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Category: Creativity
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How To Be As Unbelievably Creative As Darwin And Newton
Darwin and Wallace came up with the theory of natural selection at the same time. Why?
Darwin and Wallace came up with the theory of natural selection at the same time. Why?
New technologies and ideas emerge from our collected brains — not individual geniuses, research finds.
Innovations emerge, the paper argues, by small improvements, the mixing of ideas, situations and pure luck.
While Darwin, Newton and the rest were clearly talented and driven individuals, they were “standing on the shoulders of giants”.
The best thing you can do to be more creative, one of the paper’s authors argues, is to talk to people who disagree with you.
Dr Michael Muthukrishna, the study’s lead author, said:
“The processes of cumulative cultural evolution allow technologies and techniques to emerge, which no single individual could create on their own – because human brains, in isolation, aren’t actually all that smart.
We can see this process at work when two people have the same apparently innovative idea at the same time – such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace with the theory of natural selection.
Rather than being heroic geniuses, Darwin and Wallace were in the same ‘cultural milieu’, both reading the same books and both travelling to biologically diverse island environments.”
Societal innovation is affected by three factors, the researchers found:
- Larger more interconnected societies where ideas can mix.
- Easy transmission of useful knowledge between people so that it can be built upon.
- Tolerance for deviation: trying new things is hard and the rate of failure is high. This has to be allowed for.
Dr Muthukrishna said:
“To be an innovator, it’s better to be social rather than smart.
There’s no doubt that there are variations in people’s raw skills, but what predicts the difference between a Steve Jobs and a Joe Bloggs is actually their exposure to new ideas that are wonderful and different.
If you want to be more creative the best thing you can do is to talk to people who disagree with you.”
The study was published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (Muthukrishna & Henrich, 2016).
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A 20-Minute Break Is Essential To 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).
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Listening To Music Does NOT Boost Creativity, Study Finds
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:
- Background music with foreign (unfamiliar) lyrics.
- Instrumental music without lyrics.
- Music with familiar lyrics.
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).
Overcoming The Biggest Barrier To Creativity (M)
Tried and tested solutions have their place, but they also limit creativity.
