Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Creative people have shorter associative pathways

A study published in the December 2010 issue of Personality and Individual Differences reported evidence that creative people have more flexible and efficient association networks. For example, an uncreative person might easily see that a connecting word between cat and cheese could be mouse. But a creative person sees less distance between even seemingly unrelated words like subject and marriage. (The connecting word that popped into my head was novel. How about you?)  So creative people see connections where others do not, and they are less rigid in how they look at things. Similarly, Eysenck hypothesized that they have low cognitive inhibition. Shall we call it "mental sluttiness"? 

According to this study, the heritability of creativity is moderate.

3 comments:

  1. Saint Louis6:25 PM

    Subject and marriage: first thing that popped into my head was "submission."

    ReplyDelete
  2. Rob S.12:04 AM

    I assume that by 'due to genes' they mean the coefficient of determination, r^2? Sqrt 0.22 is 0.47. So, basically, 0.50, which seems to be the modal heritability number from studies of all kinds of traits.

    ReplyDelete
  3. between even seemingly unrelated words like subject and marriage. (The connecting word that popped into my head was novel. How about you?

    Subject --> Verb --> Marriage.

    Marriage is the object.

    As in, "Men fear marriage." :)

    ReplyDelete

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