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Being Able to Personalize Your Workspace May Have Psychological Benefits
Several studies have found that open office layouts can negatively impact employee performance. Environmental noise and interruptions can become distracting, impairing workers’ productivity. Employees in open offices have also been found to have higher levels
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What Makes a Child an Art Prodigy?
The Atlantic: Stand before any abstract painting—try a Jackson Pollock or a Cy Twombly— and it’s inevitable someone will say: My child could have done that. For many, the dripping splatters or scribbles seem haphazard and simplistic, not
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The Flow of Happiness
Whether in the creative arts, athletics, work, or spiritual practice, happiness lies in working to expand one’s skill level. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has devoted his career to studying what makes people happy. Building on years of
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How Environment Can Boost Creativity
The Atlantic: It took F. Scott Fitzgerald nearly a decade to finish Tender is the Night, his semi-autobiographical novel about the physical, financial, and moral decline of a man with nearly limitless potential. While working on
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I Tried to Make a Search Engine Write Me a Poem
The New York Times: Before I started writing this, I took a creativity test. Many different such tests exist, but I took one of the best-known ones: Guilford’s Alternative Uses Task, which simply requires that you
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Undergraduates’ Thoughts About Creative Success: Anecdotes From a Creativity Seminar
What do undergraduates think about how creative ability develops? It seems like a simple question, but it led to a sea change in my own scientific outlook. It also embodies an important example of the
