Synaesthesia,creativity and art: What is the link?

It has been suggested that individuals with synaesthesia may show heightened creativity as a result of being able to form meaningful associations between disparate stimuli (e.g. colour, sound). In this study, a large sample (N=82) of people with various kinds of synaesthesia were given two psychometric tests of creativity (Remote Associates Test, Alternate Uses Test) and were also asked about the amount of time engaged in creative arts (visual art, music). There was a significant tendency for synaesthetes to spend more time engaged in creative arts and this was, at least in part, dependent upon the type of synaesthesia experienced. For example, synaesthetes experiencing vision from music were far more likely to play an instrument than their other synaesthetic counterparts. There was no relationship between this tendency and the psychometric measures of creativity, but synaesthetes did outperform controls on one of the two psychometric measures (Remote Associates). We conclude that the tendency for synaesthetes to be more engaged in art is likely to have a different mechanism to psychometric measures of creativity, and that there is no direct link between them. Although synaesthetes may well perform better on some measures of creativity, we suggest that synaesthetes have better bottom‐up access to certain associations, but are not necessarily better able to use them flexibly (in divergent thinking).     

Mental imagery and synaesthesia: Is synaesthesia from internally-generated stimuli possible?

Previous studies provide empirical support for the reported colour experience in grapheme-colour synaesthesia by measuring the synaesthetic experience from an externally presented grapheme. The current study explored the synaesthetic experience resulting from a visual mental image of a grapheme. Grapheme-colour synaesthetes (N=6) and matched controls (N=10 per synaesthete) completed a visual mental imagery task that involved visualising a letter and making a size-based decision about it. The background colour that the grapheme was visualised against was manipulated so that it was congruent or incongruent with the synaesthetic colour for the grapheme being visualised. Compared to matched controls, an effect of colour condition was found for four of the six synaesthetes, although importantly the direction of the effect varied between synaesthetes. In addition, a significant effect of group was found, as the synaesthetes were all faster than the matched controls at the imagery task, regardless of background colour. We conclude that there is some support for subjective reports of imagery-induced synaesthesia, but there are important individual differences. These findings are discussed in relation to both the visual imagery and synaesthesia literature.     

Is there a burden attached to synaesthesia? Health screening of synaesthetes in the general population

Synaesthesia has long been considered a benign alternative form of perception most often associated with positive rather than negative outcomes. The condition has been associated with a variety of cognitive and perceptual advantages, including benefits in memory, processing speed, and creativity. It is not currently recognized in the DSM‐IV. Recently, however, several studies have raised the question of a possible link between synaesthesia and clinical conditions. Here, we present the first large‐scale screening of the general population in which we (1) objectively identified grapheme‐colour synaesthetes and (2) elicited information from our participants about a range of clinical conditions. We compared the prevalence rates of these conditions in synaesthetes versus non‐synaesthetes to establish whether any conditions were found at a higher rate among synaesthetes. In our initial study, screening 3,742 people (95 synaesthetes and 3,647 controls), we found initially that grapheme‐colour was significantly comorbid with two conditions (anxiety disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder). In our second study, screening a new population of 120 synaesthetes and 166 non‐synaesthetes, we replicated our finding that grapheme‐colour synaesthesia is comorbid with anxiety disorder. At the same time, we also addressed a methodological concern that likely elevated rates of OCD in Study 1. We consider the aetiology of synaesthesia to determine whether there may be a shared genetic or neurological basis with anxiety disorder, and we question the status of synaesthesia within a mental health framework.     

The development of creative cognition across adolescence: distinct trajectories for insight and divergent thinking

We examined developmental trajectories of creative cognition across adolescence. Participants (N = 98), divided into four age groups (12/13 yrs, 15/16 yrs, 18/19 yrs, and 25–30 yrs), were subjected to a battery of tasks gauging creative insight (visual; verbal) and divergent thinking (verbal; visuo‐spatial). The two older age groups outperformed the two younger age groups on insight tasks. The 25–30‐year‐olds outperformed the two youngest age groups on the originality measure of verbal divergent thinking. No age‐group differences were observed for verbal divergent thinking fluency and flexibility. On divergent thinking in the visuo‐spatial domain, however, only 15/16‐year‐olds outperformed 12/13‐year‐olds; a model with peak performance for 15/16‐years‐old showed the best fit. The results for the different creativity processes are discussed in relation to cognitive and related neurobiological models. We conclude that mid‐adolescence is a period of not only immaturities but also of creative potentials in the visuo‐spatial domain, possibly related to developing control functions and explorative behavior.     

