科学美国人60秒:More Creative Types May Face Concentration Challenges

Ever try to work in a coffee shop, but your concentration gets derailed by all the talking, not to mention the steaming and the pouring? The problem might not be that you’re easily distracted. It could be that your brain is actually highly creative. So finds a study in the journal Neuropsychologia. [Darya L. Zabelina et al, Creativity and sensory gating indexed by the P50: Selective versus leaky sensory gating in divergent thinkers and creative achievers]

Previous behavioral studies have found that more creative people may have leaky sensory filters. That means the involuntary neurological process that ordinarily filters out irrelevant stimuli are not as fully engaged.

To test that idea, researchers asked volunteers to fill out a creative achievement questionnaire and take a test to assess creative cognition. Then, their brain activity was monitored while they listened to closely separated click sounds.  

A typical brain responds to the first click a lot stronger than the second, identical click. It’s as if the brain acknowledges it processed something novel and doesn’t need to process the second click to the same extent. But for creative brains—

“They process the second click to the same degree so they don’t censor out information that is repetitive or irrelevant in some sense. “

Darya Zabelina of Northwestern University, lead researcher of the study.

“What’s interesting is that it happens 50 milliseconds after stimulus onset. With behavioral studies it’s impossible to sort of know exactly when this…happens. And with neurophysiology we’re able to see that only 50 milliseconds after…the clicks in our study were presented more creative people were less likely to filter out the noise. So 50 milliseconds, you’re not able to decide whether…to process something or not, it’s sort of an automatic response.”

If this kind of hyper-alert condition sounds familiar, you’re in good company. Kafka, Darwin, Chekhov and Proust were reported to avoid distractions while working because they were easily distracted. So try some ear plugs and go finish that world-changing book you’re been writing. Or possibly just trying to read.

—Erika Beras