Creative genius driven by distraction

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-03/nu-cgd030315.php

Public Release: 3-Mar-2015
Northwestern University

The literary great Marcel Proust wore ear-stoppers because he was unable to filter out irrelevant noise -- and lined his bedroom with cork to attenuate sound.

Now new Northwestern University research suggests why the inability to shut out competing sensory information while focusing on the creative project at hand might have been so acute for geniuses such as Proust, Franz Kafka, Charles Darwin, Anton Chekhov and many others.

The Northwestern research provides the first physiological evidence that real-world creativity may be associated with a reduced ability to filter "irrelevant" sensory information.

The research suggests that some people are more affected by the daily bombardment of sensory information -- or have "leakier" sensory filters.

"Leaky" sensory gating, the propensity to filter out "irrelevant" sensory information, happens early, and involuntarily, in brain processing and may help people integrate ideas that are outside of the focus of attention, leading to creativity in the real world, said Darya Zabelina, lead author of the study, calling the finding "impressive."

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The study suggests that creative people with "leaky" sensory gating may have a propensity to deploy attention over a wider focus or a larger range of stimuli.

"If funneled in the right direction, these sensitivities can make life more rich and meaningful, giving experiences more subtlety," said Zabelina, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at Northwestern.

But the downsides to such sensory distraction have been well noted by some of the world's most creative thinkers.

One of the most influential novelists of the 20th century, Kafka once said, "I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' -- that wouldn't be enough -- but like a dead man." Darwin, Chekhov and Johan Goethe also strongly lamented the distracting nature of noise.

The study cannot yet determine whether reduced sensory gating is a stable trait, or if creative achievers can modulate their sensory processing depending on task demands.