Broadening Your Knowledge Base in Your Research Area

• Having an academic degree in a subject can lead people to overestimate their knowledge. Studies showed that graduate participants frequently overestimated their level of understanding.
• Even feeling like an expert also breeds closed-mindedness. Rese...

It's rarely worth it to condense your knowledge into a specialty.

You should be broad in your knowledge. Holmes says that you should have a clean "brain attic," but he's also a walking encyclopedia of knowledge. He reads incredibly broadly—he reads about art, music—things...

The authors note that their studies employed only a small number of creative and associative tasks, which may have compromised the generalizability of their findings. Future studies should explore additional creative tasks to see if the findings replicate across other aspects of creative achievem...