What is a creative work - a painting by an artist or a piece of music that evokes a sense of admiration and inspiration in us? Is it all from a simple desire to show us something new, something different, or is it a person's craving for expressing what the artist himself saw and other people could not see? As Pablo Picasso once said: “Some people see what is and ask why. I see what could have been, and I ask 'why not? The main point of this statement is that some people see more possibilities in the things around them than others. And this is the central link of the concept of creativity.
When testing creativity, psychologists often use divergent thinking tests. For example, a person is told to come up with as many uses as possible for the simplest things, like ordinary bricks. If a person is able to come up with many options and combinations of using ordinary bricks (up to creating a coffin lid for a Barbie doll from it), then the test will show that such a person will have significantly more developed divergent thinking than someone who believes that bricks can be used only for common tasks like building walls and buildings.
According to the same studies, openness to experiences, or simply openness to new experiences, is the aspect of our personality that stimulates our creativity. Among the five main personality traits of a person (extraversion-introversion, benevolence, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience), it is openness that can best predict our effectiveness in performing tasks on divergent thinking.
As the American psychologists Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire point out in their book "Wired to Create", the desire for creativity in people "comes from the desire to cognitively explore their own world and the world around." The curiosity of a comprehensive study of certain things can lead to an increase in the level of a person's openness to see the world around him differently compared to the average person. Or, as other researchers of this issue say, "the ability to see a set of possibilities lying unnoticed in the so-called established" familiar environment "for other people."
Creative vision
The study, the results of which were published in the scientific journal Journal of Research in Personality, says that open people do not just try to see things from their other sides and thus express their point of view, such people actually really see the world around them. differently compared to ordinary people.
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The experts wanted to find out if there is any connection between openness and such a phenomenon as binacular competition. This phenomenon occurs when two different images are presented simultaneously for each eye, for example, a red card and a green card. When viewing both images by an observer for the latter, a visual effect will be created, in which the card shown for one eye will, as it were, go into the other eye and vice versa. That is, at some point it will seem that both eyes see either a green or a red background.
Interestingly, for some participants in such an experiment, it may seem that both backgrounds either merge, or one is superimposed on the other, creating a kind of structured image, as can be seen in the central picture above. And such moments of binacular suppression, when both images become visible at the same time, can be explained as an attempt of consciousness to find a “creative” solution to the problem presented in the form of completely different visual stimuli (cards with different background colors in this case).
Through experiments, the researchers found that open people are able to see merging or intersecting images for a longer period of time than the average person. Moreover, the effect lasts even longer if the person is in a good mood at this moment, which, according to earlier studies, also plays an important role in creativity. Based on these observations, the researchers concluded that the creativity of open-minded people extends down to basic visual perception. And such open people are capable of experiencing fundamentally different visual experiences compared to the average person.
Seeing what others do not notice
Another well-known phenomenon of perception is called inattention blindness. People can experience it when they are so focused on something that they literally stop noticing other things right in front of their eyes.
A great example of this perceptual glitch is an experiment in which people are asked to watch a short video. On it, several people are throwing a basketball to each other. The observer is tasked with counting the number of passes between the players dressed in white.
Before reading further, you can check your perception yourself.
At some point, a man in a gorilla costume appears right in the center of the frame, and then leaves. Did you notice him? If not, then don't worry, you are not alone in this. Roughly half of the 192 participants in the original study also missed the man in the gorilla suit. But why do some people experience inattention blindness while others do not?
The answer to this question is only due to recent research showing that your susceptibility to inattention blindness depends on your personality. And open-minded people are more likely to spot the gorilla in the shot. Again, from this we can conclude that more visual information penetrates into the process of conscious perception of the surrounding world in people who are more open - they are able to see what others do not notice.
Open your mind. Is it necessary?
It may seem that open people have more opportunities than others. But can people who initially have non-creative personality traits expand these opportunities? And is it really necessary?
There is compelling evidence that personality can be built, molded like clay and made the way you want. An increase in the openness of perception is observed, for example, after specialized cognitive training using the substance psilocybin (a chemical compound present in some hallucinogenic mushrooms). If we talk about less radical examples, then an increase in the level of openness is often observed among students studying abroad, which only once again confirms the opinion that travel helps to expand your consciousness.
But in fact, in the "openness of consciousness" not everything is as rosy as it might seem at first glance. Psychologists often associate openness with some aspects of mental illness, in particular with an increased tendency to hallucinations. There is a very fine line between being able to see more and being able to see what is not. In general, having a variety of personalities is good. It is important to remember that one person's point of view is not necessarily better than another's point of view.
NIKOLAY KHIZHNYAK