MEDITATE TO CREATE: THE IMPACT OF FOCUSSED-ATTENTION AND OPEN-MONITORING TRAINING ON CONVERGENT AND DIVERGENT THINKING

• Main Authors: Lorenza S Colzato, Ayca eSzapora, Bernhard eHommel
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2012-04-01
• Series: Frontiers in Psychology
• Subjects: Meditation; creativity; divergent thinking; Convergent Thinking; Focussed attention; Open monitoring
• Online Access: http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00116/full

The practice of meditation has seen a tremendous increase in the western world since the 60s. Scientific interest in meditation has also significantly grown in the past years; however, so far, it has neglected the idea that different type of meditations may drive specific cognitive-control states. In this study we investigate the possible impact of meditation based on focused attention (FA) and meditation based on open monitoring (OM) on creativity tasks tapping into convergent and divergent thinking. Here we show that FA meditation and OM meditation exert specific effect on creativity. First, OM meditation induces a control state that promotes divergent thinking, a style of thinking that allows many new ideas of being generated. Second, FA meditation does not sustain convergent thinking, the process of generating one possible solution to a particular problem. We suggest that the enhancement of positive mood induced by meditating has boosted up the effect in the first case and counteract it in the second.