Creativity
One of the greatest of all human abilities is its capacity for creative innovation. The lab has examined creativity from a number of different perspectives. In a recent study, we have examined the relationship between creativity and mind wandering (Baird, Smallwood, Mrazek, Franklin, & Schooler, 2012). In this study, participants attempted to come up with alternative uses for common objects (a standard measure of creativity) and then, following various intervening tasks, attempted to generate yet more uses. We found that an activity that encourages mind-wandering, (i.e. a non-demanding task) led to more creative solutions on the second attempt than situations that did not allow for mind-wandering (i.e. no incubation interval or engaging in a demanding task). Strikingly, engaging in a non-demanding task was even better than doing nothing at all with respect to the benefit of the incubation period. Collectively these findings suggest that mind-wandering during non-demanding tasks may be a particularly fertile source of creative inspiration.
The relationship between mindfulness, mind wandering and creativity was further investigated in one of the labs most recent studies (Zedelius & Schooler, 2015). This study revealed that different styles of creative problem solving are facilitated by different modes of thinking. Mindfulness was related to analytic strategies for problem solving while mind wandering may result in greater creative problems solved through insight, or through a sudden “Aha!” moment.
Other areas of research on creativity have included: the impact of thinking out loud on disrupting creative insights (Schooler, Ohlson and Brooks, 1993; Schooler & Melcher, 1995); individual differences in creativity (Schooler & Melcher, 1995), the role of the right hemisphere in creative processes (Fiore & Schooler, 1997), and the relationship between insight processes and perception (Schooler & Melcher, 1995; Schooler, Fallshore, & Fiore 1994)
News
Selected Publications
- Inspired by Distraction Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation
- Creativity and Bipolar Disorder: Touched by Fire or Burning with Questions?
- Process mapping and shared cognition: Teamwork and the development of shared problem models
- Mind wandering “Ahas” versus mindful reasoning: alternative routes to creative solutions
- Right hemisphere contributions to creative problem solving: Converging evidence for divergent thinking
- The Richness of Inner Experience: Relating Styles of Daydreaming to Creative Processes.
- Why creativity is not like the proverbial typing monkey
- Getting a grip on insight: real-time and embodied Aha experiences predict correct solutions
- LSD and creativity: Increased novelty and symbolic thinking, decreased utility and convergent thinking
- Irrelevant insights make worldviews ring true
- Can Viewing Films Promote Creative Thinking Styles? Examining The Complex Roles of Personality and Meaning-Making
- Insight and the selection of ideas
- Back to the basics: Abstract painting as an index of creativity
- Mind Wondering: Curious Daydreaming and Other Potentially Inspiring Forms of Mind-Wandering
- Standing out: An atypical salience account of creativity
- Why creatives don’t find the oddball odd: Neural and psychological evidence for atypical salience processing
- Jumping about: the role of mind-wandering and attentional flexibility in facilitating creative problem-solving