.

The music therapy itself included things like the therapist asking children to describe how they felt by playing a tune.

All the children in the study were being treated for behavioural, emotional or developmental problems.

The results showed that those who received the music therapy had higher self-esteem and reduced depression in comparison to those that had care as usual.

The early results suggest the effects are long-lasting.

Professor Sam Porter, who led the study, said:

“This study is hugely significant in terms of determining effective treatments for children and young people with behavioral problems and mental health needs.”

This study is particularly notable as much research into music therapy is poorly designed and of relatively limited scope.

Ciara Reilly, Chief Executive of the Northern Ireland Music Therapy Trust, said:

“Music therapy has often been used with children and young people with particular mental health needs, but this is the first time its effectiveness has been shown by a definitive randomized controlled trial in a clinical setting.
The findings are dramatic and underscore the need for music therapy to be made available as a mainstream treatment option.
For a long time we have relied on anecdotal evidence and small-scale research findings about how well music therapy works.
Now we have robust clinical evidence to show its beneficial effects.”

The study comes soon after a review of research on music therapy, which found it can also have beneficial effects for older people (Eells, 2014).

Simply listening to music, as well as singing along, were found to be beneficial for older adults experiencing long-term depression, anxiety and pain.

While medication can provide some relief, many people, quite naturally, prefer music.

Not only does music improve feelings, but it can help memory, provide a better connection to others and increases overall quality of life.

Image credit: Sam Nasim

The Positive Effect of Creative Hobbies on Performance at Work

Why photography, cooking or other creative hobbies might help you get on at work.

People who have a creative hobby outside work may find it boosts their work performance, according to a new study by organisational psychologists.

The study looked at the indirect effect of creative hobbies like photography, needlework or cooking on work performance (Eschleman et al., 2014).

The study found that creative hobbies may help employees recover from the demands of their job.

People in the study talked passionately about their activities outside of work.

The study’s lead author, Kevin Eschleman, said:

“They usually describe it as lush, as a deep experience that provides a lot of things for them.
“But they also talk about this idea of self-expression and an opportunity to really discover something about themselves, and that isn’t always captured with the current recovery experience models.”

In the study, two groups of people were asked about their creative activities outside work and also how creative they were at work.

The first group of 341 employees self-rated their job performance while a second group of 92 US Air Force captains were evaluated by coworkers and subordinates.

The results from both samples showed that those who had a creative hobby were more likely to feel a sense of relaxation outside work and to feel greater control and a sense of mastery.

At work, meanwhile, those with a creative hobby were more likely to help others and to be more creative in the performance of their job.

Statistical analysis suggested that the better job performance was partly a result of a greater sense of mastery and control during off-time.

Creative recovery

This study doesn’t mean organisations should start forcing employees to take up creative hobbies.

Eschleman continued:

“One of the main concerns is that you don’t want to have someone feel like their organization is controlling them, especially when it comes to creative activities.
Because intrinsic motivation is part of that unique experience that comes with creative activity.”

Instead the authors suggest:

“Large organizations, such as Zappos Inc., incorporate employee artwork into office decorations.
Other similar activities commonly found in organizations include food cook-offs, cross-discipline education opportunities, and costume contests during holidays.
A more cost-effective and less intrusive approach for organization is to inform employees that creative activity may help them recover from the workplace.” (Eschleman et al., 2014)

Image credit: Margot Gabel

Similarities in Dopamine System Between Highly Creative People and Schizophrenics

“Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box.”

Swedish researchers have found similarities in the dopamine system between highly creative individuals and those with schizophrenia.

The study, published in PLoS ONE, fuels the debate about the connection between madness and creativity (Manzano et al., 2010).

One of the study’s author, associate professor Fredrik Ullén, explained:

“The study shows that highly creative people who did well on the divergent tests had a lower density of D2 receptors in the thalamus than less creative people.
“Schizophrenics are also known to have low D2 density in this part of the brain, suggesting a cause of the link between mental illness and creativity.”

The reason for the focus on the thalamus is that it serves as a kind of relay centre for the brain, filtering information before it reaches other areas responsible for higher-level thinking.

“Fewer D2 receptors in the thalamus probably means a lower degree of signal filtering, and thus a higher flow of information from the thalamus.”

One of the key abilities of creative people is to make unusual connections between ideas.

Theoretically this could be enhanced by these differences in the dopamine system.

Dr Ullén sums up by saying:

“Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box.”

