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A person’s physiological state just before a creative task may be linked to the kind of ideas they produce, according to a study published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Researchers found that lower heart rate variability was associated with more original verbal ideas, while higher heart rate variability was linked to greater originality in visual or figural ideas.
Creativity is often examined in laboratories, where participants complete carefully controlled tasks. However, people frequently develop ideas while walking, cooking, showering or working at home. These everyday situations may involve changing levels of concentration, relaxation and physical arousal that are difficult to reproduce in a laboratory.
Heart rate variability refers to small changes in the time between heartbeats. It is influenced by the autonomic nervous system, which helps regulate functions such as heart rate, breathing and stress responses, and higher heart rate variability generally reflects greater activity in the system’s “rest and digest” branch. Researchers often use a form called vagally mediated heart rate variability as an indirect measure of the body’s regulatory state and its interaction with the brain.
Led by Christian Rominger of the University of Graz in Austria, the researchers studied 157 university students (average age about 23; 103 women). Each participant wore a portable electrocardiogram (ECG) sensor for five days and completed creativity tasks throughout the day.
Participants were prompted 12 times per day to complete either a verbal or figural task. In the verbal task, they generated unusual uses for everyday objects. In the figural task, they created drawings from abstract shapes. The researchers measured heart rate variability during the five minutes before each task and rated the originality of the resulting ideas.
Across 6,930 valid heart rate measurements, the researchers found that the relationship between heart rate variability and creativity depended on the type of task. Lower heart rate variability was associated with higher originality in verbal creativity. By contrast, higher heart rate variability was associated with more original figural ideas.
The difference was most noticeable when heart rate variability was low. At those moments, verbal ideas were more original than figural ideas. When heart rate variability was high, the difference between the two types of creativity was no longer statistically significant.
The researchers interpreted the result as evidence that different forms of creativity may benefit from different physiological states. Verbal creativity may be helped by a state involving greater alertness or approach motivation. Figural creativity may benefit more from calmness, imagination and the ability to visualize movement or images.
The main relationship remained after the researchers adjusted for age, gender, body mass index, physical activity, body position and heart rate. Ideas produced at home were also more original than those produced elsewhere. Additionally, the researchers observed a positive association between nicotine use and originality, although this result was based on only 417 prompts and should be treated cautiously.
Rominger and colleagues concluded: “we provide a model robustly predicting originality of ideas in an ambulatory context.”
There are a few things to keep in mind. Because the study observed people in daily life rather than manipulating their physiological state, it cannot show that heart rate variability shapes creativity. Stress, personality, movement, surroundings and other unmeasured factors could influence both heart rate variability and creativity. Participants were also young university students, so the results may not apply to other age groups.
The study, “It Is Heart to Be Creative: Insights From Ambulatory Monitoring,” was authored by Christian Rominger, Andreas Fink, Bernhard Weber, Corinna M. Perchtold-Stefan, Mathias Benedek and Andreas R. Schwerdtfeger.