Tag Archives: Creativity

Walking Linked to More Creative Solutions than Sitting

Asking Yourself Questions Enhances Performance More Than Self-Encouragement

-*Do affirmative self-statements actually help people perform better?

Joanne Wood

It depends, found University of Waterloo’s Joanne Wood and John W. Lee with Wei Qi “Elaine” (Xun) Perunovic of University of New Brunswick confirmed that people often use positive self-statements and believe them to be effective.

However, two experiments demonstrate that the value of positive self-statements depends on the individual’s level of self-esteem.

Participants with low self-esteem who repeated a positive self-statement (“I’m a lovable person”) felt worse than people who used no positive self-statement.
They also felt worse than the comparison group when they focused on how the statement was only true.

William Swann

Wood’s teamed referred to William Swann’s Self-Verification Theory, which suggests that people prefer that others see them as they see themselves as an explanation of these results.

Swann, of University of Texas at Austin posited that if someone has low self-esteem, a positive self-statement is inconsistent with the person’s experience and self-assessment.
As a result, it would not have “the ring of truth”, and would not have the intended bolstering effect on self-confidence and self-esteem.

This view was validated when participants with high self-esteem felt better when they repeated the positive self-statement statement and when they focused on how it was true.

Ibrahim Senay

Ibrahim Senay of Istanbul Sehir Universitesi, Penn’s Dolores Albarracin, and Kenji Noguchi of the University of Southern Mississippi investigated the relative impact of “declarative” self-talk, such as “positive thinking” or affirmations (“I will prevail!”) espoused by Maxwell Maltz, Norman Vincent Peale, Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, and Anthony Robbins.
They compared this well-known self-improvement practice with “interrogative” self-talk, such as introspective self-inquiry (“Can I prevail?”).

Dolores Albarracín

Half the participants spent one minute asking themselves whether they would complete a series of anagrams before that actually began to work on the anagrams, whereas the other half to told themselves that they would complete the task.
Surprisingly to advocates of self-affirmation, the self-questioning group solved significantly more anagrams than the self-affirming group.

Kenji Noguchi

The researchers extended and replicated the finding by asking one group of volunteers to write “Will I” 20 times before attempting to solve the anagrams.
Another group wrote “I will” 20 times, and the third group wrote “Will” 20 times.
Those were “primed” with the self-questioning “Will I” solved nearly twice as many anagrams as people in the other groups.

Albarracin suggested that “asking questions forces you to define if you really want something…even in the presence of obstacles,” so is more effective than possibly unrealistically-positive self-affirmations.
The researchers suggest that interrogative self-talk, like interrogative discussions in behavioral counseling, persuasive messages in advertising, editorials, or legal settings, and culturally “polite” behavioral requests, may elicit more intrinsically-motivated action and goal-directed behavior.

Mark Lepper

Routinely predictable extrinsic rewards can extinguish intrinsic motivation, found Stanford’s Mark Lepper and David Greene collaborated with Richard Nisbett of University of Michigan.

Richard Nisbett

In fact, interrogative self-talk may counteract suppressors to intrinsic motivation and seems to be a learnable practice that may be transferred or “generalized” from individualized learning in counseling settings.

Robert Burnkrant

This form of inquiry can be persuasive because it focuses the listener’s attention to the argument itself if the question isn’t especially relevant to the listener, or to the message’s source if is more pertinent, reported Rohini Ahluwalia of University of Minnesota, Ohio State’s Robert Burnkrant, and Southern Methodist University’s Daniel Howard.

Min Basadur

Subjunctive interrogative self-talk, rather than its rhetorical counterpart, can ignite innovation and creativity in organizational settings.
Min Basadur suggested that asking oneself and other How Might We (HMW) ….? enables innovators to defer judgment and create more options without self-conscious limitations.

Tim Brown

Embracing the uncertainty of “might” enables innovators to propose ideas “that might work or might not — either way, it’s OK. And the ‘we’ part says we’re going to do it together and build on each other’s ideas,” said Ideo’s CEO, Tim Brown.

