INTELLIGENCE(Answers at the bottom of p.201.) Another popular measure of creativity is
Karl Dunker’s Candle Problem. Imagine you have a box of tacks, a candle
and some matches. Your task is to fix the candle to the wall in such a way
that it doesn’t drip wax on the floor. The solution is to use the tacks to pin
the tack box to the wall and then use it as a candleholder.
Psychologists usually break creativity down into three component
parts. First there’s the research stage: even the most creative geniuses
need to do the groundwork. In fact, people often underestimate the
importance of getting to know a problem inside out from every conceiv-
able angle. Creativity often depends on bringing established ideas
together in novel ways, so the more raw material you have to work with,
the more likely you are to come up with a novel and useful idea. Second
is the incubation period, which has been the subject of some intriguing
psychological research suggesting that there really is some truth to the
old adage about sleeping on a problem. Finally, there’s the Aha! or eureka
moment, as when Archimedes allegedly leapt out of the bath as he real-
ized that the height of the water provided an index of volume.
Columbia also found that participants created more novel and original
toys when given blue (rather than red) parts to make them with.
Wiggle your eyes back and forth Psychologists at Stockton College
asked participants to invent new uses for everyday objects, including
bricks and newspapers, before and after performing horizontal
eye-exercises for thirty seconds. After wiggling their eyes, the strongly
right-handed and left-handed – but not the ambidextrous – partici-
pants came up with more original ideas and more categories of use
than a control group who didn’t perform the eye exercise. It’s thought
that the wiggling helps to improve communication between the
hemispheres. The same exercise also boosts memory (see p.88).
Stop thinking so hard Distract yourself and you’ll give your
non-conscious mind the chance to grapple with the problem at
hand. Ap Dijksterhuis and Teun Meurs showed this in a 2006 study
in which they asked 87 students to think of as many new names for
pasta as they could, after giving them a head start with five examples
of existing names that all began with the letter i. Those students who
first engaged in a distracter task for three minutes before giving their
suggestions thought of far more varied names than students who
spent the same time simply thinking of new names (the latter group
mostly thought of new names beginning with i).