Opening our minds

A recent study has come to the conclusion that open-minded persons possess the ability to focus on different things at the very same moment. 

Even if there are distractions around them, these individuals still manage to concentrate and see everything that is going on in the room and, so, they are less prone to the so-called 'inattentional blindness'.

Research has proven that individuals' personality plays an essential role in the way they perceive the world. 

Therefore, it is very probable that our perception of the world changes at the same time with our personality.

At first, pareidolia (seeing shapes in clouds and in other inanimate objects) was seen negatively rather than a sign of creativity. It was even considered to be a symptom of psychosis or dementia.

In 1895, French psychologist Alfred Binet - known for his work on IQ tests - suggested that inkblots could be used in psychological research to study differences in involuntary imagination. This idea was further developed, resulting in inkblots to investigate people's personality and assess their psychological state.

The creative aspect of pareidolia became known in the 19th century with the practice of 'klecksography' - the art of making images from inkblots.

Writer Victor Hugo experimented with folded papers and stains by holding his quill upside down to use the feather-end as a brush. Another practitioner of klecksography, German poet Justinus Andreas Christian Kerner, published Kleksographien (1890), a collection of inkblot art with accompanying short poems about the objects that can be noticed in the images.

• In various studies, it is found that creative people tend to be more driven, impulsive, and self-confident.

• They are less conventional and unorthodox in many aspects of life.

• Openness to new ideas, curiosity and disagreeableness comes as common traits of creative individuals, as they are opposite of normal or popular, and like Steve Jobs, are a prickly personality.

Creativity can be learned as a cognitive skill using the following steps:

• Preparation: The basic rules, languages, and instructions in any skill.
• Incubation: When ideas wander in your brain's neural network, lost in the wild.
• Illumination: This is the Aha! Moment, the light bulb coming on.
• Verification: Where it is verified that the idea is real or just a random dream without legs.

In a 1904 study by English physician Havelock Ellis, a list was made of 1030 individuals through extensive research, examining thoroughly the intellectual distinction people had by the various factors like heredity, general health, and social class.

These works established that genius minds are often hereditary.

A body of work of Stanford psychologist Lewis M. Terman, was an in-depth multi-decade study of gifted individuals, and an attempt to improve the measurement of genius and its association with the degradation of mental stability. This also included an enhanced version of the French IQ (Intelligence Quotient) test.

Some brain functions reside more on one side of the brain than the other. The left side of the brain control language and the right half control movement of the left arm and leg (and vice versa.)

But for more individual personality traits, such as creativity or a tendency toward the rational rather than the intuitive, there is little or no evidence supporting the claim that these reside in a specific area of the brain.

The idea of right-brain/left-brain may be a myth as evidence is mounting against the idea.

A 2013 study demonstrated that activity is similar on both sides of the brain regardless of one's personality. The study concluded that the notion that some people are more left or right-brained is more a figure of speech than it is anatomically accurate.

Over the past several decades, researchers have discovered

• Mindfulness can lead to improvements in physiological well-being and emotional regulation.
• Mindfulness can even enhance our levels of wisdom, both in terms of dialectism (being cognizant of change and contradictions in the world) and intellectual humility (knowing your own limitations). 
• Mindfulness can lead to improved problem solving, enhanced imagination, and better decision making.

When we focus on one particular element in a situation or problem, our brains can cause all the other elements to ‘disappear', so that we will have no conscious experience of having ever been exposed to them.

Inattentional blindness illustrates the limitations of our attentional abilities. We can’t ever multitask the way we think we can. Something will get lost. 

A moderate noise level is ideal to improve our creativity. It increases the processing difficulty which stimulates abstract processing, leading to higher creativity. 
High noise levels impair our creative thinking because we feel overwhelmed and struggle to process information properly.

Different genres correspond to our personality. For instance:

• Blues and Jazz fans have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing, gentle and at ease
• Classical music fans have high self-esteem, are creative, introvert and at ease
• Opera fans have high self-esteem, are creative and gentle
• Rock/heavy metal fans have low self-esteem, are creative, not hard-working, not outgoing, gentle, and at ease

In the vanishing ball illusion, a study found that when the magician pretends to throw the ball in the air, and his gaze follows the imaginary trajectory of the ball, almost two-thirds of the participants will be convinced that they had seen the ball move up. If his gaze did not follow the imaginary ball, the illusion was far less effective.

This illustrates that the illusion is mostly driven by expectations. Our eyes find it difficult to track fast-moving objects. Looking at the ball is only possible when we can predict where it will be in the future.

Although most participants experience an illusory effect during magic tricks, the eyes are not tricked. The conscious perception has been fooled by the illusion, but your eyes have not.

Lots of neural calculations are required before we can experience the world. Neural signals start in the retina, then it passes through different neural centers to the visual cortex and higher cortical areas, and eventually build a mental representation of the outside world. It takes about a tenth of a second for the light registered by the retina to become a visual perception. The neural delay means we perceive things at least a tenth of a second after they happened.

It describes people who enjoy the arts and new experiences. Possible facets:

• Fantasy: they have a vivid imagination
• Aesthetics: they believe in the importance of art
• Feelings: They experience emotions intensely
• Actions: They prefer variety to routine
• Ideas: they like complex problems
• Values: they tend to vote for liberals.

People that score high on this are organized, methodical and tend to keep going and going. Possible facets:

• Competence: they complete tasks successfully
• Order: they like order
• Dutifulness: the follow the rules
• Achievement-striving: they work hard
• Self-discipline: they get chores done right away
• Deliberation: they avoid mistakes.

Aphantasia was first described in the early 1800s by Francis Galton in a paper on mental imagery. It was not until 2015 that the phenomenon was further studied and the term was coined.

One of the major studies was with a patient who had undergone a minor surgery in 2005 and later could no longer generate visual images within the ‘mind’s eye’. The details of the study were published in 2010, which led to many others coming up with similar symptoms.

This was a technique used by the researchers to help test the image forming inside the brain of the individuals.

The experiment led to the finding that a recent viewing of an image had no correlation with the imagining of the image.