For creativity,try 8216;thinking outside box8217;,literally!

Some metaphors about creative thinking 'literally work' when acted out in real life,finds a study.

There are some metaphors about creative thinking,which literally work when acted out in real life,researchers say.

The authors of the new paper were inspired by metaphors about creativity found in boardrooms to movie studios to scientific laboratories around the world and previous linkages established between mind and body.

Angela Leung of Singapore Management University and her coauthors from the University of Michigan,Cornell University,and others wondered if the same was true of metaphors about creativity.

Creativity is a highly sought-after skill,they wrote. Metaphors of creative thinking abound in everyday use.

Their experiments went beyond metaphors that activate preexisting knowledge and demonstrated for the first time some metaphors 8216;work8217; by activating psychological processes conducive for generating previously unknown and therefore creative ideas.

People talk about thinking 8216;outside the box8217; or consider problems 8216;on the one hand,then on the other hand8217;. So Leung and her colleagues created experiments where people acted out these metaphors.

In one experiment,each participant was seated either inside or outside of a five-by-five-foot cardboard box. The two environments were set up to be otherwise the same in every way,and people didnt feel claustrophobic in the box. Participants were told it was a study on different work environments.

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Each person completed a test widely used to test creativity; those who were outside did the test better than people who were inside the box.

In another experiment,some participants were asked to join the halves of cut-up coasters before taking a testa physical representation of 8216;putting two and two together8217;. People who acted out the metaphor displayed more convergent thinking,a component of creativity that requires bringing together many possible answers to settle on one that will work. Other experiments found that walking freely generated more original ideas than walking in a set line; another found truth in 8216;on the hand; on the other hand8217;.

All this suggests that theres something to the metaphors we use to talk about creativity.

Having a leisurely walk outdoors or freely pacing around may help us break our mindset, said Leung.

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Also,we may consider getting away from Dilberts cubicles and creating open office spaces to free up our minds, Leung added.

The study will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science,a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.