Jonah Lehrer: Are Distractible People More Creative?

The problem with doing this analysis of a bunch of college students at top-tier colleges is that there’s a big selection bias. My guess (from having spent four years as a Harvard student and talking to many of them) is that, statistically, the kids who manage to get into a school like Harvard while having low latent inhibition probably need to have something else working for them to compensate for that.

In other words, the types of people who get in can be (as a model, remember; this is far from completely accurate) classified along two dimensions, let’s call them A and B, where:

+A = Great latent inhibition. Able to focus and work really diligently on some assigned task.

-A = Less latent inhibition. Some probably ADHD. Less able to focus diligently because they get distracted more easily.

+B = Really "creative"/bright/clever/smart/"rich mixture of thoughts". Think "high IQ" here, though there are a bunch of correlated dimensions here that can’t ideally sort people. Better description might be "paying close attention to the world" or "picks up new things quickly".

-B = Less "creative"/bright/clever/smart/whatever

Okay, so think about who gets into a place like Harvard. I posit that you end up with some +A+B types, some +A-B types, some -A+B types, and a lot less -A-B types.

In other words, to get into Harvard you’d better be a hard worker, or pretty sharp, or both, but if you’re neither you’ll have some trouble.

So now, what does this study actually do? It splits up the population into two groups, +A and -A, and then tries to find a correlation between that and +B/-B.

Well, in the first group we have +A+Bs and +A-Bs, while in the second group we only have the -A+Bs (the -A-Bs having already been excluded by the admissions criteria)

Then the study (or at least the Wired write-up) turns this into a causal link between -A and +B.... well, count me at least skeptical. I know some really really smart people who are also able to focus really well. Which is not to say that there certainly isn’t some other relationship between these two dimensions, but only that a study like this doesn’t seem like "proof". If we imagine these dimensions as normally distributed and independent, where you need some cut-off sum of A + B to get into a selective college, the number of students falling at the far right end of both bell curves (the +A+B bunch) at once might be really small.

I am one of the few who (I believe) has made a transition from 'high latent inhibition' to 'low latent inhibition'.

It happened through no intention of mine and was quite a scary experience, like letting go or admitting defeat. With respect to Jonah Lehrer I must report that it felt totally the opposite to implementing a 'cognitive strategy’.

All kinds of new sensations, thoughts and impressions now make their way into my consciousness where previously they must have been filtered. The world is enlarged, enriched and more colourful (literally, and with Vermeer-like shading everywhere).

Although these 'extras' are available to me they don't seem to distract in an unhelpful way. Rather they provide subtle analogies and metaphors to whatever else I'm thinking about. (I suppose that’s where the creativity part comes in.)

Am I more distractible? Well, no, I don't think so, because I still get to choose which thoughts to follow. If one is concerned with explaining the world then only truly surprising perceptions (those few that don't fit in with one's worldview), have the potential to distract.

[I apologise to any readers who consider this report unfalsifiable nonsense or arrogant boasting. I can only reply, respectively, that presumably only the experience of transition can convince, and, as I said above, it was most humbling.]

A related article[1] from the New York Times was published in May, and applies a similar thesis to explain why older people are wiser:

“A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers,” Dr. Hasher said. “We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”

I think this is also the reason why lateral thinking[2] consistently delivers creative results.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/health/research/20brai.htm...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateral_thinking

As I recall, the psych literature also suggests that you need high amounts of working memory for low latent inhibition to be useful. (And note that Harvard undergrads could be expected to have loads of WM, as well as more famous things like IQ.) Low WM & low latent inhibition might just screw you up.