Scott Barry Kaufman

Because once we start becoming good at something, then we start to invest more of our time and energy into it.

So it's a very strong dynamic cycle.

When you look at the neuroscience of creativity, those who have the most imaginative sort of ideas are the kind of brains that show reduction of gray volume in what's called the prefrontal cortex area.

So sometimes you actually find that some of the brains that look the least intelligent are actually the most creative.

That's the point I'm trying to make here.

So it depends a lot on your ability to sometimes put aside all the prior expertise you have, maybe even put aside your critical thinking facilities and be able to really have more associative processes.

I like to say it's really important to be really open-minded, but not so open-minded that your brain falls out.

So that's why I think intelligence is important.

I'm not saying intelligence isn't important, but it depends on the thing that you're creating.

I actually published a paper showing the distinction between the arts and the sciences and its prediction of IQ and the extent to which IQ predicts these things.

And you find IQ had a zero correlation with artistic creative achievement in life.

One important cognitive process that's associated with arts is what's called a latent inhibition, and it's particularly reduced to latent inhibition.

So usually we tend to see the world and tag things as relevant or irrelevant to a problem we're working on based on our prior expectations.

But people in the arts are really good at constantly seeing things with fresh eyes.

They're constantly good at putting aside their prior preconceptions and trying to find meaning in the here and now.

And we've published papers and there are other papers showing that people who tend to have a reduced lean inhibition, reduced, tend to score higher in the arts creative achievement domain.

Also, it's correlated with openness to experience as well.

The personality trait, openness to experience, openness to aesthetics, openness to beauty.

And also emotions, being able to tap into the rich, rich tapestry of your emotions and not view some of your emotions as off limits, like saying you always have to be happy all the time, but actually saying, you know, I'm actually going to take this depression I'm going through and use that as fodder for creativity.

Well, one specific thing I did study in my dissertation is this idea called implicit learning, which is our ability to learn the probabilistic rule structure of the world automatically and implicitly without our level of awareness.