GUEST BLOG POST(S): Ditching Gadgets May Boost Creativity — Trevor Stokes & Why Your Problem-Solving Skills May Sharpen with Age — Stephanie Bucklin

Credit: Family walk photo via Shutterstock

By Trevor Stokes

To boost your brain's creativity, take a hike, according to new research. But consider leaving the electronic gadgets at home.

Backpacking for four days in the wilderness without toting a laptop, iPhone or other high-tech device increased the creative problem-solving skills of people by 50 percent.

The study volunteers included 30 men and 26 women (whose average age was 28) who participated in Outward Bound, a group that runs leadership expeditions for young people and adults across Alaska, Colorado, Maine and Washington.

Before the hikers went on their merry way, 24 of them took a creative problem-solving test. Then, four days into the hike, the remaining 32 took the same test. The test, known as the Remote Associates Test, is commonly used to assess creativity by measuring how people associate different words. For example, the researchers asked the hikers to identify a word that is connected to beans, golf and envy. The goal of the test-takers was to come up with the word "green" on their own, with no time limitation. Before the hike began, participants answered an average of four out of 10 questions correctly. Those who took the test after four days of hiking correctly answered six of the 10 questions. While a difference of two correct responses may not seem like a lot, the 50 percent improvement is meaningful and statistically significant. "This is not a small effect. This is a bases-loaded home run in terms of its effect size," said study author David Strayer, a psychology professor at the University of Utah.

The beneficial effects of nature on the mind have been known anecdotally for generations, perhaps most famously noted by author Henry David Thoreau. He spent two years living a rustic life by Walden Pond and published "Walden," his back-to-nature account, in 1854. 

Previous research has shown that exposure to nature replenishes basic brain functions like attention span, but little has been known about higher-level thinking properties, such as those involved in solving complex problems. The current study is the first measure of nature's influence on creative problem-solving, Strayer said.

"Nature seems to be one of the most effective ways to put one's mind at ease and enhance creative thinking by setting aside worries," Strayer said.

Stimuli from trees, streams, birds and the wind are softer than the jarring sounds of car horns, cellphones and other accoutrements of modern life.  As result, people aren't as distracted. And that enhances creativity, Strayer said.

Benjamin Baird, a graduate student at the University of California Santa Barbara who has researched the effects of distraction on creativity, agreed.

"It is good, strong, very interesting work and a very interesting finding, but it will require some important follow-up to realize its full potential," said Baird, who was not involved in the study. Nature, he noted, may not have had as large an influence as thought. "It may well be that some of the effects have to do with interacting with a group of people over a period of time," Baird said. Plus, the hikers took the test in very different environments, which could have influenced the test results.

"It would have been nice to have had another group that had returned from a hike perform the task in an identical environment in the laboratory to see whether there was still an effect," Baird said.

Future research from Strayer will include measuring specific brain activities and stress hormones during hikes to determine how interactions with nature might affect how the brain functions.

"There's some concern that being in a modern urban environment with horns and technology constantly depletes nature's restorative properties," Strayer said. His advice: If you're going to go on a hike, don't bring your iPhone or cellphone. "Instead, try to focus on being in the environment you're in."

The study appeared (Dec. 12, 2012) in the online journal PLOS ONE.

Pass it on: A walk in nature can help boost your ability to creatively solve problems.

Why Your Problem-Solving Skills May Sharpen with Age — Stephanie Bucklin

Why Your Problem-Solving Skills May Sharpen with Age

By Stephanie Bucklin

You may get better at creative problem solving as you age, new research suggests.

Researchers reviewed more than 100 studies on problem solving and aging that were conducted from 1960 to 2016, looking at both data on people's behavior and evidence from brain scans. The scientists found that, generally, older adults' ability to focus and avoid distraction was not as strong as that of young adults' — but that this in turn may help older adults to perform better on some creativity and problem-solving tasks.

The researchers were surprised at the strength of the findings that a lowered ability to focus and avoid distraction could improve people's performance on tasks that require creativity, said Lynn Hasher, a co-author of the paper and a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. This is especially surprising, she said, because the ability to focus "has previously been seen as a basic requirement for success in learning," she told Live Science.

The ability to focus does help people with some specific, goal-driven tasks, such as reading, the researchers said. For example, one study included in the review showed that, while reading, older adults were slowed down more than younger adults by the presence of certain words that were added to a passage in order to distract a reader. In addition, older adults had more trouble than younger adults in recalling key information they had read when distractors were present, according to that study, which was published in 2012 in the journal Experimental Aging Research.

However, the ability to focus does not help — and may actually hinder — people's performance on tasks that require broader attention, Hasher and her colleagues concluded. For example, in a 2016 study, published in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, researchers gave participants a test in which they were shown pictures of faces with names superimposed over them. Although the study participants were instructed to ignore the names, the researchers tested the people on which names they remembered. 

Surprisingly, older participants were better at matching the faces to the names than the younger participants were, even though memory for faces and names tends to decline with age.

Another study, published in 2006 in the journal Psychology and Aging, similarlyfound that adults ages 60 to 75 had a better memory for "distractors" than young adults ages 18 to 30 did. In this study, participants looked at drawings with "distractor" words superimposed over them. Again, although the participants were instructed to ignore the words, the researchers tested them on whether they remembered the words. Results showed that the older participants outperformed their younger counterparts.

Together, these studies suggest that although young adults may be better at disregarding distracting information, they later have poorer recall of this information.

The researchers concluded in their review that older adults' "broader scope of attention" is better suited for tasks that require integrating larger amounts of information — such as solving problems in creative ways, or recognizing patterns over time — rather than tasks that require a narrower focus.

An area of the brain called the frontoparietal region is associated with focus, processing relevant information and disregarding distracting information, the researchers said. Evidence suggests that, as people age, this region's activity decreases, which may contribute to the reduced ability to focus and avoid distractions, the researchers said. However, this decrease in activity may allow older adults to draw on a broader range of knowledge to come up with creative solutions to problems.

For example, a 2005 study published in Brain found that participants with a single brain lesion in the front of the brain (as determined by a CT or MRI scan) were better at solving a creative math problem than participants who had no lesions in their brains. While 82 percent of those with the lesion could solve the problem, only 43 percent of participants with no lesion could do so.

The authors of the review noted that more research is needed to show whether a reduced ability to focus and weed out distractions affects everyday behavior. In addition, the boundary between older and younger adults is not concrete, and was not specifically defined in the review.

Of course, people's ability to focus doesn't depend only on their age. A positive mood, lack of sleep and consumption of alcohol can all contribute to a general lack of focus and increased distraction, so there may be more than one avenue to achieve better problem-solving, the researchers said.

Originally published (STORY 1) on Live Science and and (STORY 2)  on Yahoo News.