Influencing creativity through meditation

An individual’s ability to be creative and their ability to pay attention seem to be two distinct qualities. However, Darya L. Zabelina, in her journal article Short-term attentional perseveration associated with real-life creative achievement, shows that there is some overlap between creativity and attention. Zabelina deals with 2 different hypotheses describing how creative people benefit from attention. The first states that creative people have attentional flexibility and can switch between two centers of focus consciously. The other states that creative individuals have attentional persistence, which allows them to focus on a task for longer durations of time. Zabelina compared real-life creative achievers to divergent thinkers with 2 different experiments that test how well the individuals from the 2 groups are able to switch focus from one stimuli to another without making mistakes. After performing the experiments, Zabelina found that individuals with high creative achievement have exceptional attentional persistence. On the same not, she also found that their ability to maintain focus on one stimuli negatively affected their ability to switch their focus to another stimuli. This means that individuals with high creative achievement are poor divergent thinkers.

                However, a study conducted at Leiden University found that there is a way to improve creativity and divergent thinking. The journal article titled Prior Meditation Practice Modulates Performance and Strategy Use in Convergent- and Divergent-Thinking Problems states that certain meditation techniques promote and can help improve creative thinking. Even individuals that had little to no prior experience with meditation experienced improvement in their creativity. The study asked 40 individuals, some who were experienced meditators and others who weren’t, to meditate for 25 minutes before completing some thinking tasks. The study observed the effects of meditation on convergent and divergent thinking. The results showed that after meditating, participants performed better in the divergent thinking tasks, proving that their divergent thinking had improved. It is important to note, however, that this study categorizes divergent thinking as a form of creativity, whereas Zabelina seems to distinguish between divergent thinking and creative achievement. 

References:

Leiden University. (2014, October 28). Meditation makes you more creative, study suggests. ScienceDaily. Retrieved December 12, 2014 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141028082355.htm