Colours sometimes count: Awareness and bidirectionality in grapheme–colour synaesthesia

Three experiments were conducted with 10 grapheme–colour synaesthetes and 10 matched controls to investigate (a) whether awareness of the inducer grapheme is necessary for synaesthetic colour induction and (b) whether grapheme–colour synaesthesia may be bidirectional in the sense that not only do graphemes induce colours, but that colours influence the processing of graphemes. Using attentional blink and Stroop paradigms with digit targets, we found that some synaesthetes did report “seeing” synaesthetic colours even when they were not able to report the inducing digit. Moreover, congruency effects (effects of matching the colour of digit presentation with the synaesthetic colour associated with that digit) suggested that grapheme–colour synaesthesia can be bidirectional, at least for some synaesthetes.     

Artists' vulnerability to psychopathology: Towards an integrative cognitive perspective

A relationship is commonly reported between high levels of artistic creativity and mental health problems (e.g., depression or psychosis), and it is now becoming clearer that the divergent cognitive style associated with creativity has commonalities with some of the processes involved in the development and maintenance of some psychological difficulties. Our aim was to investigate the nature of this cognitive style. More specifically, we considered the profile of probabilistic reasoning and associated problem solving abilities, as both of these mechanisms have been found to be integral to major forms of clinical dysfunction. We assessed levels of creative potential, mood, probabilistic reasoning, and problem solving abilities in 66 arts and 85 science undergraduate volunteers. As predicted, art students showed higher levels of creative potential and experienced lower levels of mood than their science peers. Differences in probabilistic reasoning were observed which are in keeping with the pattern reported to be present in those suffering with psychosis in that they tended to ‘jump to conclusions’. Art students also displayed both poorer problem solving abilities and self‐appraisal of their problem solving skills. Our results extend previous findings associated with the mediating role of cognitive processes in the relationship between creativity and some forms of psychopathology. Implications for the prevention and treatment of psychological difficulties in the creative are highlighted.     

Schizotypy and creativity in visual artists

‘Every work of art is an uncommitted crime ’ Adorno (1951) . Cited in Julius (2002) . Given the putative relationship between creativity and schizotypy/psychoticism, the current study set out to investigate differences in scores on a range of personality and creativity measures between visual artists and non‐artists. Results found that the visual artists group scored higher on measures of positive‐schizotypy, disorganized‐schizotypy, asocial‐schizotypy, neuroticism, openness and divergent thinking (uniqueness) than did the non‐artist group and lower on agreeableness. These findings lend support to other studies reporting higher schizotypy scores in artistic and creative cohorts, although provide some of the first evidence of higher unusual experiences and impulsive nonconformity scores on the Oxford‐Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences (O‐LIFE) in visual artists. The relationship between creativity and schizotypy is discussed in terms of unusual ideas and a propensity to endorse socially undesirable responses.     

Unity and diversity of executive functions in creativity

Increasing evidence suggests that executive functions (EFs) – a set of general-purpose control processes that regulate thoughts and behaviors – are relevant for creativity. However, EF is not a unitary process, and it remains unclear which specific EFs are involved. The present study examined the association between the three EFs, both uniquely (EF-Specific) and together (Common EF), and three measures of creativity. Participants (N = 47) completed a divergent thinking test, and self-reported their real-life creative accomplishments. A subset of participants indicated their involvement in the artistic or information technology (IT) professions. Results indicated that fluency (but not originality) of divergent thinking was uniquely predicted by working memory Updating. Better response Inhibition predicted higher number of real-world artistic creative achievements. Involvement in the artistic (versus IT) professions was associated with better Common EF, and with enhanced mental set Shifting abilities. Results demonstrate that different EFs predict creativity depending on its operational definition.     

