How magic boosts creativity

Creativity is more important than ever. Cognitive psychologist, Mark Runco, states “an ever-changing world needs minds that are flexible and adaptable”. The past two years have been a perfect illustration of how important creativity is in adapting to challenges and modifications of our environment. Even without a pandemic shaking our habits, creativity is a crucial element of social capital and an important component of problem-solving, healthy emotional and social well-being, and success in adult life. Recent studies suggest that being creative not only decreases negative emotions, reduces stress and anxiety, but it even predicts a longer life (Scientific American).

Creativity is as crucial for businesses as it is for individuals. Creative thinking allows us to identify new opportunities, embrace challenges, be innovative and even improve our collaboration skills. It’s essential for significant outcomes in virtually every profession. With constant leaps in technology and the globalisation of business, our world has never had so many changes in a short space of time. Because of this, organisations are dealing with an ever-increasing number of challenges and creativity is now considered one of the most important factors to adapt to these and react appropriately. According to some researchers (1), the most important source of growth in the 21st century is not technology, knowledge or competition, it’s human creativity.?

It's the cornerstone of innovation and one of the top skills organisations want. It's a vital way for companies to thrive, respond to changes and develop new capabilities. Without it, there are no game-changing ideas, new experiences or transformation are unlikely to occur. A 2020 LinkedIn study, using data from over 660 million professionals, revealed creativity is the top skill needed by companies. In his book A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, Daniel Pink argues that creativity provides a competitive advantage by adding value to a company’s service or product, and differentiating the business from the competition. The author explains that linear left-brain analytical thinking is being replaced by right-brain inventiveness and understanding skills, now most needed by businesses.?

The benefits of nurturing and increasing organisational creativity do not stop at having a competitive advantage. It also introduces beneficial dynamics to teams and brings positive changes to the organisation (2, 3). Indeed, creativity is not only associated with being more productive, but also with commitment and even happiness (4).?

In summary, creativity...

Helps problem-solve and respond positively to challenges

Gives companies a competitive advantage

Brings positive change

Nurtures a positive company culture

But wait, what is creativity?

We often think of creativity as artistry, but it doesn’t just involve generating a new product or work of art. It's an important way to solve problems in new ways. It’s the ability to generate and recognise ideas, possibilities and alternatives that may be both useful in solving problems (having a direct or indirect value), and novel, original. A creative organisation can be defined as “any business entity whose main source of income comes from the production of novel and appropriate ideas, processes, products or services to tackle clients’ problems or opportunities identified” (5).?

Can people become more creative?

Due to the fast-changing world we inhabit, there's been a growing interest in work environments that support employee creativity, which is itself the foundation for all organisational creativity. But can we become more creative? Well, the short answer is yes. The myth that only talented, gifted and special people are creative needs to be buried. Despite the many controversies on creativity (e.g., how to define or measure it), the one thing that researchers tend to agree on is that creative potential exists in everyone and creativity is malleable.?

But let’s be honest, academic institutions often encourage linear rather than creative thinking. We are taught to use synthetic processes and express the ability to give a correct answer to a standardised problem, rather than create. So how can we learn to develop our creative-thinking? Most recent approaches for boosting creativity involve brain stimulation (6) or pharmacological intervention (7), which are fraught with difficulties due to side effects and poor reliability. Alternative creativity enhancement methods employ specific task instructions (e.g., explicitly asking people to be creative during the tasks (8)) or mindset (e.g.,? priming people to be playful for the task (9)), but these effects are usually weak and inconsistent across tasks (8,10) and individuals. So how can companies boost team creativity?

Did someone say magic?

The last decade has seen a sharp increase in scientific interest in magic and how to use it to study different psychological principles. From attention, belief-formation, problem-solving and even free will, many psychologists are now conducting research into using magic as a means to explore the human mind. Recently, a study conducted by Professor Richard Wiseman at the University of Hertfordshire investigated how learning to perform magic tricks could help boost creativity (11). For this experiment, a group of 10-11 year-old children were taught how to perform a simple magic trick. They also completed a creativity test before and after they learned, and performed the trick. The test, called Alternative Uses Test, consists of coming up with multiple uses for an everyday object. The results showed that compared to another group of children who took part in an art lesson, learning the trick significantly boosted the children’s divergent thinking creativity scores.

? Try this ?

- Take any object around you at home or at work
- Set a timer for two minutes
- Then come up with as many alternate uses for that object as possible 

This test is a great way of measuring divergent thinking - the ability to find as many answers to a problem as possible. 

Exploring the potential of a problem and coming up with ingenious solutions allows us to move away from conformity, examining what we don’t know.?        

Why - and how - does learning magic boost creativity?

Teaching someone to perform a trick involves two stages. Firstly, the spectator sees a sequence of events that violate their expectations about causation. Here, the person experiences a conflict between what they believe is possible and what they've just experienced. For instance, I know that objects cannot disappear into thin air, but one might experience this phenomenon during a magic performance. Therefore the first step involves experiencing an apparently impossible event.

