In the field of psychology, there’s long been a certain haziness surrounding the definition of creativity, an I-know-it-when-I-see it attitude that has eluded a precise formulation. During our conversation, Beeman told me that he used to be reluctant to tell people what his area of study was, for fear of being dismissed or misunderstood. What, for instance, crosses your mind when you think of creativity? Well, we know that someone is creative if he produces new things or has new ideas. And yet, as John Kounios, a psychologist at Drexel University who collaborates frequently with Beeman, points out, that view is wrong, or at least not entirely right. “Creativity is the process, not the product,” he says.
To illustrate, Beeman offers an example. Imagine someone who has never used or seen a paperclip and is struggling to keep a bunch of papers together. Then the person comes up with a new way of bending a stiff wire to hold the papers in place. “That was very creative,” Beeman says. On the flip side, if someone works in a new field—Beeman gives the example of nanotechnology—anything that he produces may be considered inherently “creative.” But was the act of producing it actually creative? As Beeman puts it, “Not all artists are creative. And some accountants are very creative.”
Insight, however, has proved less difficult to define and to study. Because it arrives at a specific moment in time, you can isolate it, examine it, and analyze its characteristics. “Insight is only one part of creativity,” Beeman says. “But we can measure it. We have a temporal marker that something just happened in the brain. I’d never say that’s all of creativity, but it’s a central, identifiable component.” When scientists examine insight in the lab, they are looking at what types of attention and thought processes lead to that moment of synthesis: If you are trying to facilitate a breakthrough, are there methods you can use that help? If you feel stuck on a problem, are there tricks to get you through?
In a recent study, Beeman and Kounios followed people’s gazes as they attempted to solve what’s called the remote-associates test, in which the subject is given a series of words, like “pine,” “crab,” and “sauce,” and has to think of a single word that can logically be paired with all of them. They wanted to see if the direction of a person’s eyes and her rate of blinking could shed light on her approach and on her likelihood of success. It turned out that if the subject looked directly at a word and focussed on it—that is, blinked less frequently, signalling a higher degree of close attention—she was more likely to be thinking in an analytical, convergent fashion, going through possibilities that made sense and systematically discarding those that didn’t. If she looked at “pine,” say, she might be thinking of words like “tree,” “cone,” and “needle,” then testing each option to see if it fit with the other words. When the subject stopped looking at any specific word, either by moving her eyes or by blinking, she was more likely to think of broader, more abstract associations. That is a more insight-oriented approach. “You need to learn not just to stare but to look outside your focus,” Beeman says. (The solution to this remote-associates test: “apple.”)
As it turns out, by simply following someone’s eyes and measuring her blinks and fixation times (how long she looks at something before either looking away or closing her eyes), Beeman’s group can predict how someone will likely solve a problem and when she is nearing that solution. That’s an important consideration for would-be creative minds: it helps us understand how distinct patterns of attention may contribute to certain kinds of insights.
