Space Creates Creativity

Every week, The Happiness Lab explores one science-backed idea that can make everyday life a little happier. Read it. Try it. Experience it.

Have you ever stopped trying to solve something...

and then had an idea in the shower?

While making coffee?

Halfway through doing something completely unrelated?

You weren't working on the problem.

At least, not deliberately.

And yet something appeared.

A connection.

A different angle.

A possible answer.

It can feel almost accidental.

But researchers studying creativity have been asking an intriguing question:

What happens to a problem when we stop working on it for a while?

This week, we're exploring the curious space between trying to find an idea and an idea finding us.

🔬What Science Discovered

Psychologist Benjamin Baird and colleagues gave participants a classic creativity task.

They had to think of unusual uses for ordinary objects.

Then came the interesting part.

Before returning to the problems, participants spent their break in different ways.

Some did a demanding task.

Some simply rested.

Some had no break at all.

And another group did an undemanding task, one that left more opportunity for their minds to wander.

When everyone returned to the creativity problems, that last group showed greater improvement on problems they had already encountered.

They hadn't spent the break deliberately searching for answers.

In fact, the improvement was associated with more mind wandering, not with more conscious thinking about the problems.

Sometimes stepping away from a problem may be part of solving it.

Researchers call this kind of break incubation.

And Baird's experiment isn't the whole story.

Psychologists Ut Na Sio and Thomas Ormerod brought together decades of experiments investigating what happens when people stop working on a problem and return to it later.

Across the studies, they found an overall positive incubation effect.

But there was an important wrinkle.

Not every break worked equally well.

The effect varied depending on the kind of problem, what people did during the break and how demanding that activity was.

For some problems, a low-demand activity during the gap was more helpful than simply resting.

So perhaps the useful space isn't always doing absolutely nothing.

Sometimes it may be doing something that doesn't require all of our attention.

A gap doesn't necessarily stop the creative process. It may change the way the process happens.

Neuroscience adds another interesting piece.

Creative thinking doesn't appear to belong to one single “creativity centre” in the brain.

Research instead points toward cooperation between different brain networks, including systems involved in internally generated thought and systems involved in directing and evaluating our thinking.

Ideas may need room to appear.

But they also need us to notice, shape and test them.

Wandering and focusing may both have a seat at the creative table.

🌍What This Means in Everyday Life

This isn't an invitation to stop working and wait for genius to arrive. 😎

And mind wandering isn't automatically creative.

But when you've been circling the same problem for a while, more effort isn't the only thing you can try.

You can create a gap.

Put the question down.

Do something else for a while.

Then come back.

Perhaps nothing has changed.

Perhaps you return with exactly the same problem.

Or perhaps you notice a connection that wasn't there before.

A different direction.

A question you hadn't thought to ask.

Sometimes making space doesn't give you an answer. It gives the answer somewhere to appear.