Image credit: Gioia De Antonlis

Habits and The Unexpected Benefits of Weak Self-Control

Why sometimes having low self-control helps you perform good habits.

It’s not often that anyone talks about the benefits of low self-control. That’s because usually low self-control has bad consequences: over-eating, over-spending under-exercising and the rest.

That said, there are some circumstances in which being in a weakened state can be good news for our diets, our health or even our credit cards.

These arise out of the way that habits work. Typically we perform habits automatically and unconsciously.

Let’s say you’ve got a long-established habit of going to the gym before work or of practising the piano in the evening.

But, one morning, after a bad night’s sleep, you feel mentally weak when you get up, then after a gruelling day at work you return home with your mental energy badly depleted. What will happen to the gym and piano practise?

You might imagine that when self-control is weak, as it will be in these situations, you’re more likely to give up on relatively demanding tasks and have a lie-in or watch some TV.

But that’s where the twist comes in. Because established habits tend to activate automatically, the exact reverse is true. Tiredness and low self-control actually make established routines more likely to be followed. It takes a mental effort not to follow your usual routine. So, when your self-control is low, you are actually more likely to get to the gym or practise the piano (so long as both are well-established habits).

Sounds unlikely?

A brand new psychology paper demonstrates exactly this pattern in a series of 5 studies (Neal et al., 2013). When people in these studies were feeling weak, they were more likely to perform strong habits in the same situations.

In other words, all things being equal, if the gym-habit was strong, they were more likely to go to the gym when their self-control was low.

The down-side of how habits work is that, just like good habits, bad habits are also more likely to be performed when our self-control is low. Until new, strong, improved habits are formed, we are at the mercy of our self-control to keep us on the straight-and-narrow.

Once established, though, strong habits repay the effort made to build them up many times over. So try to build up good routines that are activated by regular situations that you are in. Strong habits have the power to pull us through in difficult moments, even when we don’t feel like performing them.

→ To find out more about how to build strong habits, check out my book ‘Making Habits, Breaking Habits‘.

Image credit: Jiuck

How to Create Brand New Solutions From Old Objects and Ideas

Sometimes the pieces of the puzzle are all there in front of you, but you just can’t put them together.

What psychologists call ‘functional fixedness’ is a common creativity-blocker. It’s when thinking about an object or idea gets stuck in a rut. It’s like the old saying that when you’ve got a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail.

It comes up all the time: at home, work, family, wherever. We all get stuck thinking in habitual ways about objects, ideas or even people at some time. To arrive at new solutions, we have to escape from these stale, established ways of thinking.

Here’s a little test you can try out to see if you can escape from functional fixedness:

“…consider the two-rings problem, in which the participant has to fasten together two weighty steel rings using only a long candle, a match, and a 2-in. cube of steel [and] melted wax is not strong enough to bond the rings.” (McCaffrey, 2012)

Any ideas?

The key to the problem is remembering that a candle contains a wick and wicks aren’t just for burning, they are also pieces of string, which can be used for tying.

Once you get this flash of insight and escape from the fixed function of a candle (which is further reinforced by the presence of a match), the problem seems incredibly obvious. But until that moment you might as well be tackling Fermat’s Last Theorem.

That’s why Tom McCaffrey, a psychologist at UMass, has developed the ‘Generic-Parts-Technique’ to help us escape from functional fixedness. It simply involves asking two questions:

Can you break the problem down more?
Does the new, simpler, more generic description imply a use?

The thinking for a candle might go: first you break the candle down into its components, the wick and the string. Then you ask yourself what uses you can put a wick and a string to.

McCaffrey gave this and other similar puzzles to people to see if the technique works. Those in the control group only solved about 50% of these sorts of little puzzles. For those using the Generic-Parts-Technique, though, the success rate went up to 83%.

This works rather neatly for the type of puzzles tested in this study, but would it work in the real world? Well, it will depend on whether the answer to your problem already exists and is known to you, but in a different form.

There is evidence that this is often the case. A recent book, 1001 Inventions That Changed the World, looked at innovations both ancient and modern, and found that almost all involved co-opting existing items and ideas for new uses.

The Generic-Parts-Technique is useful because it’s a great way of tackling complex problems. The first rule encourages you to break the problem down into its component parts and this is almost always a sensible move. The mind can sometimes be much more creative with abstractions because you can start ignoring all the things you know about, say, a hammer, and start to see it in a new light.

