1. Home
  2. »
  3. Creativity
  4. »
  5. Incubation (psychology)

Incubation (psychology)

Incubation (psychology)

Incubation is one of the four proposed stages of creativity , which are preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. [1] Incubation is defined as a process of unconscious recombination of thought Elements That Were stimulated through conscious work at one spot in time, resulting and in novel ideas at Some Point later in time. [2] Incubation is related to intuition and insightin which it is the unconscious part of an intuition process can become validated as an insight. Incubation substantially increases the chances of solving a problem, and benefits from long incubation periods with low cognitive workloads. [3]

The experience of leaving a problem for a period of time and then finding that the difficulty evaporates on the problem, or even more striking, that the solution “comes out of the blue” when thinking about something else, is widespread. Many guides to effective thinking and problem solving

Paradigm for investigation

The most widely adopted paradigm for investigating the incubation of patients and their patients. The total time spent on each problem is equated with the conditions, and the incubation period is usually filled with unrelated activity. Superior performance on the subject of the incubation effect, which is thus operationally defined as any benefit of a break during problem solving.

Effects of emotion and sleep

When discussing the relationship between incubation effect, emotions , and creativity, researchers found that positive mood enhances creativity at work. That means that the day’s creativity would be expected to follow reliably from the previous day’s mood, above and beyond any carry-over of that previous day’s mood. Theory and research on incubation, long recognized as a part of the creative process, such as such cross-day effects. Thus, if positive mood increases the number of possible thoughts, which increases the probability of creative thoughts. [4]

Recent advances in neuroscience provide intriguing evidence of the mechanisms underlying incubation effects, particularly those that occur during sleep . This research Reveals That People’s experiences while awake can be consolidated into memory and result in enhanced performance the next day Without Any additional practice or involvement in the task. Moreover, there is mounting evidence that sleep can facilitate the types of memory and learningprocesses, such as associative memory, that contribute to creative problem solving. In one relevant experiment, researchers demonstrated that problem-solving insight can be dramatically enhanced by quote needed ]

The incubation period can also explain why many people get ideas or thoughts in the shower. Water has a history of being said to influence creativity. Some researchers have claimed that allowing one’s mind to succeed to enlightenment. It has been suggested that Archimedes ‘ Eureka moment was as a result of incubation.

Effects of dreams

In the 1970s, Stanford Sleep Lab Director William Dement gave 500 undergraduate students three “brain-teaser” problems in their dreams that night; seven students had a dream containing the solution. citation needed ] In 1993, Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett was researched at the University of New York. an answer which provided an answer. [5]Barrett also interviewed by Nobel Prizes and MacArthur, “The Genius Grants”, where ideas originated in dreams. [6] Her research concludes that, while anything-math, musical composition, business dilemmas-may get solved during dreaming, the two areas dreams are especially likely to help or invention of 3-D devices and 2) any problem where the solution lies in thinking outside the box -ie where the person is stuck because the conventional wisdom on how to approach the problem is wrong.

Not everybody agrees about the usefulness of dreams in solving problems. In the August 2004 article “Dreams: The Case Against Problem-Solving”, G. William Domhoff concluded:

When all is said and done, there is only occasional anecdotal evidence for the idea of ​​receding problems. This article is not intended to summarize the fact that it is small enough that it can not be compared Dreams may be used as a basis for thinking about problems in a new way, or as a basis for discussing personal problems, as some clinical research shows (Fiss, 1991, Greenberg et al., 1992). And dreams that have a dramatic emotional impact create a strong subjective sense that they must have a useful message. However, it does not follow from clinical usefulness or waking impression of importance that an adaptive function (Antrobus,[7]

See also

  • Broaden-and-build
  • Emotion and memory

References cited

  1. Jump up^ Christensen, T. Bo (2005). Creative Cognition: Analogy and Incubation . Department of Psychology, University of Aarhus, Denmark
  2. Jump up^ Seabrook Rachel, Dienes Zoltan (2003). Incubation in Problem Solving as a Context Effect
  3. Jump up^ “Does incubation enhance problem-solving? A meta-analytic review”, Sio & Ormerod
  4. Jump up^ Dodds, Rebecca A., Ward, B. Thomas, & Smith, M. Steven (2004). A Review of Experimental Research on Incubation in Problem Solving and Creativity. Texas A & M University
  5. Jump up^ Barrett, Deirdre. The ‘Committee of Sleep’: A Study of Dream Incubation for Problem Solving. Dreaming: Journal of the Association for the Study of Dreams, 1993, 3, pp. 115-123.
  6. Jump up^ Barrett, Deirdre. The Committee of Sleep: How Artists, Scientists, and Athletes Use Their Dreams for Solving Creative Problem-How Can You Too. NY: Crown Books / Random House, 2001
  7. Jump up^ Domhoff, GW (2003). The Case Against the Problem-Solving Theory of Dreaming. Retrieved from the World Wide Web:http://dreamresearch.net/Library/domhoff_2004b.html