Skip to navigation | Skip to content

Wearing 'creativity cap' brings insight

Woman solving problem while wearing 'creativity cap'

The creativity cap experiment may be revealing savant skills that lie within all of us, say researchers (Source: Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney)


Professor Allan Snyder and Dr Richard Chi of the University of Sydney's Centre for the Mind, describe an experiment on 22 normal adults, seeing how well they solved the 'nine dots puzzle' with and without a simple device that Snyder calls a 'creativity cap.'

The nine dots puzzle is a well-known problem in which people are asked to join nine dots arranged in a square using four straight lines and never lifting their pen from the paper. It (literally) requires 'thinking outside the square', the authors explain in Neuroscience Letters.

The puzzle is very hard to solve when seen for the first time. "The majority of published studies show that no participants can solve this deceptively simple problem," says Snyder, who believes that a success rate of 5 per cent is optimistic.

The participants in his study were randomly assigned to two groups: all wore a creativity cap and were shown the puzzle for nine minutes, divided into three solving attempts of three minutes each.

In one half of the group the cap was 'on' during the second three minutes, while in the other half it was not.

As expected, none of the participants was able to solve the problem during the first three minutes, and those wearing the 'sham' caps failed to solve it at any stage.

But five of the 11 people (45 per cent) wearing a functioning cap managed to solve the problem either during, or just after, electrical stimulation had been applied.

Tapping into the skills of savants

Snyder has been researching 'savants' for many years - people, often with damaged or unusual brains - who show incredible skills, such as drawing detailed pictures after a single viewing of a scene, having remarkable recall for dates, or doing amazing calculations in their heads.

He believes the creativity cap experiment may be revealing savant skills that lie within all of us, but are normally suppressed.

"Through the years we've recognised that a number of people who have injuries on the left side of the head - in particular the left temporal lobe - not long after [the injury] they may burst out in certain...savant-like skills," Snyder says.

"Getting hit on the left anterior temporal lobe somehow relieves us from the tyranny of our left brain and allows us to have some sort of knowledge that the right brain had but we weren't privy to."

Tiny current

The device used on the participants (who were all strongly right handed), put a tiny current of about 1.5 milliamps through the brain for 10 minutes, with the left side of the brain electrically negative and the right side positive.

"It's driven by a low-voltage flashlight battery", he says.

"If you came in and tried on the creativity cap and I were to switch it on - you don't go 'bang - everything's different!' - the effect is subtle. You don't feel much physically either - there's a tiny bit of tingling on the scalp, but it's hardly noticeable."

"Needless to say we were very careful with safety", says Snyder, adding that all the participants were checked for pre-existing medical conditions. "I wouldn't want to advocate people to use this continuously."

"Do I think creativity caps are a thing of the future?" he muses, "Yes I actually think it's a real possibility."

Tags: neuroscience