Making the most of bad times

Alison Motluk

• Last Updated: May 07. 2009 7:10PM UAE / May 7. 2009 3:10PM GMT

Embrace your inner grouch

It’s hard to stay upbeat when your penny-pinching bosses are counting paper clips and coffee grains, but here’s some good news: you don’t need to be cheery. Workplace discontent may just be a vast, untapped source of creativity.

“For a long time, it seemed that all companies cared about was job satisfaction,” says Jing Zhou at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She and her colleague Jennifer George wondered whether dissatisfaction was really such a bad thing. To find out, they surveyed 149 employees at a drilling equipment company. Surprisingly, people who were dissatisfied and willing to pipe up were found to be the most creative. “It was very striking,” says Zhou, “and counter-intuitive.”

Let your mind wander

“Chance favours the prepared mind.” That was Louis Pasteur’s mantra, and new research suggests he may have been on to something.

John Kounios at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Mark Jung-Beeman at Northwestern University in Chicago were interested in knowing what was going on in the brain in the run-up to a eureka moment. To find out, they scanned the “resting” brains of volunteers as they waited to be told what the experiment entailed. Then the researchers gave them anagrams – “MPXAELE”, for example – and afterwards asked them to indicate whether the solution had just come to them as an insight or if they’d had to work it out. Comparing the activity in volunteers’ resting brains, Kounios and Jung-Beeman found clear differences, with those who reported using insight seeming to let their minds wander. They had more activity in their right hemisphere, which is associated with processing loose associations, and more diffuse activity in the part of the brain that processes vision. The researchers suggest this may allow them to sample their world more broadly for connections that could trigger an “aha” moment.

Try living somewhere new

It is a common escapist fantasy: ditch the daily drudgery, leave your troubles behind and build a new life somewhere else. The idea that living abroad spurs creativity has been in the popular psyche for eons. What would Gauguin have been without Tahiti, or Hemingway without Spain?

Adam Galinsky at Northwestern University in Chicago and Willam Maddux of INSEAD, a business school in Fontainebleau, France, decided to put the theory under the microscope. In one experiment, they found that people who had spent time living outside their own countries were more likely than people who hadn’t to solve the “Duncker candle problem”: given only a box of thumbtacks and a candle and told to fix the candle to a wall, you need to divine that the tack box can be used as a shelf. What’s more, the longer someone had lived abroad, the more likely they were to solve the problem. Time spent abroad also predicted whether another set of individuals would be able to reach a deal in a seemingly intractable negotiation.

Colour your world blue

It may be nothing more than an association with big skies and the open seas, but beholding the colour blue makes you more creative.

Juliet Zhu at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver compared the effects of red and blue on people’s behaviour. While red tended to sharpen the memories of her undergraduate volunteers, blue helped to unlock their imaginations. For example, when they were given toy parts in either blue or red, the toys that the volunteers constructed in blue were rated as much more creative than those made with red.

Be more playful

When times get tough, many people turn serious – this is no time for girls’ giggly nights or horsing around with the guys. Or is it? Some researchers believe that some light-hearted recreation may be better in the long run than hunkering down. Play, they say, not only frees up your mind, it keeps you nimble for when the unexpected happens. “It’s a survival drive that we have minimised in our culture,” says Stuart Brown, a psychiatrist who founded the US National Institute for Play in Carmel Valley, California.

People are wrong to regard play as just a frill, says Marc Bekoff at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He studies play behaviour in social carnivores such as wolves, coyotes and dogs, and believes that it allows individuals to try out new things because they can make mistakes without penalty. “Play encourages taking reasonable risks,” he says. “It allows you to be flexible and creative.” Dr Brown agrees. “The search for novelty and the desire for something fresh is a hallmark of the state of play,” he says. And of course novelty and freshness are also central to creativity.

Two is creative company

Fight that recessionary impulse to go into hiding until your Nobel Prize-winning concept is fully formed. According to Vera John-Steiner, at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, the best ideas are forged not in moments of solitary genius, but during exchanges with trusted colleagues. In her book Creative Collaborations, Ms John-Steiner studies what went right with famously creative duos such as Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, Marie and Pierre Curie and Margaret Mead and her daughter MC Bateson. “Social interactions are crucial,” she concludes. “They provide a non-judgmental ear for emerging ideas.”

What’s more, if the Great Depression is anything to go by, hard economic times may actually be a catalyst for greater collaboration and innovation. It was a time of great creativity, she says, everywhere from the theatre to laboratories of theoretical physics.

Play the piano

Music may provide more than just a brief respite from the economic downturn – it may help you cultivate the ingenuity to rise above it.

Sohee Park and her colleagues at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, wanted to find out what was different about the brains of people who are good at “divergent thinking” – creativity characterised by coming up with novel ideas. She recruited 20 students of classical music, who had each had at least eight years of formal training, and 20 people matched for age, gender and IQ. The volunteers were each given one or more objects – for instance, a toothbrush, toothpaste and dental floss – and asked to come up with alternative uses for them. The musicians, it turned out, were far more creative.

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