Colours sometimes count: awareness and bidirectionality in grapheme-colour synaesthesia

Three experiments were conducted with 10 grapheme-colour synaesthetes and 10 matched controls to investigate (a) whether awareness of the inducer grapheme is necessary for synaesthetic colour induction and (b) whether grapheme-colour synaesthesia may be bidirectional in the sense that not only do graphemes induce colours, but that colours influence the processing of graphemes. Using attentional blink and Stroop paradigms with digit targets, we found that some synaesthetes did report “seeing” synaesthetic colours even when they were not able to report the inducing digit. Moreover, congruency effects (effects of matching the colour of digit presentation with the synaesthetic colour associated with that digit) suggested that grapheme-colour synaesthesia can be bidirectional, at least for some synaesthetes.     

Creative Thinking Strategies for Life: A Course for Professional Adults Using Art

To thrive in today's economy and the workforce of the future, individuals need creativity and problem-solving skills. Emotion skills have been increasingly discussed as well, with companies listing emotional intelligence as one of the top skills needed for professional success. The present paper describes a course designed to teach professional adults two sets of creativity skills (problem finding and idea generation) and two sets of emotional intelligence skills (using emotions to facilitate thinking and understanding emotions) using visual art as a medium. The course consisted of eight, 60-min sessions in which professional adults participated in art observation and art engagement activities. Fifty-six professional adults completed measures of creative abilities and emotional intelligence skills in a pretest, posttest, and 2-month follow-up design. Participants who engaged in the course showed significant gains in the originality of their ideas on divergent thinking and problem construction tasks, as well as their self-reported creative behavior compared with controls. No significant changes in emotion understanding were detected. We discuss the course's distinct value to creativity and emotion skills training research.     

Personality traits in people with synaesthesia: Do synaesthetes have an atypical personality profile?

People with synaesthesia not only have – by definition – unusual experiences (e.g., numbers triggering colour), they also have a different cognitive profile (e.g., in terms of their memory and perceptual abilities) and a bias towards certain interests and activities (e.g., towards the arts). However, virtually nothing is known about whether synaesthetes have an atypical personality profile. In this study, a standard measure of personality was administered (Big Five Inventory) along with two questionnaire measures of empathy. Synaesthetes, relative to demographically matched controls, reported higher levels of ‘Openness to Experience’ which is known to be related to imagination and artistic tendencies. They also reported higher levels of ‘Fantasizing’ on one of the empathy measures, which is conceptually related to Openness, although their self-reported empathy did not differ in other respects. In addition, synaesthetes reported lower levels of Agreeableness which we did not predict in advance.     

Boundless Creativity: Evidence for the Domain Generality of Individual Differences in Creativity

This study investigated correlates of domain‐general and domain‐specific components of creativity. 158 college students completed a questionnaire that assessed their motivational and personality traits (i.e., intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, creative personality, and originality in word association) as well as intellectual abilities (SAT verbal and quantitative scores). Under two different instruction conditions (standard instruction or explicit “be creative” instruction), students also took a battery of multi‐item, product‐based tests of creativity in three domains (artistic, verbal, and mathematical creativity). Factor analyses showed evidence of domain‐generality of creativity. Furthermore, results from structural equation models showed that motivational and personality traits and intellectual abilities were associated with the domain‐general component of creativity. Only one variable (SAT quantitative score) was found to be associated with the domain‐specific component of mathematical creativity under the explicit “be creative” instruction condition. These results affirm the domain‐generality of creativity and challenge researchers to identify correlates of domain‐specific components of creativity.     

