Category: Creativity

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

Listening to happy, energetic music increases people’s creativity, a 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).

The drink increases both divergent and convergent thinking.

Drinking hot tea instantly increases a kind of creativity called ‘divergent thinking’, research finds.

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.

People in the study did a test like this after they either drank a cup of hot water or a cup of black tea.

One test involved arranging building blocks into an attractive design and another involved naming a noodle shop (it was a Chinese study).

The tea drinkers beat the hot water drinkers in both tests.

Other studies have also linked drinking tea to convergent thinking.

This is the ‘other’ type of creativity, which involves coming up with the single correct answer to a problem.

It is still a mystery, though, exactly why tea has this effect on creativity.

Tea drinkers were not in a better mood, nor was there enough caffeine or theanine to make much difference.

Also, both caffeine and theanine take more than a few minutes to kick in and people in the study did the creativity test within minutes of drinking tea.

It also couldn’t be to do with the ritual of making tea as study participants didn’t make it themselves.

The study’s authors write:

“This work contributes to understanding the function of tea on creativity and offers a new way to investigate the relationship between food and beverage consumption and the improvement of human cognition.

Two biological ingredients, caffeine and theanine, have beneficial effects on attention, which is an indispensable part of cognitive function.

But the amount of tea ingredients our participants absorbed was relatively small.

Also, theanine facilitates long-term sustained attentional processing rather than short-term moment-to-moment attentional processing.”

So the mysterious, creative effects of tea remain unexplained…

The study was published in the journal Food Quality and Preference (Huang et al., 2018).

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).

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.”

Imagine the future

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.”

Distant thinking

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).