This type of self-interrogatory, sometimes presented in group innovation “sprints” at Google Ventures, IDEO, Frog Design or other thought-leading organizations has been effectively been combined with structured innovative problem-solving:

Understand by analyzing problems and requirements through process evaluation,
Diverge by applying constraints to “think differently,”
Decide by selecting solution to develop,
Prototype by “storyboarding” the user experience, process, obstacles,
Validate by testing prototypes with potential solution users.

-*Under what circumstances have you found ‘interrogative’ self-talk to enhance performance more than affirmative self-talk?

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Confidence Enables Persistence Enables Performance

Greater Hemispheric Specialization, not Integration = Increased Creativity

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Rafeeque Bhadelia

Increased connection between brain hemispheres has been considered essential for creative problem-solving and creative expression: Previous research reported a relationship between the size of the corpus callosum connecting brain hemispheres.

However, a more nuanced understanding of brain structure is needed, based on contradictory findings from Cornell’s Dana W. Moore, collaborating with Rafeeque A. Bhadelia and Carl Fulwiler of Tufts and Suffolk University’s Rebecca L. Billings and David A. Gansler, teamed with University of Florida’s Kenneth M. Heilman, and Kenneth M.J. Rood of Boston University.

Carl Fulwiler

The team measured creativity in divergent thinking using the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) for 21 right-handed male volunteers.
Divergent-thinking tasks provide scores for fluency, flexibility, originality, abstractness, resistance to premature closure, and elaboration, and additional scores for emotional expressiveness, story-telling articulateness, movement, synthesis of figures, humor, richness of imagery, and fantasy.

Paul Torrance

Results from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) explained almost half of the variance in creative achievement, measured by quantity of publicly-recognized innovative accomplishments and ratings by judges of each participant’s three most significant creative work products in research by Indiana University of Connecticut’s Jonathan Plucker.

Jonathan Plucker

Moore’s team also performed volumetric MRIs participants’ distributed inter- and intra-hemispheric network activity, and confirmed the relationship between visual–spatial divergent .

However, they found no significant relationship between the right hemisphere’s white matter volume (WMV) and creative production in divergent thinking tasks.

In fact, people with smaller corpus callosum in relation to total white matter volume scored higher on divergent-thinking tasks than those with larger corpus callosum.

Torrance Test of Creativity

Smaller white matter volume indicates more successful neuronal pruning during brain development, leading to increased neural connection and modular brain organization efficiency, they suggested.

Lateralized knowledge processing and momentary suspension of hemispheric modularity may account for creative illumination, incubation and generating divergent ideas, noted University of Southern California’s Joseph E. Bogen and Glenda M. Bogen.
Both processes were aided by decreased callosal connectivity and increased enhances hemispheric specialization in their observations.

Joseph E. Bogen

Creativity and brain structures seem to have a reciprocal relationship: The brain’s structure is reflected in creative performance, and can be changed by training in visual art.

As drawing skills improved, cortical and cerebellar activity patterns changed and prefrontal white matter reorganized, shown in monthly fMRI scans by Dartmouth’s Alexander Schlegel, Prescott Alexander, Sergey V. Fogelson, Xueting Li, Zhengang Lu, Peter J. Kohler, Enrico Riley, Peter U. Tse, and Ming Men.

Alex Schlegel, Prescott Alexander

In addition, participants showed increased divergent thinking and use of model systems, processes, and imagery, but not perceptual abilities.

These findings indicate that neural pathways are adaptable or “plastic” to enable creative cognition and perceptual-motor integration.

-*What do you do to change your brain function?

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Bilingual Competence Strengthens Brain’s “Executive Control,” “Adaptive Modulation”

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Andrea Stocco

Learning a second language in childhood or later in life provides numerous benefits, including:

Increased cultural awareness,
Enhanced creativity,
Possibly delaying cognitive deterioration associated with dementia.

Bilingual individuals excel on several cognitive measures, including “executive control”, measured by speed in applying new rules and switching tasks on a Rapid Instructed Task Learning (RITL) paradigm, according to University of Washington’s Andrea Stocco and Chantel S. Prat.

