Simone M. Ritter, Rodica Ioana Damian, Dean Keith Simonton, Rick B. van Baaren, Madelijn Strick, Jeroen Derks, Ap Dijksterhuis
This study discusses human creativity in relation to diversifying life experiences – the kind of experiences which shape character – early parental loss, having immigrant status, or even living abroad. A fascinating look into the adaptability of the human mind, and especially how the brain reacts to these often extremely stressful and life changing conditions.
Can creativity be a bi-product of these experiences? How does sport play a role in facilitating this creative expression? What are the implications for coaches?
Takeaways
- This study adds to research literature on the nature of human creativity.
- Previous research shows that highly creative individuals often experience more unusual or unexpected life events than the general population, such as early parental loss, having immigrant status, or even living abroad.
- The explanation for this link is a bit murky. But for the sake of this study, the researchers define these unusual or unexpected events as diversifying experiences.
- And further, they suggest that diversifying experiences themselves help break a person’s normal cognitive patterns.
- These breaks in normality in turn seem to promote a thinking style marked by creative cognition.
- The practical implications of this line of research suggest that sports performance is especially fertile soil for either explicit or implicit creative development.
- Explicitly coaches can be more creative themselves in designing practice and training protocols that are unexpected or unusual in space or time, environment, sound, constraints, motivations, technology use, or virtual realities.
- Implicitly, the sporting world itself is by definition grounded in the unexpected or unusual and therefore could well be a primary nurturing source for developing more flexible and creative human beings.
The Research
It turns out that there is inherent value in human beings faced with unexpected or unusual situations. There is a relationship between cognitive flexibility (creative thinking) and the frequency of such odd but uncommon life experiences.
These researchers give credence to the idea of understanding the implications of broadening perspectives resulting from experiencing “difference.” They call the idea of difference diversifying experiences. And they hypothesize that any unusual or unexpected experience itself can enhance flexible and creative thinking.
Here’s what they did to see if this kind of relationship between difference and creativity is indeed likely. They designed two experiments to see if diversifying experiences increase cognitive flexibility.
The first experiment included a sample of 61 university students. They immersed the subjects in a virtual reality environment where they exposed them to a series of events defying the laws of physics (perspective, velocity, and gravity). One group walked through a virtual reality replica of the university cafeteria experiencing: 1) a suitcase standing on a table with the size of the suitcase decreasing when approached, and increasing as the subjects moved away; 2) subjects felt they were walking faster than they were since each step was 1.5 times the actual movement; and 3) subjects approached a toy car on the middle of the table; as it slowly rolled toward a bottle at the edge of the table, and when the car hit the bottle, the bottle didn’t fall—it slowly rose upwards. Another group walked through the virtual cafeteria without any abnormalities. A third group did not experience first-hand the virtual reality; instead they watched a film clip of others in the abnormal walk through.
In the second experiment, 68 student subjects were randomly put into four groups where there was an everyday experience (making a sandwich) but with one variation in sequence that altered the schema of normality. All subjects followed a written script to make a sandwich with butter and chocolate chips. The first group’s (Active) script was to put chocolate chips on the plate, then butter the bread, then put buttered side down over the chips. The second group (Normal) just made the sandwich normally (bread buttered and chips added). The third and fourth groups (Vicarious) watched a film of an actor making the sandwich either in the upside-down way or the conventional way.
Using a variety of valid psychological task tests the researchers reported on their tests of the causal role of diversifying experiences in creative cognition. In Experiment 1 they found that actively experiencing complex, unusual, and unexpected events (group 1) in a virtual reality environment (the cafeteria), increased cognitive flexibility. In Experiment 2 they learned that the actual virtual reality of making the sandwich the uncommon way also produced enhanced cognitive flexibility. So when compared to either normal action or inaction or viewing action, it was the experience of the odd difference that produced significant and positive results. The active lived experience of difference over normality increased cognitive flexibility.
So what about these findings and the domain of sports? If you think through the sporting implications for the practical outcomes of this study it sure seems that sport-in-and-of-itself is almost the definition of diversifying experiences. The entire edifice is balanced on the idea of contention of interests, of the interplay of wins and losses, of the struggles, of the unexpected challenges, of differences in gender, races, and ethnic backgrounds, of the uncommon power to amaze, to disappoint, to franchise and disenfranchise, and to be a world of creative freedom within the rules. Even more, the one and most important word in the text of this research paper is this word: active. Both experiments validate the necessity to be the active, not passive, agent of our creative possibilities. If sport is nothing else, it is this.
