As a culture, we clearly admire creative people. At MOMA in New York last winter, there was a line out the door to see a collection of Van Gogh paintings. Last night, saxophone great Sonny Rollins played a sold-out show here in Austin. We still place Einstein on a pedestal for his immense scientific creativity.
One reason we admire creative people is that we know how hard it is to be creative ourselves. We may spend a lot of time gaining expertise in our chosen profession, or in a hobby like art or music, and yet still feel that we have fallen short of real creativity. So, anything that looks like it might influence our ability to be creative is real news.
One important element of creativity is flexible behavior. That is, when someone is being creative, they are not simply repeating a past action. They are going beyond those prior actions to try something new.
Over the past few years, a number of researchers have begun to uncover factors that promote this kind of flexibility. In this series of posts, I'll talk about a few. I will start with some recent findings that seem bizarre on the surface, though I think they make some sense when considered carefully.
Joel Cretenet and Vincent Dru published an interesting paper in the May, 2009 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. In this paper, they looked at the effects of flexing and extending your right and left arm on cognitive flexibility.
That is the bizarre part, of course. Why would flexing and extending your arms affect the way you think? Even if flexing and extending does affect the way you think, why would it matter which arm you used? Ok. Hang on a second, we're about to take a rather strange ride.
When you flex your arm, you are pulling your hand (and whatever is in it) toward your body. In many cases, when you pull your arm toward your body, you are creating an "approach" movement. That is, you are bringing something closer to you. When you extend your arm, you are pushing your hand (and whatever is in it) away from your body. So, you are pushing something away, which is an "avoidance" movement.
Now it turns out that there is some reason to believe that the left and right sides of your brain react differently to approach and avoidance. (For now, we'll take this on faith, but I'll try to write more about differences in the sides-or hemispheres-of your brain at a later time.) For most right-handed people (lefties like me are a bit strange in the brain), the right side of the brain seems to be most strongly associated with avoidance actions and motivation. The left-side of the brain is most strongly associated with approach actions and motivation.
Now, one more confusing fact to complete the story here. Movements of the right arm are controlled with the left side of your brain, and movements of the left arm are controlled with the right side of your brain.
Ok. Let's summarize this before we go on:
Extending your arm: Avoidance
Flexing your arm: Approach
Right side of the brain (left arm): Avoidance
Left side of the brain (right arm): Approach
Cretenet and Dru find that when the type of arm movement someone makes matches the preferred motivation of a brain hemisphere, then people's behavior is more flexible. So, extending your left arm, or flexing your right arm enhances creativity. Flexing your right arm or extending your left arm enhances creativity.
So, let's summarize the combination of movements and arms and the effects of those movements:
Extend left arm (avoidance movement/avoidance brain): Flexible
Extend right arm (avoidance movement/approach brain): Not flexible
Flex left arm (approach movement/avoidance brain): Not flexible
Flex right arm (approach movement/approach brain): Flexible
In their experiments, people sit at a table and either put their hand on a pad on top of the table and press down (extending their arm) or put their hand on a pad on the bottom of the table and press up (flexing their arm).
This paper reports a number of studies using different tasks. As one example, people were asked to perform the Alternative Uses Task, which requires them to list possible uses of common objects like bricks. When people matched their arm movements to the motivational preference for the side of their brain, they were able to list more alternative uses and those uses were more original than when the arm movements mismatched the motivational preference for that side of their brain.
There are a few things to say here. First, this set of experiments is one of a growing number of studies that are looking at how a fit between motivational states and other elements of the environment can enhance flexibility. Second, the people in these studies were not aware of the connection between their arm movements and the tasks they were performing. More work needs to be done to know whether these effects can also be obtained when people are aware of the relationship between body movements and flexibility. Third, we don't know how long-lived these effects can be.
So, there is a lot of work to be done before we know whether you ought to be sitting at your desk pressing down with your left arm or pulling up with your right when you want to enhance your flexibility. Still, as we learn more about motivational influences on flexibility, and the relationship between mind and body, we may be able to help people improve their own creative skills.
