Creativity leads to an entire different reality; study finds

A new research reveals that people who show the trait of being more ‘open’ have a different perspective to things as compared to an average individual.

Openness is among the five major personality traits. The part of our personality basically drives our creativity level and our interest in discovering new things. This characteristic of openness measures performance on different thinking tasks along with predicting real-world creative accomplishments and engagement in daily creative pursuits. Such people with this trait are often said to have better visual awareness.

Anna Antinori along with her team at the University of Melbourne published their research in the Journal of Research in Personality. Antinori informed, “They seem to have a more flexible gate for the visual information that breaks through into their consciousness.”

In order to test the link of openness with a visual perception known as binocular rivalry scientists conducted three experiments. After the tests, it was seen that people with the trait of openness often saw scrambled or fused images for longer time period as compared to an average person. Moreover, these images were seen for even longer when the participants were in a good mood.

The results predicted that the creative tendencies of open people expand down to the common visual perception. Open people ought to have primarily divergent visual experiences from an average person, reported Independent.

The researchers then conducted a set of experiments to find out about another perceptual occurrence named inattentional blindness. The phenomenon occurs when people are so into one thing that they fail to see another thing right before their eyes. The results after the experiment concluded that inattentional blindness depends upon the person’s personality; open people were more probable to focus on other things while average person screens them out.

An increase in openness has also been seen during cognitive training interventions and also during the effects of psilocybin mushrooms. However, the trait also has a downside linked to mental problems like proneness to hallucination. New Scientist reported Antinori saying, “At those levels of openness, people may actually see reality differently. For example, they may ‘see’ spirits, or misinterpret interpersonal or other signals.”