How Individual Preferences Affect Our Creativity

We give ideas shape more quickly the more we like them. But in order to be creative, we must emphasize original thought. This is what a recent study by Alizée Lopez-Persem and Emmanuelle Volle, Inserm researchers at the Paris Brain Institute, demonstrated.

The researchers explain how individual preferences affect the rate of the emergence of new ideas and their level of originality using a behavioral study and a computational model to reproduce the many stages of the creative process. These preferences also influence the concepts we choose to use and share with others.

What motivates us to create novel concepts rather than choose tried-and-true procedures and methods? What makes people want to create even though doing so could cost them time, effort, and reputation? Motivating oneself is a key component of the intricate dynamics that underlie creativity, which we are only beginning to grasp. However, having a purpose in mind does not adequately explain why we favor some ideas over others, or whether our decision enhances the outcome of our actions.

“Creativity can be defined as the ability to produce original and relevant ideas in a given context, to solve a problem or improve a situation. It is a key skill for adapting to change or provoking it,” explains Lopez-Persem, a researcher in cognitive neuroscience. “Our team is interested in the cognitive mechanisms that enable creative ideas to be produced, hoping to learn how to use them wisely.”

The two subsequent phases of the creative process—generating new ideas and assessing their potential—are now accepted by researchers. But they still do not understand how this evaluation works or why some ideas stick with us while others don’t.

“We need to value our ideas to select the best ones,” says Lopez-Persem. “However, there is no indication that this operation corresponds to a rational and objective evaluation in which we try to inhibit our cognitive biases from making the best possible choice. We, therefore, wanted to know how this value is assigned and whether it depends on individual characteristics.”

Objectifying the inner motion of the emergence of concepts

A common idea of creativity, which is typically portrayed as a momentum that seizes, transports, and transcends us, does not match to a model of the creative process that involves a series of activities involving different brain networks. On the other hand, Volle’s team contends that creativity has three fundamental dimensions that can be mathematically represented: exploration, which is based on personal experience and allows us to consider potential options; evaluation, which entails assessing an idea; and selection, which enables us to decide which idea will be expressed.

The researchers recreated these three dimensions in a computational model, which they contrasted with the real behavior of the participants recruited for the study, in order to understand the reciprocal links between these three aspects. 71 participants were invited to do free association tests using the PRISME platform of the Paris Brain Institute, which entail pairing words in the most outrageous manner possible. After then, participants were asked to judge how much they enjoyed these conceptual connections and whether they were meaningful and original.

“Our results indicate that the subjective evaluation of ideas plays an important role in creativity,” says Emmanuelle Volle, a neurologist. “We observed a relationship between the speed of production of new ideas and participants’ level of appreciation of these ideas. In other words, the more you like the idea you are about to formulate, the faster you come up with it. Imagine, for example, a cook who intends to make a sauce: the more the combination of flavors seduces him in his mind, the faster he will throw himself on the ingredients. Our other discovery is that this assessment combines two subjective criteria: originality and relevance.”

Which personal preferences encourage creativity?

The team shows that the importance of these two criteria varies between individuals. “It all depends on their experience, personality, and probably their environment, adds the researcher. Some favor the originality of an idea over its relevance; for others, it’s the other way around. However, preferring either originality or relevance has a role in creative thinking: we have shown that individuals inclined to original ideas suggest more inventive concepts.”

Finally, depending on the preferences of the participants as determined by a separate task, the team’s model projected the quantity and caliber of their creative proposals. These findings demonstrate how the creative impulse is mechanical. They also challenge the notion that creative thought is an enigmatic process over which we have no influence at all by suggesting that it may be possible in the long run to properly describe the mechanisms of creativity at the neurocomputational level and correlate them to their brain substrate.

“In the future, we want to define different creativity profiles related to people’s fields of activity. Do you have different creative preferences if you are an architect, software engineer, illustrator, or technician?” adds Lopez-Persem. “Which environments foster creativity, and which ones inhibit it? Could we modify or re-educate our creative profile through cognitive exercises to match personal ambitions or needs? All these questions remain open, but we firmly intend to answer them.”

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