Priming effect (ms) by prime-target relatedness, experimental and control groups
| Prime-target relatedness | Experimental group | Control group |
|---|---|---|
| Related | about 48 ms | about 47 ms |
| Unrelated | about 37 ms | about 16 ms |
This passage is adapted from Madhuvanthi Kannan, “Overworking Your Brain Can Spark Ideas.” ©2015 by Scientific American.
If you walk down to the office gallery at Pearlfisher Inc., a
design agency, you are bound to hear the unmistakable cluck of
plastic balls colliding. At first, you might dismiss it as the
sound of employees chilling out on a ping pong game. What
you see next might take your breath away – a huge ball pit
filled with 81,000 white plastic balls. But frolicking in the pit
are not preschoolers or kindergartners. They are in fact
corporate managers, dressed in business suits, in an afternoon
brainstorming session.
Companies relying on innovation go to astonishing lengths
to imbue creativity in their staff. Jump In!, the wacky
brainchild of Pearlfisher’s creative strategist, is built on the
premise that interleaving work and play can spark creativity in
grown-ups, just like it did back in school days.
But it turns out that mental exhaustion from overwork can
itself unleash creativity. When we are tired, our mind can be
too weary to control our thoughts, and eccentric ideas that
might normally be filtered out can bubble up, suggests a recent
study by Rémi Radel at the University of Nice. This means that
perhaps creative ideas can be hatched at the workplace, right
when we feel drained from a mental overload.
In their study, Radel and colleagues overtaxed the minds of
a group of undergrads by having them perform a computerized
task that demanded attention: finding the direction of a center
arrow by ignoring the directions of surrounding arrows. The
task was iterated across 2000 trials. In conflict trials, the center
and surrounding arrows pointed in opposite directions whereas
in non-conflict trials, all arrows pointed in the same direction.
The controls and test subjects faced conflict in 10% and 50% of
the trials, respectively. After the students finished the task, the
scientists measured their creativity in verbal tests. First, they
asked the students to enlist multiple, innovative uses for
common objects, such as paperclip, newspaper, shoe. Next,
they tested the students’ ability to connect unrelated words.
They presented the students with a “priming word” followed
by “target word” – for example, they flashed the word tiger
followed by the word loni, jumbled from lion – and asked the
students to vote whether the target word was a real or a non-
existent word.
Radel found that students who took the rigorous attention
task turned out to be more creative than others who had taken
milder versions of the task. These students were also more
likely to connect unrelated words in the word association test.
They identified more non-existent words as real words
especially when the prime-target pairs were seemingly related,
such as tiger and loni. They perceived loni as lion when it
appeared after tiger and hence, called it a real word. Their
ability to associate unrelated words came from a reduced
filtering of irrelevant information – here, for instance, the
priming word tiger – from the mind.
Radel’s attention task induced creativity in the students by
exhausting their inhibition, which is the brain’s ability to sift
out unwanted information from the conscious mind. Although
inhibition is essential for day-to-day activities such as problem-
solving and focusing on tasks, it stifles creative thinking by
gating out eccentric thoughts and ideas. Being creative is not
just about achieving a state of low inhibition, but about
tweaking inhibition for brief stints without losing control.
Harvard psychologist Shelly Carson calls this process “flexing
the brain.” She says that creative people can turn down the
volume of inhibition to let novel ideas inspire them, and then,
turn the volume back up to put their ideas to meaningful use.
For beginners, Radel’s technique of overtaxing the brain, to
find a sweet window for a creative spell, may be a good place
to start. As we go through our day, juggling multiple tasks, our
mind works hard to stay focused on a single task. There is the
added pressure to keep distractions at bay – meetings, e-mails,
news updates. At the end of it all, we are left feeling exhausted.
At such times, instead of shutting down and relaxing, we
should perhaps learn to capitalize on the mental fatigue and try
to kindle our creative genius.
If you walk down to the office gallery at Pearlfisher Inc., a
design agency, you are bound to hear the unmistakable cluck of
plastic balls colliding. At first, you might dismiss it as the
sound of employees chilling out on a ping pong game. What
you see next might take your breath away – a huge ball pit
filled with 81,000 white plastic balls. But frolicking in the pit
are not preschoolers or kindergartners. They are in fact
corporate managers, dressed in business suits, in an afternoon
brainstorming session.
Companies relying on innovation go to astonishing lengths
to imbue creativity in their staff. Jump In!, the wacky
brainchild of Pearlfisher’s creative strategist, is built on the
premise that interleaving work and play can spark creativity in
grown-ups, just like it did back in school days.
But it turns out that mental exhaustion from overwork can
itself unleash creativity. When we are tired, our mind can be
too weary to control our thoughts, and eccentric ideas that
might normally be filtered out can bubble up, suggests a recent
study by Rémi Radel at the University of Nice. This means that
perhaps creative ideas can be hatched at the workplace, right
when we feel drained from a mental overload.
In their study, Radel and colleagues overtaxed the minds of
a group of undergrads by having them perform a computerized
task that demanded attention: finding the direction of a center
arrow by ignoring the directions of surrounding arrows. The
task was iterated across 2000 trials. In conflict trials, the center
and surrounding arrows pointed in opposite directions whereas
in non-conflict trials, all arrows pointed in the same direction.
The controls and test subjects faced conflict in 10% and 50% of
the trials, respectively. After the students finished the task, the
scientists measured their creativity in verbal tests. First, they
asked the students to enlist multiple, innovative uses for
common objects, such as paperclip, newspaper, shoe. Next,
they tested the students’ ability to connect unrelated words.
They presented the students with a “priming word” followed
by “target word” – for example, they flashed the word tiger
followed by the word loni, jumbled from lion – and asked the
students to vote whether the target word was a real or a non-
existent word.
Radel found that students who took the rigorous attention
task turned out to be more creative than others who had taken
milder versions of the task. These students were also more
likely to connect unrelated words in the word association test.
They identified more non-existent words as real words
especially when the prime-target pairs were seemingly related,
such as tiger and loni. They perceived loni as lion when it
appeared after tiger and hence, called it a real word. Their
ability to associate unrelated words came from a reduced
filtering of irrelevant information – here, for instance, the
priming word tiger – from the mind.
Radel’s attention task induced creativity in the students by
exhausting their inhibition, which is the brain’s ability to sift
out unwanted information from the conscious mind. Although
inhibition is essential for day-to-day activities such as problem-
solving and focusing on tasks, it stifles creative thinking by
gating out eccentric thoughts and ideas. Being creative is not
just about achieving a state of low inhibition, but about
tweaking inhibition for brief stints without losing control.
Harvard psychologist Shelly Carson calls this process “flexing
the brain.” She says that creative people can turn down the
volume of inhibition to let novel ideas inspire them, and then,
turn the volume back up to put their ideas to meaningful use.
For beginners, Radel’s technique of overtaxing the brain, to
find a sweet window for a creative spell, may be a good place
to start. As we go through our day, juggling multiple tasks, our
mind works hard to stay focused on a single task. There is the
added pressure to keep distractions at bay – meetings, e-mails,
news updates. At the end of it all, we are left feeling exhausted.
At such times, instead of shutting down and relaxing, we
should perhaps learn to capitalize on the mental fatigue and try
to kindle our creative genius.