Creative people tend to be comfortable with 'time when they have nothing else to do'



When you're busy or have tasks to complete, you may feel like it's a waste of time to do nothing. However, research shows that creative people tend to enjoy boredom rather than hate it when they have nothing to do.

Full article: Creative Minds at Rest: Creative Individuals are More Associative and Engaged with Their Idle Thoughts

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10400419.2023.2227477



Creative people enjoy idle time more than others | University of Arizona News
https://news.arizona.edu/story/creative-people-enjoy-idle-time-more-others

Creative People Do Something The Rest of Us Usually Avoid : ScienceAlert
https://www.sciencealert.com/creative-people-do-something-the-rest-of-us-usually-avoid

A collaboration between psychologists from the University of Arizona, the University of Arkansas, and the University of Minnesota conducted two studies to understand how creativity occurs during times when there is nothing else to do. Did. Jessica Andrews Hanna, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Arizona and the paper's lead author, said of the study's significance: ``In psychology and neuroscience, most studies of human thinking involve asking participants in a particular way.'' Either we are prompted to think, or we are asked to report on the thoughts we experience. Less is known about how thoughts arise naturally and unfold over time without prompting.I Our research can be helpful here.'

In the first study, 90 volunteers were asked to wait in a room without internet for 10 minutes, and were asked questions such as 'If you had 100 rubber bands, how could you make money?' I asked them to say whatever came to mind. Verbal-based tests that measure a person's ability to think outside the box are called divergent thinking tests, and participants who perform better are often more likely to say things like, ``I remember this,'' or ``That's right.'' They tend to show associated thoughts with phrases such as 'if'.



Initial experiments found that creative people were better able to focus on their thoughts when they were alone without distractions such as cell phones or the Internet. 'While many participants tended to jump between seemingly unrelated thoughts, creative people showed signs of thinking more associatively,' said Quentin Refaeli, a psychology graduate student at the University of Arizona. , participants said that they talked more when they found a free flow of ideas, and ultimately rated that they ``didn't get bored even in a boring room while actively talking about ideas.'' .

Next, an online survey was conducted among 2,612 people. In the survey, we asked people whether they felt creative and how bored they were by being confined for a long time during the lockdown due to the new coronavirus. The results showed that people with higher levels of creative self-awareness were less likely to feel bored during the seemingly endless lockdown.



The paper states, ``The results of this study are close to intuition and cannot be called a surprising finding.However, this finding emphasizes that people think differently even when they are not doing anything. 'This may have an impact on research that relies on comparisons, etc.' Hanna added: 'Understanding why people think differently can lead to promising interventions to improve health and well-being. 'As we become more and more dependent on our devices, I think we need to be more creative at home, work and school, and spend more time just thinking and relaxing.'

in Science, Posted by log1e_dh