The Mind and Creativity

Creativity can be defined as this whole process in which we come up with new thoughts and ideas and having the ability to produce or use them in reality. It is also characterized by having the ability to perceive the world in many different ways and to find hidden patterns, connections, and solutions. Creativity generally involves two processes, which are thinking and producing. If you generate new thoughts and ideas but do nothing with them, you are simply just imaginative and not creative. Creativity is an integral part of life,and its importance can be seen in our own lives, because many times we are able to solve new problems in life in a creative way without knowing.

In the article Where Do Eureka Moments Come From? by Maria Konnikova, she explains to us the recent studies and thoughts of Mark Beeman, a cognitive neuroscientist at Northwestern who studies creativity and insight. Beeman and John Kounios conducted a study in which they followed and recorded many people's gazes as they attempted to solve a test. The test given is called the remote-assistant test and in this test in "the subject is given a series of words, like “pine,” “crab,” and “sauce,” and has to think of a single word that can logically be paired with all of them" (Konnikova). The purpose of this study was to see if the direction of the subjects eyes and their rate of blinking could provide insight on the subjects approach and success rate. The results were that if the subject focused on the word and looked directly at it, which meant less blinking, this signaled a higher degree of close attention and the subject was likely to be thinking in an analytical and convergent fashion. On the other hand, if the subject stopped looking at a specific word, either by blinking or moving her eyes, it would be likely that they are thinking on a more broader and divergent fashion. From these findings, Beeman could predict how someone will likely solve a problem and when they will be close to that solution. This helps provide them with a sort of insight on how people can come up with creative solutions differently from each other. Attention is another important consideration for creative people because their state of attention can affect how the person creates a solution for the problem and where they apply their focus. Beeman states that attention is important in order to find potential and future creative minds, and by understanding these distinct patterns of attention they can have more insight on the creativity of a person.

The results of this test can be compared to another article and concept that was given in my neuroscience class. The article is called Short-term attentional preservation associated with real life achievement and the study was conducted by both Darya L. Zabelina and Mark Beeman. In this study, they wanted to examine how real-world creative achievers and divergent thinkers distribute their attention and how much they switch their attention over time. In this experiment, participants had to identify target stimuli that can occur at both a local feature or global feature. The participants included both high creative achievers and low creative achievers in order to compare how well they did from switching between local and global features.The results of this study were that high creative achievers made more errors when switching levels of attention and performed worse overall on the task in comparison to the low creative achievers. This study also stated that these results were possible because high creative achievers noticed the pattern of the blocked levels better, whereas low creative achievers had ignored the pattern and noticed the sequences and knew when to switch their attention. This can be compared to what was found in Beemans remote-assistant test because he also found two different types of attention in his study. The high creative achievers can be related to the convergent and more analytical people, and the low creative achievers can be related to the divergent and broader thinking people.

Attention plays a major role in both these studies and in the experiments since it is needed without a doubt. In the remote-assistant test, they are looking for what types of attention and thought processes lead them to their answers. In the results of this test, the participant either signaled a high degree of close attention on the test or not. As Beeman states "Your state of attention both before you get a problem and when you're solving it matters" (Konnikova). This relates to the target stimuli study because it was found that the high creative achievers had different levels of attention than the low creative achievers. The high creative achievers processed the target stimuli more differently and even made more errors than expected. These results demonstrate that there is a connection between a form of attention switching and creative achievement. The findings in both of these studies can be connected through both the concept of creativity and attention. Creativity plays an important factor on attention patterns, and the levels of attention are different in everybody. The different levels of creativity also play a factor in ones life as it can either help benefit your attention on one task or cause errors and problems for you. Either way, creativity is an important aspect to grasp and it plays a part an important part in the world as it can affect both the people in it and its history as well.










Konnikova, M,. (2014). Where do Euroka Moments Come From?. The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/where-do-eureka-moments-come-from

Zabelina, L. D, Beeman, M., (2013). Short-term attentional; preserverance associated with      real-life creative achievement. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 1-8.