Creative minds at rest: Creative individuals are more associative and engaged with their idle thoughts

Abstract

Despite an established body of research characterizing how creative individuals explore their external world, relatively little is known about how such individuals navigate their inner mental life, especially in unstructured contexts such as periods of awake rest. Across two studies, the present manuscript tested the hypothesis that creative individuals are more engaged with their idle thoughts and more associative in the dynamic transitions between them. Study 1 captured the real-time conscious experiences of 81 adults as they voiced aloud the content of their mind moment-by-moment across a 10-minute unconstrained baseline period. Higher originality scores on a divergent thinking task were associated with less perceived boredom, more words spoken overall, more freely moving thoughts, and more loosely-associative (as opposed to sharp) transitions during the baseline rest period. In Study 2, across 2,612 participants, those who reported higher self-rated creativity also reported less perceived boredom during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time during which many people experienced unusually extended periods of unstructured free time. Overall, these results suggest a tendency for creative individuals to be more engaged and explorative with their thoughts when task demands are relaxed, raising implications for resting state functional MRI and societal trends to devalue idle time.

Keywords: COVID; associative thinking; boredom; creativity; curiosity; divergent thinking; mind wandering; resting state; spontaneous thoughts; think aloud.

Figure 1.

Scatterplots representing relationships between mean originality scores on the divergent thinking task and variables related to engagement with the unconstrained baseline Think Aloud task (A & B) and associational thinking at rest (C & D). The shaded grey area represents the 95% confidence region for the regression fit.

Figure 2.

Schematic of the main results from Study 1. Higher originality scores on the divergent thinking task were significantly related to metrics derived from analysis of the unconstrained baseline Think Aloud task suggestive of more engagement with idle thoughts (i.e., less bored and higher total word count), higher levels of exploratory and associative thinking (i.e., more freely moving thought, higher percentage of associative transitions), and higher levels of curiosity (CEII: Curiosity & Exploration Inventory II). Semantic similarity (in grey), another variable theoretically related to associative thinking, was not significantly related to originality (though see conclusion). Bold arrows represent significant relationships between mean originality scores on the divergent thinking task and other metrics.

Figure 3.

Scatterplot representing the relationship between self-rated creativity (assessed by the Kumar and Holman’s Global Measure of Creativity Capacity scale) and self-rated boredom during COVID. The shaded grey area represents the 95% confidence region for the regression fit. Note that for visual purposes, the data points have been scattered using the jitter option of ggplot so as to minimize overlapping data points.