Chantel Prat

In addition, bilingual volunteers showed greater “adaptive modulation” of the brain’s the basal ganglia striatal activity, suggesting that competence in multiple languages changes brain activation patterns and structures.

Bilingual people’s performance advantages in executive functioning may develop as they adaptively select and apply different rules when speaking multiple languages, surmised Stocco and Prat.
They suggested that this behavioral flexibility may strengthen the brain’s fronto-striatal loops that connect to the prefrontal cortex.

The team evaluated 17 bilingual and 14 monolingual volunteers on their language proficiency and arithmetic problems defined by a set of operations and two uniquely-specified inputs.
Participants completed practice problems using just two operation sets, then tackled another set combining new items and some from the practice set.
For the final round, volunteers completed new and practice items while in an fMRI brain scanner.

Bilinguals completed the new problems significantly more quickly than monolinguals, although both groups performed similarly on familiar items, suggesting that people with multiple language competence may have an advantage in rapidly processing new information and unfamiliar challenges.

The physiological basis for this performance difference was revealed by the fMRI scan: There was increased activity during work on novel problems in the bilingual volunteers’ basal ganglia.
This brain area is associated with learning linked to rewards and motor functions, and to prioritizing information before directing it to the prefrontal cortex for further processing.

Ellen Bialystok

This research suggests that learning multiple languages trains the basal ganglia to switch more efficiently between the rules and vocabulary of different languages, a skill which can generalize to other tasks such as arithmetic.

Michelle Martin-Rhee

The roots of this cognitive advantage is based on childhood bilingualism, which can also train inhibition of attention for perceptual information, found York University’s Ellen Bialystok and Michelle M. Martin-Rhee.

They noted that this effect was not due to differences in representational abilities because monolinguals ands bilinguals performed similarly on these tasks.
Bilingual preschoolers also showed greater creativity in non-mathematical and mathematical problem solving, reported University of Haifa’s Mark Leikin.

Mark Leikin

He compared bilingual children from a Hebrew–Russian kindergarten and a Hebrew monolingual kindergarten was well as monolingual children from a monolingual school on the Picture Multiple Solution task’s measure of general creativity and the Creating Equal Number task for mathematical creativity.
Bilingual children from the bilingual kindergarten showed significantly greater creativity on general and mathematical tasks than monolingual children.

Fergus I.M. Craik

Besides the benefit of enhanced creativity, bilingualism seems to be associated with later onset of dementia by four years, and less cognitive decline among more than 180 volunteers evaluated by York University’s Bialystok with Fergus I.M. Craik and Morris Freedman of University of Toronto.

Morris Freedman

They analyzed repeated Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores and also found that elderly bilinguals performed better on switching attention between objects, as demonstrated in Stocco and Prat’s work.

Though learning a second language in adulthood is “an order of magnitude more difficult” than learning in childhood, according to Stocco and Prat, the cognitive benefits can make it worth the challenge and effort.

-*What benefits have you experienced associated with learning a second language or life-long fluency in another language?

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“Default Mode Network”, Positive Mood Increase Creative Problem Solving

Paradoxical Bias against Innovative Ideas in the Workplace

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Jennifer Mueller

Managers’ implicit attitudes and cognitive “mindset” during proposal presentations can bias organizational decision-makers against innovative solutions without their awareness, according to University of San Diego’s Jennifer Mueller with Shimul Melwani of University of North Carolina and Cornell University’s Jack Goncalo.

Shimul Melwani

Mueller and team pointed out a paradox: Most managers say they want innovative solutions to workplace issues from team members, yet often reject these creative ideas to reduce risk and uncertainty.

The team asked volunteers to rate a running shoe equipped with nanotechnology that improved fit and reduced potential to develop blisters.

Jack Goncalo

They “primed” some participants toward increased uncertainty in this task by telling them that there were many potential answers to a problem.
In contrast, they cued another group with reduced uncertainty by instructing them that a problem required a single solution.

When volunteers who said they favored creative ideas experienced uncertainty, they preferred concepts of practicality on an implicit word association test, and associated “creativity” with negative concepts including “vomit,” “poison” and “agony.”

