Do you prefer originals to remakes, or the whacky option compared to something more relevant? Well, a new study published in the journal American Psychologist suggests that people more inclined towards original ideas are likely to be more inventive themselves.
Creative mechanisms in the brain are complex and largely unknown – and scientists are still learning how creativity works and what motivates it. But a French team of cognitive neuroscientists are trying to shed the light on this process.
Neuroscientists currently agree that the creative process has two parts: coming up with ideas and then assessing them to choose the good ones.
Led by scientists at the Paris Brain Institute in France, this study focused on that second stage, attempting to pin down characteristics that make people value creative ideas.
It involved testing the creative inclinations and responses of 71 participants. The team measured these individuals’ responses to various tests, including one known as the ‘free association’ test.
If you have been a bored passenger on a long car journey, you may be familiar with a version of this test: it’s when you have to say the most audacious thing that comes to your head in response to various prompts.
The participants then had to rate how much they liked the different associations they produced, and how much they thought their ideas were relevant and original.
From this, the neurologists discovered that people who prefer more original ideas – rather than more relevant ones – tend to suggest more inventive concepts.
The scientists also found that the speed of idea generation is linked to how much value individuals place in the idea.
“The more you like the idea you are about to formulate, the faster you come up with it,” said Emmanuelle Volle, one of the neurologists on the team.
In theory, this means that your better ideas may be the ones you think of faster.
Whether an individual favours relevance or originality, the scientists claim, depends on personality, experience, and environment. Both, however, are important to different peoples’ concepts of creativity.
Alongside the participants’ responses, the team created a computational model which combined existing neurological calculations. They based this model on three measurable aspects of creativity:
- Exploration: The ability to retrieve, change and/or combine of existing knowledge from our memory to imagine different options.
- Evaluation: The ability to assess the quality of an idea.
- Selection: The choice of a single idea among several options to take forward and convey.
The team then compared the model’s results with the actual responses of the participants.
This model, they say, challenges the idea that creativity is a mysterious concept. That’s because the model is able to predict the speed and quality of participants’ creative responses based on their creative preferences.
In the future, they hope that further understanding of the creative neural mechanism will help us learn more about how creativity is linked to brain activity. This could help us understand which workplaces and environments foster creativity and which inhibit it – as well as whether we can improve our creativity through cognitive exercises.
“All these questions remain open, but we firmly intend to answer them,” said co-author Alizée Lopez-Persem.
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