Stimulating Creative Thinking- Is Music an Aid or a Barrier
Listening to music while carrying out a task significantly stimulates creativity. That was the conclusion of a research from the Netherlands and Australia. A connection was discovered between happy music and creativity after conducting an experiment where participants listened to four different types of music while taking two types of creativity tests. The musical selections were all classical pieces that varied on two dimensions, valence (positive or negative) and arousal (high or low). The four pieces were described as calm, happy, sad, and anxious, and a group took the tests in silence.
The conclusion was drawn that those who listened to happy music (classical music that elicits a positive mood and is high on arousal) were more creative than those who didn’t listen to any music. Specifically,they did better on divergent thinking tasks, which require generating a broad range of ideas in an open-ended way.These results fall in line with previous research on mood and creativity that suggests that we are more cognitively flexible when we’re in a good mood and perhaps we feel more energized, which encourages persistence when we listen to music with a more active tempo.So if you’re feeling particularly lost in the initial stages of idea generation for a new project or marketing campaign, try listening to some happy music.
For the study, UK researchers presented people with a series of word puzzles designed to measure creativity and “insight-based” processes. The study participants completed the puzzles either in a quiet space or in one with music playing in the background. Whether that music was familiar or unfamiliar, vocal or strictly instrumental, people’s scores on average fell on the creativity test compared to their scores in the quiet condition.“The findings challenge the view that background music enhances creativity,” the study authors wrote.More research on music and creativity has found that, depending on the kind of creative task a person is grappling with, certain types of music may be helpful.
Credit must be given to Mark Beeman, chair of psychology at Northwestern University and principal investigator at NU’s Creative Brain Lab. who has spent two decades studying the brain and its creative processes, which he explores in his 2015 book The Eureka Factor: Aha Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain.He said “For breakthrough moments of creativity, positive mood is generally helpful.” he also said “this [anxiety] tends to cause them to focus more, which is not helpful,” He explains that the process of creative problem solving tends to unfold in predictable stages.
The first stage, he says, involves studying a problem or dilemma, assessing the obvious solutions, and realizing that none of them works. “At this point, if you keep focusing too hard on a problem, that tends to make it more difficult for the brain to come up with different or novel ideas,” he says. He likens it to a dim star that disappears when you stare straight at it. “To see the star, you have to look at it out of the corner of your eye, and creative ideas may be like that too,” he says. “You need to take your focus off the strong, obvious ideas to avoid squashing the others.”
This is where music comes into play. Once a person has closely examined a problem and hit a roadblock, the next creative stage is one Beeman calls “incubation.” During this stage, “there’s some kind of continuing process in the mind where you’re still mulling the problem at an unconscious level,” he says. This incubation period often produces “aha!” insights or realizations—like when you can’t recall a word, but then it pops into your head later in the day, after you’ve thought you’d stopped thinking about it.But not all activities foster incubation, Beeman says. “If you’re reading email or doing other demanding tasks, there aren’t enough background resources to do any work on the problem.”Listening to music, on the other hand, may be just the kind of mild diversion that relaxes the brain’s focus while still allowing it to do its fruitful new-idea incubating, he says. And indeed, there’s evidence that listening to music can stimulate the brain’s default mode.
Beeman doesn’t disagree with the results of the new study that found out that music impairs creative problem solving. He says music might not help people solve the type of verbal puzzle the study employed—which he himself helped design and validate years ago in an effort to better measure some aspects of creative thinking. This specific type of puzzle requires “multiple cognitive processes,” he says, some of which require “focused attention.” And all types of distraction—music included—may impair focused attention.So if a person is in the midst of the first stage of creativity, the one that involves analyzing a problem and eliminating the obvious choices or solutions, background music probably isn’t helpful. “It’s either a distraction or you just block it out,” he says.
But if you’re stuck on a problem and you’re looking for creative inspiration, taking a break to listen to music or engage in idle “mind wandering” may allow the brain the freedom it needs to “dredge up” new ideas or insights, he says. He also cites research linking mind-wandering to creative inspiration,in those cases, it depends on the type of music you listen to “I think that will vary a lot depending on the individual,” Beeman says. “For most, I think something that’s pleasant and familiar—not so novel that it’s distracting—would be helpful.”