Biases and regularities of grapheme–colour associations in Japanese nonsynaesthetic population

Associations between graphemes and colours in a nonsynaesthetic Japanese population were investigated. Participants chose the most suitable colour from 11 basic colour terms for each of 40 graphemes from the four categories of graphemes used in the Japanese language (kana characters, English alphabet letters, and Arabic and kanji numerals). This test was repeated after a three-week interval. In their responses, which were not as temporally consistent as those of grapheme–colour synaesthetes, participants showed biases and regularities that were comparable to those of synaesthetes reported in past studies. Although it has been believed that only synaesthetes, and not nonsynaesthetes, tended to associate graphemes with colours based on grapheme frequency, Berlin and Kay's colour typology, and colour word frequency, participants in this study tended in part to associate graphemes with colours based on the above factors. Moreover, participants that were nonsynaesthetes tended to associate different graphemes that shared sounds and/or meanings (e.g., Arabic and kanji numerals representing the same number) with the same colours, which was analogous to the findings in Japanese synaesthetes. These results support the view that grapheme–colour synaesthesia might have its origins in cross-modal association processes that are shared with the general population.     

An exploratory study of linguistic–colour associations across languages in multilingual synaesthetes

In one of the most common forms of synaesthesia, linguistic–colour synaesthesia, colour is induced by stimuli such as numbers, letters, days of the week, and months of the year. It is not clear, however, whether linguistic–colour synaesthesia is determined more by higher level semantic information—that is, word meaning—or by lower level grapheme or phoneme structure. To explore this issue, we tested whether colour is consistently induced by grapheme or phoneme form or word meaning in bilingual and trilingual linguistic–colour synaesthetes. We reasoned that if the induced colour was related to word meaning, rather than to the acoustic or visual properties of the words, then the induced colours would remain consistent across languages. We found that colours were not consistently related to word meaning across languages. Instead, induced colours were more related to form properties of the word across languages, particularly visual structure. However, the type of inducing stimulus influenced specific colour associations. For example, colours to months of the year were more consistent across languages than were colours to numbers or days of the week. Furthermore, the effect of inducing stimuli was also associated with the age of acquisition of additional languages. Our findings are discussed with reference to a critical period in language acquisition on synaesthesia.     

Schizotypy and mental health amongst poets, visual artists, and mathematicians

Many researchers have found evidence of an association between creativity and the predisposition to mental illness. However, a number of questions remain unanswered. First, it is not clear whether healthy creatives have a milder loading on schizotypal traits than people who suffer serious psychopathology, or whether they have an equal loading, but other mediating characteristics. Second, most of the existing research has concentrated on artistic creativity, and the position of other creative domains is not yet clear. The present study compares schizotypy profiles using the O-LIFE inventory in a large sample of poets, artists, mathematicians, the general population, and psychiatric patients. Poets and artists have levels of unusual experiences that are higher than controls, and as high as schizophrenia patients. However, they are relatively low on the dimension of introvertive anhedonia. Mathematicians are lower than controls on unusual experiences. The results suggest that artistic creatives and psychiatric patients share a tendency to unusual ideas and experiences, but creative groups are distinguished by the absence of anhedonia and avolition. Moreover, different domains of creativity require different cognitive profiles, with poetry and art associated with divergent thinking, schizophrenia and affective disorder, and mathematics associated with convergent thinking and autism.     

Colour fluctuations in grapheme‐colour synaesthesia: The effect of clinical and non‐clinical mood changes

Synaesthesia is a condition that gives rise to unusual secondary sensations (e.g., colours are perceived when listening to music). These unusual sensations tend to be reported as being stable throughout adulthood (e.g., Simner & Logie, 2007, Neurocase, 13, 358) and the consistency of these experiences over time is taken as the behavioural hallmark of genuineness. Our study looked at the influence of mood states on synaesthetic colours. In Experiment 1, we recruited grapheme‐colour synaesthetes (who experience colours from letters/digits) and elicited their synaesthetic colours, as well as their mood and depression states, in two different testing sessions. In each session, participants completed the PANAS‐X (Watson & Clark, 1999) and the BDI‐II (Beck, Steer, & Brown, 1996, Manual for Beck Depression Inventory‐II), and chose their synaesthetic colours for letters A‐Z from an interactive colour palette. We found that negative mood significantly decreased the luminance of synaesthetic colours. In Experiment 2, we showed that synaesthetic colours were also less luminant for synaesthetes with anxiety disorder, versus those without. Additional evidence suggests that colour saturation, too, may inversely correlate with depressive symptoms. These results show that fluctuations in mood within both a normal and clinical range influence synaesthetic colours over time. This has implications for our understanding about the longitudinal stability of synaesthetic experiences, and of how mood may interact with the visual (imagery) systems.     