Uncertain participants also rated the shoe as significantly less creative than those in the more structured condition, suggesting that were less able to recognize a creative idea and held an unconscious “negative bias against creativity.”

Cheryl Wakslak

In more recent work, Mueller collaborated with University of Southern California’s Cheryl Wakslak and Viswanathan Krishnan with University of California, San Diego to expand the idea assessment scenario with two ideas that were independently rated as “creative,” and two ideas judged “not creative.”

Vish Krishnan

Mueller, Wakslak and Krishnan cued some participants to consider “why” in evaluating creative ideas, to evoke broad, abstract thinking, and “high-level construal.”
They instructed other volunteers to think about “how” creative idea works, to stimulate narrow focus on practical details and logistics, and “low-level construal.”

Although participants in both groups rated two non-creative ideas similarly, those who adopted a “high-level construal” or a “why” mindset recognized creative ideas more often than those using the “how” mindset.

As an idea’s degree of creativity increases, uncertainty also increases about its feasibility, acceptability, and practicality.
This increased risk may reduce evaluators’ willingness to accept and advocate for an innovative idea, even when objective evidence is presented to validate a creative idea.

To mitigate the paradoxical rejection of creative ideas, organizational leaders can ask team members to consider “why” when creative evaluating proposals to enable “big picture” thinking and a broader construal level.

-*How do you encourage innovative solutions to work challenges?

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Time of Day Affects Problem Solving Abilities

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People differ in their circadian rhythms, which determine times of greatest mental alertness, reflected in body temperature differences.

James A Horne

“Morningness” describes people who awaken easily and are most alert early in the morning, whereas “eveningness” refers to “night owls” who awaken later and feel most alert late in the day, according to Loughborough University’s James A. Horne and colleague O. Östberg, who developed a self-report questionnaire to distinguish these these temporal preferences.

Mareike Wieth

Creative problem solving is more effective at “non-optimal” times of day for both “morning people” and “night people,” according to Albion College’s Mareike B. Wieth and Rose T. Zacks of Michigan State University.

Rose Zacks

They studied volunteers who solved insight problems and analytic problems at their optimal or non-optimal time of day and found consistently better performance on insight problem-solving during non-optimal times, but no consistent effect for analytic problem solving.

During non-optimal times, people may be more distractible, less focused and more able to consider diverse information, alternatives, and interpretations.
These conditions can enable innovative thinking and creativity.

William Hrushesky

William Hrushesky, formerly of University of South Carolina, argued that “timing is everything” in medical treatment, and Wieth and Zacks’ findings suggest suggests that working at “off-peak” times is effective for tasks that require creative thinking rather than analytic rigor.

-*How do you sequence your work tasks to enhance performance during “non-optimal” and “peak” times of day?

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Evidence-Based Stress Management – Mindful Attention – Part 2 of 5

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Workplace stress reduces employees’ ability to concentrate and pay attention to work, but mindfulness training can enhance these skills while reducing stress.

Matthew Killingsworth

Inattentiveness and distraction are both frequent and unpleasant, according to Harvard’s Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert.
They surveyed more than 2,000 adults, who reported that 47 percent of the time, their focus was not on their current activities.
In addition, these volunteers reported being less happy when distracted.

Lee Ann Cardaciotto

Another way to measure distraction and attentiveness is The Philadelphia Mindfulness Scale, developed by La Salle University’s Lee Ann Cardaciotto and James Herbert, Evan Forman, Ethan Moitra, and Victoria Farrow of Drexel University.
This tool provides a baseline measure of potential need for stress management and mindfulness training, and can demonstrate impact of training.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Current approaches to stress management training are typically based on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), which trains participants to focus on breathing, which slows respiration and heart rate, and triggers the “relaxation response.”

Wendy Hasenkamp

Using these frameworks, Emory’s Wendy Hasenkamp, Christine Wilson-Mendenhall, Erica Duncan, and Lawrence Barsalou investigated the neurological activity during distraction and mind-wandering experiences using fMRI scans of 14 meditators.

Participants focused on breathing and pressed a button when they realized their minds were wandering, then returned focus to the breathing.
Scans pinpointed active brain regions before, during, or after the button press.

