original article by David Pescovitz
A study in the scientific journal Brain and Cognition suggests that increasing the "crosstalk" between the brain's left and right hemispheres can increase creativity. Researchers from the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey ran an experiment on 62 people to gauge creative thinking. After a first try at the task, some of the participants were told to shift their eyes horizontally back and forth for 30 seconds, an exercise that boosts the communication between the hemispheres. Those subjects performed much better on the test the second time around than a control group who stared straight ahead. The scientists published the results of their study in the journal Brain and Cognition. From the British Psychological Society Research Digest:
An important factor that the researchers took note of was the participants' handedness. Prior research has suggested that people who have one hand that is particularly dominant, so-called "strong-handers", have less cross-talk between their brain hemispheres compared with people who are more ambidextrous or "mixed handed"...
The key finding is that on their second creativity attempt, strong-handers who'd performed the horizontal eye movements subsequently showed a significant improvement in their creativity, in terms of being more original (i.e. suggesting ideas not proposed by others) and coming up with more categories of use...
The researchers also showed that, for strong-handers, the beneficial effects of the eye movement exercise lasted nine minutes for originality, but just three to six minutes in terms of coming up with more categories of use.
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