The second rule, thinking about alternative uses, encourages a kind of practicality which is divorced from habitual uses. By going around this loop, through abstractions and alternative uses, you create sparks of ideas which may well help you through that mental road-block.

Image credit: Patrizio Cuscito

The Incubation Effect: How to Break Through a Mental Block

Taking a break may help bring that Eureka moment, but what part does the unconscious play?

Mental blocks are incredibly irritating.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re pondering spreadsheets at work, trying to decide what colour to paint the shed or wondering where to spend the holidays, sometimes you hit a mental block and can’t go forwards.

It might be that the number of options is overwhelming or, at the other extreme, that you can’t come up with a single idea. Either way you’re stuck and in that moment there seems like no way out.

The usual solution is simply to take a break. After an hour, a day or a week, you return to the problem afresh and suddenly everything seems clear. You can’t understand what the problem was in the first place: the answer is right there, staring you in the face.

This is a fascinating capability of the mind. It’s wonderful that it can solve problems unconsciously while we’re getting on with day-to-day life.

I’ve come back to problems that have stumped me and been amazed to feel the answer pop into my head as if by magic. It partly makes up for all those times I get lost in the city or can’t remember my next-door neighbour’s name.

Incubation works

The incubation effect is well-known and was included in an early four-stage theory of creativity, put forward in 1926 by Graham Wallas, an English psychologist:

Preparation
Incubation
Illumination or insight
Verification

The problem with this theory is that the incubation phase is extremely mysterious. First you prepare, then you ‘incubate’, which involves making no conscious effort to solve the problem, then comes the insight. It sounds too good to be true.

Whether it sounds too good to be true or not, the psychological research backs up the common experience that incubation (or taking a break) does work. About 50 different studies have been carried out on the incubation effect and three-quarters of them find an effect.

The question is: why does it work? (This argument matters practically and I’ll explain why in a moment.)

Is it just rest?

One group of psychologists say it’s only the effect of resting. When you take a break from a problem you rest your mind and when you come back it’s fresher, so you do better.

It’s not just you that’s fresher, it’s also your take on the problem that has been freshened up. Before, you saw the problem in a particular way which limited your ability to come up with solutions. After a break, though, you forget things that held you back, which allows the breakthrough.

On the other side of the fence sit psychologists who say, yes, these things are important, but they don’t tell the full story. The break doesn’t just freshen you up, it gives your unconscious time to work towards a solution.

This argument is important because if the unconscious is doing some processing then it matters that you’re motivated, expecting to work on the problem again and that you’re creative. If not, all that matters is that you take a break.

The alternative uses task

These two views have been tested in a new study by Gallate et al. (2012). They gave participants a standard creativity test which…

“…involves listing as many novel uses as you can for an everyday object in two minutes.
Take for example, a chair: yes you can sit on it but that’s not a novel use. You can also stand on it which is a little more novel. Much more novel is using it to build a home-made fort, burning it to fight the cold or hitting someone with it in a bar-room fight.
The more of these examples you can come up with in an allotted amount of time, typically the more creative you are (try it, it’s good fun).” (from: Duck/Rabbit Illusion Provides a Simple Test of Creativity)

After this they were given a maths test to keep their conscious minds busy, and then asked to do the creativity test again. The catch was that only some of the participants were told they would be returning to the creativity test, the rest were visibly surprised to be asked to do it again.

For the participants who were surprised by the second test of creativity, their average performance didn’t improve much. In contrast those who were told had time for their unconscious to work on the problem and they did improve. In fact they came up with more than twice as many novel ideas the second time.

Breaking through

This study suggests, then, that unconscious processing is important in the incubation effect. It seems that for the group who knew they’d be doing the task again, their unconscious was working away in the background thinking up more solutions.

This means that breaking through a mental block is about more than just taking a break. It helps to be motivated and to know that you will be returning to the problem. It also helps if you are a creative person because this study found that people who were naturally more creative benefited more from the break.

At a time when we always seem to be in a hurry, we need reminding that taking a break is a simple but effective tool for boosting creativity. To come up with creative solutions to problems, your chances are increased by incorporating breaks into your work-flow.

Here are two more research-based hints to get the most from your incubation periods:

Prepare. Another boost for the incubation effect comes from preparation. If you’ve looked at the problem from more angles before you start incubating, there’s more chance your unconscious can give you some answers.
Short breaks. Even relatively short periods of incubation can be successful. Studies have found that 30-minute incubation periods can be superior to 24 hours.

Image credit: Khalid Albaih