Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

Creativity Blocked? Try a Common Scents Solution

December 3, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Woman sleeping below odor lines

“Sleep on it” is a traditional piece of advice for puzzled people in need of an innovative solution. In recent years, the wisdom of this approach has been validated by science, with one study linking dream-heavy REM sleep with later flashes of insight. There is no guarantee you’ll awake from a nap with an ending for your novel. But newly published research suggests the odds of such a breakthrough increase if you remind your slumbering self of the pressing issue at hand. That requires employing a sense that remains alert and functioning even as we sleep: smell. In a ... Read More

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Further Evidence Links Creativity, Dishonesty

November 26, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can Be More Dishonest is the title of a provocative paper published precisely one year ago. Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke University presented evidence that highly creative people are more likely to engage in unethical activities, apparently because they are better at finding ways to justify such behavior. While those who value creativity conceded the logic of that equation, many were reluctant to embrace that uncomfortable conclusion. But newly published research confirms those results, and adds a ... Read More

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Hip-Hop on the Brain

November 16, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
(ILLUSTRATION: FOTOLIA)

My hometown, Minneapolis, may not have been the cradle of hip-hop, but by the late 90s, when I hit high school, it was a Mecca for indie rappers and DJs. More than a few of my friends kept “rhyme books” stashed in their lockers and spent weekends pawing through vinyl at Fifth Element, the local record store. I remember Brad Hartung, a youth leader and beat-box extraordinaire, picking up a microphone at a church retreat and just about blowing the roof off the sanctuary. I remember, too, a short-lived after-school rap group that recorded freestyle sessions in Pat Jarosch’s attic. Most of ... Read More

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The Creativity of the Wandering Mind

September 4, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Brick

Do you have a numbingly dull job, one so monotonous that you frequently find your mind wandering? Well, congratulations: without realizing it, you have boosted your creative potential. Mindless tasks that allow our thoughts to roam can be catalysts for innovation. That’s the conclusion of a research team led by Benjamin Baird and Jonathan Schooler of the University of California, Santa Barbara’s META Lab (which focuses on Memory, Emotion, Thought and Awareness). Their research, published in the journal Psychological Science, suggests putting a difficult problem in the back of your ... Read More

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To Boost Creativity, Study Abroad

August 6, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Creativity Boost Abroad

Looking to hire someone who will make a creative contribution to your organization? Here’s a tip: When checking applicants’ college transcripts, don’t focus exclusively on their grades or honors. Take note of whether they spent time studying abroad. That’s the implication of newly published research, which provides the best evidence yet that studying overseas boosts one’s creativity. A semester spent in Spain or Senegal leads to higher creativity scores on two different tests, according to research conducted by Christine Lee, David Therriault, and Tracy Linderholm of the ... Read More

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Book Review: Practical Ways to Become More Creative

July 6, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Innovation Generation: How to produce creative and useful scientific ideas" By Roberta Ness (New York: Oxford University Press) $29.95

Reviewed by Paul Silvia, associate professor of psychology, University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Some of science’s best ideas hide in plain sight: they seem obvious, even fatuous, but they have surprising implications. In the 1950s, J. P. Guilford, a founder of modern creativity research, wondered what would happen if he told some people to “be creative” while they were working on creativity tasks. He gathered a sample of adults and had them come up with unusual uses for common objects and write titles for short stories; half were told to try to come up with creative ideas. Not ... Read More

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A Flash of Green Enhances Creativity

March 20, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Want to be more creative? You might want to take a stroll through the park, eat a spinach salad, or catch a few minutes of the Muppets — keeping your eye on Kermit the Frog. According to newly published research, innovative thinking seems to be stimulated by the color green. A research team led by University of Munich psychologist Stephanie Lichtenfeld reports the color of limes and leaves “has implications beyond aesthetics.” Specifically, a glimpse of green appears to activate “the type of pure, open (mental) processing required to do well on creativity tasks.” The ... Read More

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Thinking Creatively: Just Add Milk

February 23, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Want to boost your creativity? Tomorrow morning, pour some milk into an empty bowl, and then add the cereal. That may sound, well, flaky. But according to a newly published study, preparing a common meal in reverse order may stimulate innovative thinking. Avoiding conventional behavior at the breakfast table “can help people break their cognitive patterns, and thus lead them to think more flexibly and creatively,” according to a research team led by psychologist Simone Ritter of Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. She and her colleagues, including Rodica Ioana Damian ... Read More

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Pressure to Conform Can Inspire Creativity

February 6, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Do you think of yourself as not particularly creative? Well, you might have more innovative ideas than you realize. To access them, you just need to feel some pressure to conform. Admittedly, that sounds like an oxymoron; creative thinking and conformity are usually considered mutually exclusive. But newly published research finds a specific sort of arm twisting can help people who aren’t terribly innovative increase their creative output. The key is pressuring them to think independently, within the confines of a group project. In the journal Organizational Behavior and Human ... Read More

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Morning People May Be More Creative in the Afternoon

January 23, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Are you struggling with a problem that requires a creative solution? If so, your impulse might be to attack it during that time of the day when you feel fresh, rested and alert. New research suggests that would be precisely the wrong approach. Participants in an experiment were more likely to solve “insight problems” — mind-stretchers that require an “aha moment” to crack — when quizzed during a time period when they weren’t at their peak. “Morning people” scored higher in the late afternoon, while “evening people” did better in the a.m. A pair of Michigan ... Read More

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