Creativity articles
How would you feel if someone told you that you needed to sit silently in a chair and not use your phone for 30 minutes? To just sit there and "think"? I expect that like many people, you would probably think that you would be bored out of your mind. Being bored has numerous benefits. [...]
It was inevitable. Not long after new Artificial Intelligence software began producing images based on users' text input, someone has now used it to win an art prize. Digital Artist James Allen recently won First Place at the Colorado State Fair digital art category, with this painting titled Théåtre D'opéra Spatial. Théåtre D'opéra Spatial, [...]
When it comes to getting creative work done, sometimes your brain needs to shut out external information in order to focus. This is especially true for information which your brain previously noticed but deemed unimportant, and so begins to ignore. Examples of this include you not seeing the outline of your nose in front of [...]
For years, I have been wondering about how curiosity evolved. It may be a silly question. After all, curiosity brings all sorts of benefits, especially when it comes to making us more creative. But if you look back millions and billions of years to when the first life was evolving, there was real danger to [...]
Curiosity has long been linked to being more creative. Along with being open to new experiences, being curious makes it more likely that you discover new and interesting knowledge which can then be combined in a creative way. A 2019 meta-analysis of 2,692 individuals showed that there was a strong positive link between being more [...]
Have you ever been in a group discussion, where it seems like a decision was made that nobody actually thought was ideal? You might have just witnessed a psychological bias known as groupthink. Groupthink occurs when a group of people need to make a decision, and due to the pressure of not creating conflict between [...]
Are some people born creative? Or to say it another way, are some people born not creative? I hear this myth all the time. That someone thinks that they are not creative because they see other people who have more talent or skill than they do, and by comparing themselves to these "geniuses", they believe they [...]
There is evidence to show that walking is a great way to encourage creative thought. Now, hot off the presses, we might soon learn that any type of random body movement might have the same effect. I recently interviewed Prof Angus Fletcher, whose team is studying how narrative creativity is built in the brain, for [...]
When people first start developing their creative skills for the first time, they often go through a similar sequence of learning and trying new things. They take something they already know and like, such as a drawing or song produced by a famous artist, and then: Copy it, until they can reproduce or perform it [...]
They aren't. People think that any small mistake or embarrassment is going to be noticed and judged by everyone around them. Yet in reality this is not what happens. Even if you do something embarrassing, like falling over, forgetting a word while speaking, spilling coffee on your shirt or snorting while you laugh, and you [...]
