☄️ Science-Backed Practices to Boost Your Creative Instincts
Understanding the need for convergent vs divergent creativity
When most people hear the word “creative”, they think of artistic qualities related to domains such as music, fine art, and performance art. They might think of a Picasso painting or their favorite piece of music.
The skill we label as creativity actually stretches much broader than the arts, and we utilize it in all kinds of daily decision-making. For example, when we’re tackling a difficult problem at work, we might inventively combine multiple types of information or expertise to find the correct answer. Or when we’re considering how to describe a peculiar experience to a friend, we might come up with a bunch of unique adjectives that we’d never normally use.
“Creativity” isn’t easy to define. For example, Merriam Webster defines “creative” as “marked by the ability or power to create” or “having the quality of something created rather than imitated”. But these definitions don’t describe anything particularly interesting since all things from builders to bowels have the ability to create.
Most dictionary entries will reference something related to the qualities of being original, inventive, or imaginative. You could argue that “creativity” is really just exploring solutions in a unique or innovative way.
Thankfully, when researchers study creativity, they start by systematically defining exactly what they are measuring or manipulating. This often comes down to two different types of creative problem-solving:
Divergent creativity: This describes open-ended problem-solving that generates many possible ideas or solutions. There isn’t necessarily one correct answer, but rather a whole landscape of possible answers, and your job is to find the ones you want to use. This type of creativity is most characteristic of the arts since there isn’t one best piece of music or one ideal painting.
Convergent creativity: This problem-solving moves in the opposite direction. There’s usually a single ideal answer that you’re trying to reach, but there are many possible ways to get there. You often need to bring together multiple streams of information or thought to find the tricky, inventive solution you’re searching for. Many engineering problems require this kind of creativity.
New research has uncovered a fascinating connection between our ability to be creative in these two respects and our ability to physically navigate the world. The special creative skill we often think of as uniquely human and cognitively complex may be rooted in a much simpler skill from our evolutionary history: foraging.
🫐 Hacking our foraging instincts
In a study published in 2024, researchers recruited 143 online participants and asked them to complete one of two map navigation tasks. In one of the map tasks, participants had to use a divergent foraging strategy to navigate from a single fixed starting location to separate target locations distributed across different parts of the map. In the second map task, participants used a convergent foraging strategy to repeatedly navigate to the same target location multiple times.
Both types of foraging were important in our evolutionary history. We had to make choices each day between exploring for new territories or returning to familiar locations to exploit known resources. There are important tradeoffs between the two strategies: exploration comes with risk and danger but a huge payoff if we find new resources, while exploitation is relatively safe but resources will dwindle over time. It was essential to find the right balance between the two strategies depending on what kind of environment you lived in.
After asking participants to engage in one of these foraging strategies during the map task, the researchers tested each person’s convergent and divergent creativity skills.
To measure divergent creativity, they used a word stem completion task in which they produced a two-letter stem (e.g. “pr-”) and gave participants 30 seconds to come up with as many words as they could that started with that stem (e.g. “present”, “print”, “procure”, etc).
To measure convergent creativity, they produced three prompt words (e.g. “dust”, “cereal”, and “fish”) and asked people to find the single target word that could go before or after each of those prompts to form accurate two-word compounds (e.g. “bowl”).
Amazingly, the people who practiced divergent foraging on the map performed significantly better in the divergent creativity task. While convergent foragers produced only 5.3 words on average per word stem, divergent foragers produced 6.1 words.
However, convergent foragers performed significantly better in the convergent creativity test. While they found the correct compound word for 65% of the questions, divergent foragers could only score 55% on average.
These results support the idea that foraging skills may underlie some of our mental creativity. Just as we used our creativity to forage for food and other physical resources in the past, today we use our creativity to psychologically forage for concepts and ideas that help us solve challenges. It’s an example of what psychologists call “embodied cognition”.
The best part is that it’s possible to nudge our minds into a divergent vs convergent mode depending on the challenges we’re likely to encounter. By setting up our travel habits or daily routines to support what life and work demand of us, we can improve our ability to successfully engage the right type of creativity when we most need it.
⭐️ Takeaway Tips
Tap into the right kind of creativity: If you’re trying to solve a problem with many possible solutions, spend your day somewhere unusual like a new coffee shop or coworking space. New surroundings stimulate an exploratory state of mind. If you’re trying to converge on a single ideal solution, stick with your regular productive location instead. Research suggests there are deep parallels between how we navigate the world and how we utilize creativity, so practice leveraging that connection.
Don’t underestimate physical movement: It’s common to think of our minds as a separate substance to the physical world around us, but in reality, they are two sides of the same coin. This is one of the reasons for why physical exercise improves our mental health, not just our physical health. Whether you need a creativity boost, emotional boost, or any other mental boost, going for a walk or doing some exercise is likely to help.
Explore your own creative performance: If you’re a Wordle fan, you’re regularly testing your convergent creativity skills. Similarly, if you do a lot of artistic work or high-level brainstorming, you’re frequently testing your divergent creativity skills. Experiment with these skills and find which conditions give you the biggest return. Are you better at Wordle after a walk in your favorite park followed by your regular morning coffee? Does your poetry writing or idea generation flow better after you explore a completely new city? A single moment of creativity can be transformative so give yourself the best possible opportunities.
“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
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👋 Until next time,
Erman Misirlisoy, PhD
This is a fascinating take on the roots of divergent and convergent creativity thanks Erman. I particularly love the foraging concept encouraging us to strike the balance between exploring fertile new ground to see what emerges, and exploiting existing tried and tested routes / resources. Lots to think about :)
This is fascinating. I had heard of convergent vs. divergent thinking before but didn't know it could be cultivated!