The mere act of witnessing a trick might in itself help boost creativity. Some research has shown that any activity which disrupts our usual schemata of perception and understanding of the world can help us generate more novel, original ideas. For instance, Milica Vasiljevic and Richard Crisp (12) found that participants who were asked to generate counter-stereotypical categories (such as rich student) obtained higher divergent thinking scores than participants who had to generate stereotypical ones (poor student). More closely linked to magic, other research shows that people can become more creative when they experience magical or fantastical events. Children who watched a short film featuring ‘magical’ events (e.g., wizards performing the impossible) subsequently obtained higher creativity scores than those watching non-magical film clips (13). In other words, if you don’t know what to watch tonight, Harry Potter or the Lord of the Rings might be a good idea to boost your creativity!

Looking at our neuronal activity when we observe magic also helps us understand why this first step might increase our creative thinking. What happens in our brain when we watch magic? Some scientists put this question to the test and observed participants’ brain activity while they watched a magic trick (14). The results showed that a brain area called the anterior cingulate cortex, associated with processing anomalous information and with cognitive flexibility (the ability to adapt our behaviour and thinking in response to the environment) were specifically activated! This research suggests that simply witnessing a magic trick can boost divergent thinking.

For the second stage of learning a trick, the magician explains how the trick was done and reveals the secret of the illusion. For instance, the performer might explain that they dropped the coin into their lap to give the illusion that it magically disappeared. Here, people not only witness a magic trick, but also learn it. As the research team further explains, learning to perform magic encourages us to think ‘outside the box’, perform unusual tasks, thereby promoting creative thinking.?

While the benefits of creativity are widely recognised, Professor Wiseman’s recent study was the first to experimentally explore the impact that learning magic has on creativity. Future research might help us shed light on what types of tricks are especially beneficial and how best to use such interventions to foster creativity in organisations.

It is important to note that one of the most essential drivers of whether individuals will be creative depends on their beliefs about themselves as a creative individual (15). Scientific literature on creativity underlines the fact that, for someone to transform their creative potential into action, they must have confidence in their ability to act creatively. More specifically, theories on creativity suggest that if businesses seek to promote more creativity, they need to engage their teams in educational activities that support creative self-beliefs. Art-based methods have been suggested as the key approach to explore (16).

So, learning and practising a few tricks might just be the perfect way to gain some self-confidence about your creative potential and unleash your inner magic!

References

1. Florida, R. The rise of creative class. (Hachette UK, 2019).

2. Amabile, T. M., Conti, R., Coon, H., Lazenby, J. & Herron, M. Assessing the work environment for creativity. Acad. Manag. J. (1996). doi:10.2307/256995

3. Martins, E. C. & Terblanche, F. Building organisational culture that stimulates creativity and innovation. European Journal of Innovation Management (2003). doi:10.1108/14601060310456337

4. Csikszentmihalyi, M. Flow and Creativity. NAMTA J. (1997).

5. Andriopoulos, C. & Lowe, A. Enhancing organisational creativity: the process of perpetual challenging. Manag. Decis. (2000). doi:10.1108/00251740010379768

6. Di Bernardi Luft, C., Zioga, I., Thompson, N. M., Banissy, M. J. & Bhattacharya, J. Right temporal alpha oscillations as a neural mechanism for inhibiting obvious associations. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. (2018). doi:10.1073/pnas.1811465115

7. Beversdorf, D. Q. Neuropsychopharmacological regulation of performance on creativity-related tasks. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 55–63 (2019). doi:10.1016/j.cobeha.2018.09.010

8. Acar, S., Runco, M. A. & Park, H. What Should People Be Told When They Take a Divergent Thinking Test? A Meta-Analytic Review of Explicit Instructions for Divergent Thinking. Psychol. Aesthetics, Creat. Arts (2019). doi:10.1037/aca0000256

9. Zabelina, D. L. & Robinson, M. D. Child’s Play: Facilitating the Originality of Creative Output by a Priming Manipulation. Psychol. Aesthetics, Creat. Arts (2010). doi:10.1037/a0015644

10. Chen, C. et al. Effects of explicit instruction to ‘be creative’ across domains and cultures. J. Creat. Behav. (2005). doi:10.1002/j.2162-6057.2005.tb01252.x

11. Wiseman, R., Wiles, A. & Watt, C. Conjuring up creativity: The effect of performing magic tricks on divergent thinking. PeerJ (2021). doi:10.7717/peerj.11289

12. Vasiljevic, M. & Crisp, R. J. Tolerance by Surprise: Evidence for a Generalized Reduction in Prejudice and Increased Egalitarianism through Novel Category Combination. PLoS One (2013). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0057106

13. Subbotsky, E., Hysted, C. & Jones, N. Watching films with magical content facilitates creativity in children. Percept. Mot. Skills (2010). doi:10.2466/04.09.11.PMS.111.4.261-277

14. Parris, B. A., Kuhn, G., Mizon, G. A., Benattayallah, A. & Hodgson, T. L. Imaging the impossible: An fMRI study of impossible causal relationships in magic tricks. Neuroimage 45, 1033–1039 (2009).

15. Beghetto, R. A. & Dilley, A. E. Creative Aspirations or Pipe Dreams? Toward Understanding Creative Mortification in Children and Adolescents. New Dir. Child Adolesc. Dev. (2016). doi:10.1002/cad.20150

16. Homayoun, S. & Henriksen, D. Creativity in business education: A review of creative self-belief theories and arts-based methods. Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity (2018). doi:10.3390/joitmc4040055