Creativity is crucial—at the heart of human endeavors ranging from art to entrepreneurship. It’s also notoriously hard to study. Usually in psychological tests we see whether people produce a particular predetermined response to a particular question. The essence of creativity, however, is to spontaneously make something new, something no one could predict beforehand. The few measures of creativity we have are more than 50 years old, and they are hard to score and often unreliable.
In 2017, a group of computational biologists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, led by Yuval Hart, invented a new technique to measure creativity: the “creative foraging game.” Subjects see a grid of squares on a computer screen and are asked to move them around to make shapes they consider “interesting and beautiful.” When they find something they like, they save it to a gallery. There are more than 35,000 possible shapes, too many for a human researcher to track, but a computer can automatically record the moves and shapes that people make and can analyze them objectively.
The biologists were inspired by the sophisticated way that animals forage for food in the wild. Birds, for example, have to decide when to eat the cherries on one particular tree and when to fly off to explore another tree that might have more and better fruit. There are mathematical formulas that show how efficient the birds are in getting the largest amount of the best fruit. The researchers wondered, what if you were searching for interesting new shapes instead of cherries?
Successful creativity alternates between wildly generating lots of crazy possibilities and narrowing in on just the useful ones.
Some remarkably systematic patterns emerged. There were two phases in the creative process—exploring and exploiting. People would begin by exploring, doodling with the squares and slowly wobbling around from one shape to another. When they hit on a particular shape they liked, they quickly and efficiently made a bunch of similar shapes—the exploit phase. After a bit, they would drain those possibilities and switch back to explore mode, like the birds flitting off to check out a new tree. They would go back to slowly doodling until a new category of shapes emerged. Some people went through the phases more quickly, rapidly switching back and forth between exploring and exploiting, but everyone showed the same pattern.
The results helped the researchers describe a common intuition about the creative process more precisely. Successful creativity alternates between wildly generating lots of crazy possibilities and narrowing in on just the useful ones, as in the old saying that you should “write drunk and edit sober.” The math of foraging lets you describe just how this works.
The Weizmann group used the shape game to explore other aspects of creativity. In one study, they demonstrated a placebo effect. People sniffed a cinnamon-y scent, and the researchers told half of them before playing the game that the scent would make them more creative. The computer program kept track of how frequently similar shapes were made by multiple participants. The group who believed they would be more creative made significantly more original shapes that were repeated less frequently. (This may help explain why microdosing psychedelics has become so popular in Silicon Valley. The doses may be too small to have much real effect, but they are a great creativity placebo).
My own lab collaborated with Dr. Hart on a study looking at how children play the game. They spent more time than adults exploring and produced more original shapes, but were less efficient exploiters. So children were better at the crazy part of creativity, even if they weren’t as good at refining the possibilities. Like the foraging birds, creators need to do both.
