How to Fuel Your Creativity: The Relationship between Attention and Creativity

            Society characterizes creativity to be a skill that one either has or does not have; something innate that is measured by our ability to abstractly think, see, and project. Creativity has been an enigmatic curiosity to those in the sciences. Since it is hard to pinpoint where our creative ability comes from, scientists have taken different aspects of human intelligence and linked those with an individual’s creative abilities.

            In class, Darya Zabelina explained that her and her colleagues’ study focused on the relationship between an individual’s attention perseveration and creativity. The results showed that creative people fixate on a subject, making their attentional flexibility weaker than those who are less creative. The more creative participants were slower at shifting their attention from the smaller picture to the bigger picture, or different stimuli. Zabelina further discussed that more creatively inclined people focus on a stimuli more diligently than people that are less creative. As Zabelina went in depth about her lab’s processes, I thought about my own creative achievements, and how I produce my art work. Personally, since I am easily distracted by my environment, I need to be in silence, with, ideally, just me in the room, and I keep working until I finish. Opposingly, I remembered that my professor for brain and behavior had said the taking a break from a project helps with finishing it off.

            A study at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, titled, “Incubation and creativity: Do something different”, explored the incubation, “a stage in which the problem is set aside and not consciously worked on”, and creativity. Ken J. Gilhooly, George Georgiou, and Ultan Devery discovered that during incubation, doing a task that is similar to the creative project you are working on will significantly increase the time it takes to complete the project when you return to it, than if you were to incubate doing a task that is dissimilar to the creative project. This study correlates with Zabelina and her colleagues’ study as it shows how attention plays a role in creativity. Gilhooly, Georgiou, and Devery came to the conclusion that shifting attention to something that is does not require the creativity that the project does, will make it easier to focus and complete the project after the non-creative incubation. The findings from both studies is really intriguing and can apply to everyday life. I can use these tricks when I work on my next art project or even studying, or writing a paper.

Beeman, Mark., Zabelina, Darya L. 2013. Short-term attentional perseveration associated with real-life creative achievement. Frontiers in Psychology. http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00191/full

Devery, Ultan., Georgiou, George., Gilhooly, Ken J. 2013. Incubation and creativity: Do something different. Thinking & Reasoning. Vol. 19 Issue 2, p137-149.
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