Wednesday 17 October 2012

Creativity for breakfast today?

Think of any creative people you know. Think about how they dress, their adherence to formality, how they socially interact, where they are from. Chances are that they do regular things just a little bit different from the rest of us. This ties in with research showing that doing everyday things in unconventional ways can stimulate creative thinking.

Psychologist Simone Ritter of Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands has demonstrated this by having people mix up their usual breakfast making routines, resulting in higher scores on creativity tests. The cliché ‘Have you had your Wheetabix’ could make a comeback as Ritters work suggests for example, that pouring some milk into a bowl and then adding the cereal afterwards will stimulate innovate thinking.

This is based on the theory that conducting a common task in reverse order helps to avoid conventional behavior. This in turn helps people break regular thinking patterns, and leads us to think more flexibly and creativity, Ritter argues that “active involvement in an unusual event” can trigger higher levels of creativity.

In her research Dutch university students were asked to prepare a breakfast sandwich popular in the Netherlands.

Half of them did so in the conventional manner: They put a slice of bread on a plate, buttered the bread and then placed chocolate chips on top. The others, prompted by a script first put chocolate chips on a plate, then buttered a slice of bread and then placed the bread butter-side-down on the dish with the chocolate chips.

After completing their gastronomic assignment, they turned their attention to the “Unusual Uses Task,” a widely used measure of creativity. They were given two minutes to generate uses for a brick and another two minutes to come up with as many answers as they could to the question: “What makes sound?”

“Cognitive flexibility” was scored not by counting how many answers they came up with, but rather by the number of categories those answers fell into. For example in the “What makes sound?” test, a participant whose answers were all animals or machines received a score of one, while someone whose list included “dog,” “car” and “ocean” received a three.

“A high cognitive flexibility score indicates an ability to switch between categories, overcome fixedness, and thus think more creativity,” Ritter and her colleagues write.

Those who made their breakfast treat backwards had higher scores. Breaking their normal sandwich-making pattern apparently opened them up and their minds wandered more freely, allowing for more innovative thought.

Ritter makes the point that previous research showed that periods of immigration have been historically followed by exceptional creative achievement, with immigrants bring new customs and ideas that may act as ‘diversifying experiences’ for the local population, and thus may enhance creativity via cognitive flexibility.”

The real lesson may be that creativity, the value of which is increasingly recognized by organizations of all kinds, can be boosted in surprisingly simple ways. Stimulating inventiveness through eating cereal? Now that’s thinking outside the Cornflake box.

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