Creative people physically see and process the world differently
IF YOU relish adventure, you may literally see the world differently. People who are open to new experiences can take in an exceptional amount of visual information and combine it in unique ways.
Openness to experience is one of the “big five” traits often used to describe personality. It is characterised by curiosity and an ability to do well at tests that ask people to come up with creative ideas, such as new uses for everyday objects like bricks.
There’s evidence that people who score highly in assessments of openness also have better visual awareness. For example, when focusing on letters moving on a screen, they are more likely to notice a grey square appearing elsewhere on the display.
Now Anna Antinori at the University of Melbourne in Australia and her team have found that people who score higher for the openness trait “see” more possibilities.
The team gave 123 university students a binocular rivalry test, in which they simultaneously saw a red image with one eye and a green image with the other eye for 2 minutes. Usually, the brain can only perceive one image at a time, and most participants reported seeing the image flip between red and green. But some people saw the two images fused into a patchwork of red and green.
The higher the participants scored for openness on a personality questionnaire, the more they experienced this mixed perception (Journal of Research in Personality, doi.org/b5q4). “Their brains are able to flexibly engage with less conventional solutions,” Antinori says. “We believe this is the first empirical evidence that they have different visual experiences to the average individual.”
“It seems that openness alters the filter of consciousness, and we’d like to know how”
The results could explain why people with a high degree of openness tend to be more creative and innovative, Antinori says. “When they come up with all these crazy new uses for bricks, it might be because they really perceive the world differently.”
The findings also hint at why extremely open people can be prone to paranoia and delusions, says Niko Tiliopoulos at the University of Sydney, Australia. “At those levels of openness, people may actually see reality differently,” he says. “For example, they may ‘see’ spirits, or misinterpret signals.”
There are similarities between high levels of openness and the experience of taking magic mushrooms, says Antinori. Her team has shown that the chemical psilocybin in magic mushrooms increases a person’s openness scores and experience of mixed perception in binocular rivalry tests. Some forms of meditation also increase mixed perception.
Antinori wants to see if similar neural processes are involved in mixed perception, creative thinking and the shifts in visual perception caused by psilocybin and meditation. “It seems that openness alters the filter of consciousness, and we’d like to know how,” she says.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Creative people perceive more”
