Articles

A new brain-imaging study has studied the brain activity of jazz guitarists during improvisation to show that creativity is, in fact, driven primarily by the right hemisphere in musicians who are comparatively inexperienced at improvisation. However, musicians who are highly experienced at improvisation rely primarily on their left hemisphere.

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If you believe that great scientists are most creative when they're young, you are missing part of the story. A new study of winners of the Nobel Prize in economics finds that there are two different life cycles of creativity, one that hits some people early in their career and another that more often strikes later in life.

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The popular view that music enhances creativity has been challenged by researchers who say it has the opposite effect. Psychologists investigated the impact of background music on performance by presenting people with verbal insight problems that are believed to tap creativity. They found that background music 'significantly impaired' people's ability to complete tasks testing verbal creativity -- but there was no effect for background library noise.

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Welcome to the wonderful world of pretend play, where a cardboard tube is a telescope and the space under the dining room table is a cave. Pretend play, also called make-believe play and imaginary play, has been regarded as crucial to children’s healthy development. The benefits, apparently, are many.

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I worry that my children aren’t imaginative and creative enough. My elder son is six years old. Yesterday he and his friend were playing in our backyard. His friend pretended to be a giant dinosaur, and all my son said was, “there’s no dinosaur”. He never pretend plays, in fact, he seldom plays.

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When we think of all the skills a child needs to learn to be able to succeed academically, we often think of reading, writing, concentration, math and so on. However, one of the most important skills children need to develop is their creativity.

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Encouraging children to use gestures as they think can help them come up with more creative ideas, according to research in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

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Legos, the popular toy bricks, may be great for stimulating creativity in little kids. But when it comes to adults, things might be a little different. According to a new study in the Journal of Marketing Research, when adults are given a set of Legos to solve a well-defined problem, their creativity may suffer.

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