Visuo‐spatial abilities in autism: A review

Individuals with autism show various signs of heightened abilities in visuo‐spatial functioning. First, it is long‐established that they excel on embedded figures and block design tests relative to comparison participants. Second, some evidence suggests that processing global features is affected by inappropriate processing of the constituent elements of a stimulus. Third, they are more accurate than comparison participants in judging the shape of a slanted circle in a context in which ambient visual cues are eliminated. This suggests that their perception of the shape is less influenced by prior knowledge. Fourth, they are fast at searching for feature and conjunctive targets in a visual array. Contrary to earlier reports, however, they are susceptible to visual illusions. Also, they do show evidence of utilising prior knowledge when pairing a colour with an atypically coloured target. Accordingly, we conclude that there is something distinctive about autistic visuo‐spatial functioning, but not necessarily in ways that are predicted by the ‘weak central coherence’ hypothesis. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Learning a map of environment: The role of visuo‐spatial abilities in young and older adults

The present study examines age‐related differences between young and older adults in spatial mental representation derived from learning a realistic city map. A sample of 30 young (20–30‐years) and 30 older (60–72 years) adults learned a simplified map of a city; afterwards participants performed map‐drawing and pointing‐aligned and counter‐aligned tasks. Tasks measuring visuo‐spatial abilities were also administered to explore their relationship with map learning. Results showed an age‐related impairment in older adults in both map tasks, as well as in visuo‐spatial ones. Furthermore, performance on counter‐aligned pointing was poorer than on aligned pointing in young and older adults, and its relationship with visuo‐spatial abilities changed as a function of age group: The performance of counter‐aligned pointing in older adults was related to all visuo‐spatial abilities, and in young adults with perspective‐taking measures only. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Educational Intervention and the Development of Young Art Students' Talent and Creativity

This study focuses on behavior associated with young art students' developing artistic talent (skills and art‐making behavior) and creativity (personal expressions of visual information). The study examines the role of personal expertise in a student's development of problem finding, domain‐specific technical skill, perseverance, evaluation, and creative ideation. The study compares 30 experienced art students' artistic processing and products with those of 29 novice art students. Both groups are 7‐ through 11‐year‐olds. The author recorded participants' behavior as they created drawings in two contexts — from imagination and from life — and three adult artists then assessed the technical skill and creativity revealed in the drawings. Multivariate analyses of the variables associated with the drawing products and processes offer evidence of the changes related to the students' developing expertise in both novice and experienced groups. This study finds that the drawing situation (life or imagination) interacts clearly with the relationships among hypothesized components of creativity, gender, and predictors of expertise. Technical skill, perseverance, modifications, and creativity in drawings from life were significant predictors of expertise. Modifications, efficient problem finding, and creativity in drawings from imagination were additional significant predictors of expertise. Gender was found to be a measurable factor in both the artistic process and the assessments of drawings from imagination. The findings are discussed within the context of three conceptions: artistic talent, developing creativity, and art education.     

Group Artistic Creativity: Creative Clusters and Cinematic Success in Feature Films1

Filmmaking represents a distinctive form of group creativity in which many individuals contribute to a single creative product. This exploratory investigation examines these contributions in 1,327 English‐language, narrative feature films. Besides control variables, the measures included 2 criteria of impact (Best Picture honors, movie guide ratings) and 16 assessments of outstanding cinematic contributions (direction, male and female lead, male and female supporting, screenplay, art direction, costume design, makeup, cinematography, film editing, score, song, visual effects, sound effects editing, sound). A factor analysis showed that the contributions formed 4 creative clusters: dramatic, visual, technical, and musical. Hierarchical regression analyses indicate that a film's impact was a positive additive function of the dramatic and visual clusters, with the dramatic having the primary role.