What Might Be Letting Some Creative People Think Outside the Box, According to Science
Wanda Thibodeaux
Executive ghostwriter, columnist; Host, Faithful on the Clock podcast
Every once in a while, the same video comes across my LinkedIn feed. A little girl, kneeling by her coffee table, gets to work drawing. But there's a caveat: Her piece of paper already has scribbles on it. Her caregiver has put those scribbles on the paper on purpose. No worries. That's kind of the point. What will the little girl create from the seemingly meaningless scribbles?
The result is intensely satisfying. Over and over, the little girl takes the scribbles her caregiver gives her and makes adorable drawings -- a family, a girl in a bunny carriage, three girls holding hands in a circle.
Now, I consider myself to be relatively creative. But make a bunny carriage out of scribbles I cannot. Why can the little girl in the video do it and I can't?
According to new research, it might be because our brains are different in how they interpret how important information is.
The contextual blessing of "leaky attention"
To explore why creative people often notice details others miss, Madeleine Gross of the University of California, Santa Barbara conducted a set of two studies.
In the first study, 51 participants viewed a series of images while wearing electroencephalogram (EEG) caps. Most of the images were rocks. But Gross' team tossed the participants the occasional "oddball" picture of apples. The researchers then looked at a brainwave called the P300, which is associated with how surprising or significant the brain finds a stimulus.
The team found that creative people tend to process oddball information similarly to typical information, having a diminished P300 response. The researchers hypothesize that this diminished brain response might enable creative individuals to break free of conventional boundaries. Because they see more information as "typical," they can avoid getting stuck on what's "obvious." They can look at and consider a broader range of details, which might help give them a different perspective than their less-creative counterparts.
The second of Gross' studies had 200 participants perform the Alternate Uses Tasks, which is a test where individuals must come up with creative uses for an object. Researchers paired this task with a questionnaire about daily activities, which helped the team assess how much participants enjoyed, spontaneously thought about, and wanted to do the activities. They considered the results of the questionnaire in the context of schizotypy, which is a personality trait associated with eccentricity and anomalous perception.
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Previous research on schizotypy showed a weak connection between task wanting and liking -- that is, an individual can like an activity but not want to do it. Gross' second study, however, showed that creative individuals have increased wanting overall. Moreover, there was a positive relationship between liking and wanting. The more the participants liked an activity, the more they wanted to do it.
Based on the combined results of the studies, Gross' team concluded that some creative individuals have atypical salience attribution, or "leaky attention." They have a broader and more distractible attentional style, which influences what they notice and can take inspiration from. Atypical salience attribution is particularly helpful in artistic domains, as shown in this LinkedIn post featuring street art (manhole cover = waffle iron for rodents, anyone?).
But Gross notes that there are different types of creativity. Some tasks, like those conducted in many laboratory contexts, require a "watertight" way of processing information where the individual is able to block out distractions and focus their attention in a highly controlled way. So, a person doesn't necessarily lack creativity just because they don't excel in artistic contexts compared to lab contexts, and vice versa.
Creativity is "process" and "how", but also something even more valuable
Let's go back to the little girl in the video for a moment. In the context of the research above, she might be able to produce her awesome drawings out of scribbles because, unlike yours truly and millions of other people around the world, she doesn't see the scribbles as odd or out of place. Because her brain sees the scribbles as typical, she might be able to take better notice of details (e.g., size and shape) and mentally draw associations between those details and other elements in the world (e.g., pigtails, a bunny).
This study is hardly the only one that attempts to draw some connections between creativity and biology. A study from the Zuckerman Institute, for example, looked at how the brain's ability to categorize objects links to feelings of curiosity, a trait widely associated with creativity.
Yet, as we understand more about how creativity "works," let's not reduce creativity down to cells and chemicals. Let's recall from the little girl's jubilant smile that creativity is not merely a matter of process or how, but also an experience that can offer incredible joy and meaning.
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