e18: So much time & nothing to do... Creative Minds at Rest
Wednesday, February 21st, 2024
18:30-19:30 GMT (Europe) • 1:30-2:30 EST (North America, Eastern)
Most of our discussions revolve around creativity in action. What does the creative process look like? What motivates creativity? What impact does being creative have on us?… But what happens when there is nothing to do but rest?
This month we’ll look into how creative minds behave when not engaged in an external task, digging into a recent paper from Raffaelli and colleagues (2023), “Creative Minds at Rest: Creative Individuals are More Associative and Engaged with Their Idle Thoughts.”
We’ll also briefly touch on creativity’s relationship to the Default Mode Network, a set of brain areas associated with internally focused thought processes and resting states, using Kenett et al. (2020) as a bonus paper this month.
This meeting has passed, but we would love for you to join us next time!
📄 Raffaelli et al. (2023):
Raffaelli, Q., Malusa, R., de Stefano, N. A., Andrews, E., Grilli, M. D., Mills, C., Zabelina, D. L., & Andrews-Hanna, J. R. (2023). Creative Minds at Rest: Creative Individuals are More Associative and Engaged with Their Idle Thoughts. Creativity Research Journal, 1-17. DOI: 10.1080/10400419.2023.2227477
Open-source PDF Link
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Despite an established body of research characterizing how creative individuals explore their external world, relatively little is known about how such individuals navigate their inner mental life, especially in unstructured contexts such as periods of awake rest. Across two studies, the present manuscript tested the hypothesis that creative individuals are more engaged with their idle thoughts and more associative in the dynamic transitions between them. Study 1 captured the real-time conscious experiences of 81 adults as they voiced aloud the content of their mind moment-by-moment across a 10-minute unconstrained baseline period. Higher originality scores on a divergent thinking task were associated with less perceived boredom, more words spoken overall, more freely moving thoughts, and more loosely-associative (as opposed to sharp) transitions during the baseline rest period. In Study 2, across 2,612 participants, those who reported higher self-rated creativity also reported less perceived boredom during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time during which many people experienced unusually extended periods of unstructured free time. Overall, these results suggest a tendency for creative individuals to be more engaged and explorative with their thoughts when task demands are relaxed, raising implications for resting state functional MRI and societal trends to devalue idle time.
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• Neuroscience of Emotion and Thought Lab
(University of Arizona)• A recent, general review of the Default Mode Network
(Menon, 2023)
BONUS PAPER:
📄 Kenett et al. (2020):
Kenett, Y. N., Betzel, R. F., & Beaty, R. E. (2020). Community structure of the creative brain at rest. NeuroImage, 210, 116578. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.116578
Open-source PDF Link
👋🏼 Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you need pdfs of the articles.