Berly McCoy
speaker
102 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Berly McCoy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keeley and Tiffany Vera Castro were the audio engineers.
Hi Short Wavers, Burleigh McCoy filling the host chair today, and I'd like you to meet psychologist Zorana Ivcevic-Pringle. When Zorana was an undergraduate, she was searching for a thesis topic. To spark ideas, she was reading everything she could get her hands on, and she stumbled across work from the 1960s, during the space age, about creativity.
She read that creative people often have personality traits that don't seem to go together.
In the two decades Zorana's been studying creativity, she's realized that even though creative people are unique, it's not because they're born with it. But that idea that some people are creative and some people aren't, what scientists call a fixed mindset, can stop creativity in its tracks.
But this idea is pervasive. We can sometimes think it's only the Einsteins or Beyonces of the world who are creative.
One example of mini-C might be your unique way of learning times tables.
Like designing new software, writing a novel, or making a science podcast. So even if you aren't big C-level like Beyonce, you and anyone can always start by opting in to being creative. Which Zorana learned the hard way, after years of limiting herself.
That has changed, and it culminated into a very creative thing, a book called The Creativity Choice, about how creative people can stick with an idea. So today on the show, the science of creativity. We talk about how psychologists study it and the choices people make to grow their creativity. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Okay, Zorana, so now let's talk about how you go about studying and measuring something so vague and mysterious as creativity. How do scientists study it?
So this is the brick test. That's one way scientists can study creativity. What if they want to ask more complicated questions? What are some of those complicated questions and then how would scientists go about measuring that?
Interesting. And one of the ways you write that people can build their creative skills is by being aware of their emotions and working with them to problem solve and even regulate those emotions. So how does building your emotional intelligence muscles feed into creativity?
Okay. Can you give me an example of that, using an emotion to our advantage?
So the flip side of creativity is creative blocks. To illustrate this, can you tell me about the candle test?
Okay, so spoiler alert. If you want to try this, don't keep listening right now.
What's the change?
Okay. And so in your book, you say this is an example of reconstructing the problem. You give the example of your book, of how you got stuck and how you got unstuck. What was that like, one? And what do you think other people could learn from that example?
Zorana, thank you so much for talking to me today about creativity. Thank you. Zorana's book, The Creativity Choice, The Science of Making Decisions to Turn Ideas into Actions, is out now. And shortwavers, thank you for listening. Make sure you never miss an episode by following us on your favorite podcast platform. It really helps our show.
And if you have a science question, send us an email at shortwave at npr.org. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson, edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. The audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Burleigh McCoy.
Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, short wavers, producer Burleigh McCoy in the host chair today. So every couple of years when I was growing up in the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri, my family and I would gather in our basement, not for a party or game night, but to take cover from a potential tornado. As a kid living around Tornado Alley, I thought this was normal.
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