How do you see the world?
What is it about a creative work such as a painting or piece of music that elicits our wonder and adoration? Is it the adventure of being revealed something brand-new, something different, something the artist saw that we did not?
As Pablo Picasso put it:
Others have seen what is and asked why. I have actually seen what might be and asked why not.
The concept that some people see more possibilities than others is central to the principle of creativity.
Psychologists often measure imagination using divergent thinking tasks. These require you to produce as lots of uses as possible for mundane items, such as a brick. People who can see various and diverse usages for a brick (say, a casket for a Barbie doll funeral diorama) are rated as more innovative than people who can just think about a couple of common usages (say, for constructing a wall).
The element of our personality that appears to drive our creativity is called openness to experience, or openness. Among the 5 significant characteristic, it is openness that best forecasts performance on divergent thinking jobs. Openness also anticipates real-world imaginative accomplishments, in addition to engagement in everyday creative pursuits.
As Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire describe in their book Wired to Create, the imagination of open individuals comes from a “drive for cognitive expedition of ones external and inner worlds”.
This interest to examine things from all angles might lead people high in openness to see more than the average person, or as another research team put it, to discover “intricate possibilities laying dormant in so-called familiar environments”.
Innovative vision
In our research, released in the Journal of Research in Personality, we found that open people dont just bring a various perspective to things, they really see things in a different way to the average individual.
We wished to check whether openness is linked to a phenomenon in visual perception called binocular competition. This takes place when two different images exist to each eye concurrently, such as a red spot to the right eye and a green spot to the left eye.
For the observer, the images seem to turn intermittently from one to the other. At one moment just the green spot is viewed, and at the next minute just the red spot– each stimulus appearing to measure up to the other (see illustration below).
Binocular competition job. Credit: Author provided
Intriguingly, individuals in binocular rivalry studies sometimes see a merged or scrambled mix of both images (see middle frame, above). These minutes of “rivalry suppression”, when both images end up being purposely accessible at the same time, seem practically like a “imaginative” service to the problem provided by the 2 incompatible stimuli.
Throughout 3 experiments, we found that open individuals saw the fused or rushed images for longer durations than the average individual. They reported seeing this for even longer when experiencing a positive mood state similar to those that are known to boost creativity.
Our findings suggest that the innovative propensities of open people extend all the way to basic visual understanding. Open people might have essentially various visual experiences to the typical person.
Seeing things that others miss
Another popular perceptual phenomenon is called inattentional blindness. Individuals experience this when they are so focused on one thing that they totally fail to see something else right before their eyes.
In a popular illustration of this affective glitch, participants were asked to see a brief video of people tossing a basketball to one another, and to track the total variety of passes in between the players using white.
Try this out yourself, prior to reading even more!
Count the basketball passes in between gamers in white.
Did you see it? Approximately half of the 192 individuals in the initial study entirely stopped working to see the costumed figure.
Why did some people experience inattentional blindness in this study when others didnt? The answer to this concern can be found in a recent follow-up research study showing that your susceptibility to inattentional loss of sight depends upon your personality: open individuals are most likely to see the gorilla in the video clip.
Once once again, it appears that more visual info breaks through into conscious understanding for individuals high in openness– they see the things that others evaluate out.
Opening our minds: is more much better?
If open individuals have actually been dealt a much better hand than the rest of us, it may seem as. Can individuals with uncreative characters expand their restricted vistas, and would this be a great thing?
There is installing evidence that character is malleable, and increases in openness have actually been observed in cognitive training interventions and studies of the effects of psilocybin (the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms).
Openness also increases for students who select to study overseas, confirming the idea that travel broadens the mind.
However there is likewise a dark side to the “permeability of awareness” that identifies open people. Openness has actually been linked to elements of mental disorder, such as proneness to hallucination.
So regardless of its appeal, there may be a domino effect between seeing more and seeing things that are not there.
From various personalities emerge different experiences, but we must constantly remember that one individuals view is not necessarily better than anothers.
Composed by:
People who can see varied and numerous uses for a brick (say, a casket for a Barbie doll funeral diorama) are rated as more imaginative than people who can only believe of a couple of common uses (state, for constructing a wall).
The element of our personality that appears to drive our creativity is called openness to experience, or openness. Among the five major character qualities, it is openness that best forecasts efficiency on divergent thinking tasks. Did you see it? Roughly half of the 192 individuals in the initial study totally stopped working to see the costumed figure.
Luke Smillie, Senior Lecturer in Personality Psychology, The University of Melbourne
Anna Antinori, PhD prospect, The University of Melbourne
This post was very first released in The Conversation.