Erica Duncan

Hasenkamp and team proposed four intervals in a cognitive cycle, based on button-pressing patterns:

Mind wandering (default mode activity), controlled by the medial prefrontal cortex, leading to self-focused thoughts
Awareness of mind wandering (attentional subnetworks)
Shifting of attention (executive subnetworks)
Sustained attention (executive subnetworks).

Lawrence Barsalou

These experienced meditators disengaged attention and deactivated medial prefrontal cortex more quickly after identifying mind-wandering, suggesting that their mindfulness practice helped them voluntarily shift from perseverative, ruminating thoughts.
They demonstrated increased connectivity between default mode and attention brain regions, enabling less default mode activity while meditating.

Britta Hölzel

Besides reducing stress, mindfulness meditation trains attention, improves working memory, fluid intelligence, introspection, and standardized test scores, according to Britta Hölzel team at Harvard and Justus Liebig Universität Giessen.
In addition, mindfulness meditation has shown beneficial results in comprehensive treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, and sexual dysfunction.

Fadel Zeidan

Hölzel’s group conducted anatomical magnetic resonance (MR) images for 16 volunteers with no previous mindfulness meditation experience before and after they participated in the 8-week training program.
Gray matter concentration increased in the meditators’ left hippocampus, posterior cingulate cortex, temporo-parietal junction, and cerebellum, areas responsible for learning and memory processes, emotion regulation, self-referential processing, and perspective taking.

Further support for mindfulness meditation’s value in reducing perceived stress and anxiety comes from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center’s Fadel Zeidan.
His study identified brain areas activated and deactivated during meditation and participants reported that anxiety decreased by 39 percent during practice.

Norman Farb

Mindfulness meditation training modifies the way people experience themselves over time and in the present moment, according to University of Toronto’s Norman Farb and six collaborators.
The team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine monitoring of two self-reference processes: Focus on enduring traits (’narrative’ focus) or momentary experience (’experiential’ focus).

They compared participants with no previous meditation experience, and volunteers who completed an 8-week mindfulness meditation training to increase attention on the present.

Herbert Benson

Brain scans of inexperienced and experienced meditators differed significantly in tasks that required these two forms of self-awareness: the self across time and in the present moment.
These two experiences are usually integrated but can be dissociated through mindfulness attention training.
Results suggest that mindfulness training enables people to focus on the present moment without the distraction of intrusive, ruminative thoughts which can increase stress.

Manoj Bhasin

Mindfulness-based stress management has significant long term effects by modifying gene expression.
Harvard’s Herbert Benson, who led research on “the relaxation response” almost four decades ago, along with colleagues including Harvard’s Manoj Bhasin and Abbott Northwestern Hospital Jeffery Dusek and four others, assert that meditation evokes “a specific genomic response that counteracts the harmful genomic effects of stress.”

Jeffrey Dusek

Genes associated with inflammation and stress are less active and those involved in energy metabolism, mitochondrial function, insulin secretion and telomere maintenance are activated.

Bhasin, Dusek and team measured peripheral blood transcriptome in experienced and inexperienced meditators before and after they listened to a relaxation response-inducing tape or a health education message.

Both short-term and long-term practitioners showed significant temporal gene expression changes with a greater effect among the experienced meditators.

This and other research evidence supports the effectiveness of mindfulness attention training as a stress management practice.
Mindful attention training enables people to voluntarily control body processes like respiration and heart rate, which reduces perceived stress.
The practice can induce calm thoughts that reciprocally reduce the physical expressions of stress.

Jonathan Smallwood

Like other stress management techniques, this practice requires willingness and commitment to take full advantage of benefits demonstrated in lab studies.

If efforts to cultivate mindfulness falter, mind-wandering or “self-generated thoughts” can be channeled away from self-referential worries to enable creativity problem-solving and planning.

Jessica Andrews-Hanna

Max Planck Institute’s Jonathan Smallwood and Jessica Andrews-Hanna of University of Colorado argue that “a wandering mind helps project past and future selves.”

