The INSIDER Summary:
- A recent study suggests that creative, open-minded people actually see the world differently.
- They experience "binocular rivalry"— seeing two different images as a combined one.
- Where others switch back and forth between two conflicting stimuli, open-minded people combine them into something harmonious, which researchers interpret as a form of creative thinking.
Creative people can literally see things that others can't.
A new study published in the "Journal of Research and Personality" suggests that people who display high levels of openness in a personality test (which researchers say is the driving force of creativity) also experience a unique phenomenon called "binocular rivalry."
Binocular rivalry happens when each eye is shown a different image and the brain melds them into a single unified one — a form of creative thinking.
Most people's brains can only process one image at a time. When faced with two different images (in this study's case, a red patch and a green patch on separate eyes) most people's eyes switched back and forth to focus on one or the other, unable to merge two conflicting stimuli.
The study found that particularly open-minded people saw a combined red and green patch. Their brains took the two incompatible images and turned them into something harmonious, which researchers interpret as a form of creative thinking.
In other words, creative people actually see and perceive the world differently.
It is worth noting, though, that high levels of openness have also been linked to proneness for hallucination in some cases, when seeing things that others don't just means seeing things that aren't really there.
So there's nothing wrong with you if you don't experience binocular rivalry — it's probably just your personality.
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