On Sunday nights, I play in the horn section of a blues
band. Each week, musicians come from all
over town to play with us. So, over the
course of the night, I get many opportunities to hear people play solos on a
variety of instruments. And sometimes, I
am just blown away by the quality and creativity of people’s solos.
One thing that is clear is that the great musicians who play
with us have spent a lot of time honing their talents. A fascinating paper by Carsten De Dreu,
Bernard Nijstad, Matthijs Baas, Inge Wolsink, and Marieke Roskes in the May,
2012 issue of Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin suggests that people’s working memory capacity may also play a role in the creativity on
display.
Working memory capacity is the amount of information that
people can hold in mind at once. All of
us have a relatively limited amount of information we can think about at any
one time, but there are differences between people in the size of working
memory. This capacity can be measured
with tests like the OSPAN, in which people solve math problems while trying to
hold words in mind at the same time. The
more words you can remember on this test, the larger your working memory
capacity.
In one study, the researchers actually explored the
creativity of improvisations played by cellists with no formal training in
improvisation. At the start of the
study, they measured everyone’s working memory capacity. Then, participants were given the chance to
perform three 3-minute improvisations based on a theme (such as Winter or
Spring). Each improvisation had a
different theme. The improvisations were
recorded in a studio, and then professional musicians rated them for their
originality and creativity. The
creativity of the first improvisations people performed was about the same
regardless of their working memory capacity.
However, the people with high working memory capacity played better
improvisations as they progressed through the study, while those with low working
memory capacity played worse improvisations.
So, by the end of the study, the people with higher working memory
capacity were playing significantly more creative improvisations than those
with low working memory capacity.
In another study, participants whose working memory capacity
was measured were given a fairly unconstrained brainstorming task in which they
were supposed to generate as may ideas as they could. These ideas were rated for their originality
and their rarity. Of interest, the
researchers explored flexibility and persistence as well. Flexibility was measured by the number of
different categories that someone explored while brainstorming. A flexible person might generate one idea
about pollution and then another about education, and then a third about
transportation. Persistence was measured
by how likely people were to stick with the same category and to produce lots
of ideas from that category. A persistent
person might generate several ideas about education.
People with high working memory capacity generated more
original and novel ideas than those with low working memory capacity. People with high working memory capacity were
also more persistent than those with low working memory capacity. That is, they generated lots of ideas within
a category. Other statistical analyses
suggest that this difference in persistence explains the difference in the
originality of people’s ideas.
What does all of this mean?
In order to be creative, it is important to get beyond
familiar ideas. Chances are, when you
start thinking about something, whether it is a musical solo or an idea to
revolutionize our education system, the first few things you come up with will
be variations on ideas you have encountered in the past. Only after you think through those more
mundane ideas are you likely to start really generating something new.
It seems that when you have high working memory capacity,
you are better able to pull out both the initial ideas that are not deeply
original as well as other more novel ideas.
There is still much research to be done to investigate this
further. For example, the studies I just
described were both correlational. That
is, the researchers measured people’s working memory capacity and then related
that to their performance on tasks of creativity. They did manipulate working memory in one
study by having a group of people do a task called the Remote Associates Task
(RAT) while trying to remember some numbers at the same time. The RAT is often used as a measure of creativity. It would be useful to see more results like
this with a wider range of creativity tasks and ways of affecting people’s
working memory capacity before drawing stronger conclusions.