Thomas Suddendorf

Similarly, University of Queensland’s Thomas Suddendorf and Michael Corballis of University of Auckland posit that this hindsight and foresight enables experience and memory integration into a sense of self through this “mental time travel.”

Michael Corballis

University of California, Santa Barbara’s Benjamin Baird collaborated with Jonathan Smallwood and four colleagues to evaluate the impact of mind-wandering on a creativity task during a demanding task, rest, or an undemanding task.

Benjamin Baird

They found that engaging in an undemanding task during an incubation period led to substantial performance improvements, suggesting the value of mind-wandering to develop creative solutions.

Although mindfulness training has been reliably associated with effective stress management, even moments of mind-wandering can be channeled to productive ends in creative problem-solving.

-*How applicable are mindfulness attention training practice for workplace stress?

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Working with Ambiguity at Work

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“Leading during uncertain business conditions” and “tolerating ambiguity” are explicitly-sought skills in Silicon Valley position descriptions.
These competencies are crucial to navigate frequent, sometimes surprising restructurings and layoffs.

Rolf Wank

In contrast, employees outside the U.S. enjoy greater job certainty and worker protection in some countries, as outlined in Ruhr-Universität Bochum researcher Rolf Wank’s survey of typical German employment relationships .

He summarized “work-arounds” to Gremany’s current system that might require employees to develop skills in working with more ambiguous employment agreements.

Frank Shipper

Tolerance for Ambiguity has been measured in a scale developed by Frank Shipper of Salisbury University, adapted from earlier work by Stanley Budner, then of New York State Psychiatric Institute.
Similarly, David Wilkinson of Oxford drew on his background in UK military and police organizations to propose Modes of Leadership based on varying developmental, perceptual, and cognitive styles of ambiguity tolerance:

Mode One – Technical Leaders manage ambiguity by ignoring, denying, or creating premature, inaccurate or false “certainty”
They tend to be risk averse and are more directive in leading others
Mode Two – Cooperative Leaders seek to “disambiguate uncertainty” and build teams to mitigate risk
Mode Three – Collaborative Leaders prefer consensual alignment among team values and execution goals through explicit team discussion
Mode Four – Generative Leaders use ambiguity to find opportunity by drawing on “emotional resilience” and continuous learning.

David Wilkinson

In 2008, Wilkinson began investigating two additional leadership modes for inclusion in this framework.
He also posited an “ambiguity continuum” among risk, ambiguity, vagueness, uncertainty and chaos.

Creative scientists and artists have long understood the importance of the ambiguous “incubation” period when solutions germinate.

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein, known for his breakthrough insights in physics, argued for imagining solutions when the present situation is unclear:

° Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere

° Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions

° Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create

Richard Diebenkorn

Painter Richard Diebenkorn of UCLA echoed Einstein’s sentiment in several entries in Notes to Myself on Beginning a Painting, in which he coached himself to risk, tolerate uncertainty, and persist in the search for solutions:

° Attempt (sic) what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion.

° Do search. But in order to find other than what is searched for.

Rainer Maria Rilke

The spirit of Diebenkorn’s advice to himself was codified decades earlier by poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke in his oft-quoted Letters to a Young Poet.

…Try to love the questions themselves…
Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them….
Someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Both creative artists and business leaders recognize the crucial importance of working with and through ambiguous conditions to produce breakthrough solutions.

° What approaches help you tolerate ambiguity?
° How can ambiguity tolerance be increased?

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Tag Archives: Creativity

Walking Linked to More Creative Solutions than Sitting

Asking Yourself Questions Enhances Performance More Than Self-Encouragement

Confidence Enables Persistence Enables Performance

Greater Hemispheric Specialization, not Integration = Increased Creativity

Bilingual Competence Strengthens Brain’s “Executive Control,” “Adaptive Modulation”

“Default Mode Network”, Positive Mood Increase Creative Problem Solving

Paradoxical Bias against Innovative Ideas in the Workplace

Time of Day Affects Problem Solving Abilities

Evidence-Based Stress Management – Mindful Attention – Part 2 of 5

Working with Ambiguity at Work

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