Tag: Creativity

Why do some of our choices appear to be driven by a desire to explore the unknown? An Inserm team from École Normale Supérieure led by Valentin Wyart has shown that most of these choices are not motivated by curiosity, but by errors caused by the brain mechanisms implicated in evaluating our options. These findings

The next time you need to get the creative juices flowing, playing some types of video games may help. Video games that foster creative freedom can increase creativity under certain conditions, according to new research from Iowa State University. The experimental study compared the effect of playing Minecraft, with or without instruction, to watching a

Humans use imagination a lot, whether it be thinking about what’s for dinner later tonight or trying to imagine what someone else on the other side of the world may be experiencing after reading the news. As situations become farther away from reality and more distal, imagining a situation becomes more difficult. The limits to

It takes King Curtis less than half a minute into “Memphis Soul Stew,” his best-remembered song, to really get a groove going. When it does, it doesn’t let go. According to the lyrics of the 1967 hit, the ingredients that make up a good groove are simple: “half a teacup of bass” and “a pound

Our level of alertness rises and falls over the course of a workday, sometimes causing our energy to drop and our minds to wander just as we need to perform important tasks. To help understand these patterns and improve productivity, Cornell University researchers have developed a tool that tracks alertness by measuring pupil size, captured

Think you’re totally in control of your thoughts? Maybe not as much as you think, according to a new San Francisco State University study that examines how thoughts that lead to actions enter our consciousness. While we can “decide” to think about certain things, other information — including activities we have learned like counting —

Every cell and every organism ages sooner or later. But why is this so? Scientists at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg have now discovered for the first time a protein that represents a central switching point in the aging process. It controls the life span of an individual — from the fly to

When was the last time you watched a Michael Jackson music video? If your answer is “never” or “not for quite a while,” you are really missing a treat. According to Rolling Stone, “No single artist … shaped, innovated or defined the medium of ‘music video’ more than Michael Jackson.” Back in the 1980s and

As an undergraduate student at York University, Joel Lopata was studying film production and jazz performance when a discrepancy became apparent. “I noticed students in the jazz program were really developing a language of creative engagement, whereas in the film program, we weren’t having the same education. It was a lot more theoretical than practical,

No one likes smug know- it-all friends, relatives or co-workers who believe their knowledge and beliefs are superior to others. But now these discussions at the dinner table, bar or office might be less annoying. A new University of Michigan study indicates what many people suspect: these know-it-all people are especially prone to overestimating what