A study led by Christian Rominger at the University of Graz in Austria has found that a person’s physiological state immediately before a creative task may influence the kind of ideas they produce. The research, conducted with 157 university students (average age about 23; 103 women) and published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, suggests lower heart rate variability is linked to more original verbal ideas, while higher variability predicts more original visual or figural ideas.
Participants wore portable ECG sensors for five days and were prompted to complete creativity tasks throughout the day. They received twelve prompts per day to perform either a verbal or a figural task.
In the verbal task, participants generated unusual uses for everyday objects; in the figural task, they created drawings from abstract shapes.
Heart rate variability was measured during the five minutes before each task, and the originality of the resulting ideas was rated. Across 6,930 valid heart rate measurements, the researchers found that the relationship between heart rate variability and creativity depended on the task type. Lower heart rate variability was associated with higher originality in verbal creativity, while higher heart rate variability was associated with more original figural ideas.
The difference was most noticeable when heart rate variability was low. At those moments, verbal ideas were more original than figural ideas. When heart rate variability was high, the difference between the two types of creativity was no longer statistically significant.
The researchers interpreted the result as evidence that different forms of creativity may benefit from different physiological states. Verbal creativity may be helped by a state involving greater alertness or approach motivation, while figural creativity may benefit more from calmness, imagination and the ability to visualise movement or images.
The main relationship remained after the researchers adjusted for age, gender, body mass index, physical activity, body position and heart rate. Ideas produced at home were also more original than those produced elsewhere. Additionally, the researchers observed a positive association between nicotine use and originality, although this result was based on only 417 prompts and should be treated cautiously.
Rominger and colleagues concluded: “we provide a model robustly predicting originality of ideas in an ambulatory context.”
There are a few things to keep in mind. Because the study observed people in daily life rather than manipulating their physiological state, it cannot show that heart rate variability shapes creativity. Stress, personality, movement, surroundings and other unmeasured factors could influence both heart rate variability and creativity. Participants were also young university students, so the results may not apply to other age groups.
The study, “It Is Heart to Be Creative: Insights From Ambulatory Monitoring,” was authored by Christian Rominger, Andreas Fink, Bernhard Weber, Corinna M. Perchtold-Stefan, Mathias Benedek and Andreas R. Schwerdtfeger.
