Tasting Sounds, Hearing Colors: The World of Synesthesia
What color is Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run”? For many, the question may sound like word salad, but if you have synesthesia, not only...
Remix culture, revisited
Where do great ideas come from? Often, the answer is “other great ideas, sort of mashed together.” The term “remix culture” was coined...
The Power of Distractibility
Do you experience difficulty in filtering interruptions out of everyday life? Do outside forces—sirens, a co-worker chewing loudly in the...
Bright Lights, Big Ideas
Here’s one way in which all that talk about big-city glamor may be backed up by fact. Statistically, large cities yield a far higher...
Falling Apples and the Rise of Domain Knowledge
What is the most practical method for generating creativity? Despite our growing understanding of those neural processes, that question...
Analogous Thinking: The Genius of Mix-and-Match
Want to be more creative? One promising path to creativity is what's called analogous thinking. This approach suggests often you can...
Creativity Crunching: How Do We Measure Human Ingenuity?
Scientists trying to get to the core of creativity encounter a very basic problem at the outset. Unlike, say, size, or time, creativity...
Creativity and IQ: What 1500 Kids Can Teach Us
How does your IQ affect your creativity? One might assume that having a super high IQ would garner you more powerful creative flights of...
Epiphanies, or, the Bottom-Up Principle
Creativity as a whole is a hard thing to concretely study. However, a slightly easier question than "where does creativity come from?" is...
Zen and the Art of Riffing
Q: What did the Zen master say to the hotdog vendor? A: “Make me one with everything...” Central to the premise of this old joke is the...
