No bolt of lightning, no voice from the heavens, not even a lightbulb dangling overhead – for years scientists have been searching for the source of creativity, having discarded the myths and memes of the past.
In January, scientists at Northwestern announced they had found the first physiological evidence of a connection between creative thinking and sensory distractions, or what they call “leaky attention.”
In sound tests given to 97 subjects, the researchers found that the poorer a person’s sensory gating – that is their ability to filter unnecessary stimuli from their brain – the higher their creativity scores.
“This reduced sensory gating may indicate that a leaky sensory filter is a general neural processing characteristic related to real-world creative achievement,” wrote the authors of the study in Neuropsychologia, adding that leaky attention “may help people integrate ideas that are outside the focus of attention into their current information processing, leading to creative thinking.”
Noise, in other words, aids inspiration.
To test this noise factor, the researchers examined a specific neural marker of sensory gating called the P50 event-related potential, a neurophysiological response that occurs just 50 milliseconds after a stimulus. In the Northwestern test, two auditory clicks were presented to the subjects and their ability or inability to inhibit their response to the second click was viewed as a marker for sensory gating.
“Thus, the more creative achievements people reported, the leakier was their sensory gating,” the report concluded.
One likely “leaky” genius from the past was German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Dogs barking in the street, the building of a bowling alley, even the movement of a weaver’s loom – all drove Goethe to distraction, and to complain to authorities. (One of his less famous lines from Faust: “Be still, thou poodle; make not such racket and riot!”)
Many geniuses, of course, have been known to play the role of rude narcissist when it comes to unwanted interruptions. Not so, Marcel Proust, who was profoundly polite even as he nagged, as he did in this letter, to an upstairs neighbor. “If your charming son, innocent of the noise that martyrizes me, is nearby, please give him my best wishes,” Proust wrote in the letter, among dozens discovered just last year. (Proust later employed wax ear plugs and lined his bedroom with cork to counter the noisy distractions of Paris life.)
And for those who can’t seem to find the right ambiance for inspiration? Just the right creative boost is only an app away.
Coffitivity, which can be downloaded on most smartphones, provides a “library” of sounds from various cafes, the favored hangout of many a budding young genius. So if your creative impulses are best managed via a laptop and a latte, then all that’s left to do is cue the cacophony.
