Abstract
This paper aims to explore how traveling and vacation can affect creativity. Creativity often deals with new and unusual ideas, so a basic inference could be made that new and unusual places, combined with decreased stress on the mind and body can increase creativity. It is important to note the difference between general leisure and vacation leisure, and the effects each can have on the mental and physical well-being of an individual. This paper also aims to explore the need for personal resources for creativity and how travel replenishes them. Openness to new experience is a key part of travel and vacation, and can have some of the most profound effects on boosting creativity, most notably through the increase of cognitive flexibility. Experiencing different cultures provides the individual with a wealth of new ideas and perspectives on how to creatively solve problems.
Keywords: travel, cognitive, flexibility, culture, creativity, excursion
How Does Travel Impact Creativity?
It was by chance that author Stephen King ended up in Colorado’s Stanley Hotel. On a late October night in 1974, he and his wife happened upon the inn near the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. It being the last date before the building shut down for the winter season, the pair found themselves virtually alone inside. After a single evening of exploring the empty corridors, dining in the vacant restaurant, and dreaming restlessly about chasing his son through the hallways, King woke with a head full of ideas. Soon, he had the basis for The Shining down. What brought King to the Stanley though? Was he eagerly searching for inspiration, challenging writer’s block, or something more? No, he was simply traveling on vacation!
Barring any negative, unforeseen circumstances, it’s generally safe to assume that vacation is a time to de-stress, relax, and take a break from what one would consider their everyday life. Hobson and Dietrich (1994) assume that vacationing and traveling promotes good health for both the body and mind during a pursuit of infrequent leisure activities.
Not only is it a great way to kick-back for a while though, but traveling and vacation have proven to have a profound effect on a person’s creativity. It should come as no secret that new experiences lead to new thoughts and even ideas, but first, it is important to understand the definitions of vacation and leisure.
Vacation & Leisure
While leisure and vacation go hand-in-hand, there are important differences between the type of leisure one experiences at home and what they experience away from home. While each can have a positive effect on happiness and creativity, one provides more benefit than the other, especially when it comes to restoring a person’s precious personal resources.
Leisure vs. Vacation Time
Dolnicar, Yanamandram, and Cliff (2012) define leisure as regular, home-based activities. In other words, everyday normal routines not considered work. Leisure activities are consistent, accessible, and generally-speaking, do not change radically throughout life. While an evening or entire weekend off can reduce stress, vacation time and the pursuit of infrequent leisure activities provide a larger boost in a person’s physical and mental well-being (Chen, Lehto, Cai, 2013). These home-based leisure activities are often routine and simple, making their impact on a person’s quality of life (QOL) nearly negligible (Dolnicar, Yanamandram, Cliff, 2012). Dolnicar (2012) defines QOL as a feeling of overall life satisfaction, whether within a person’s vocation, home life, or with any personal resources they hold dear. Personal resources are often depleted by routine and norms, even more-so when these situations become high-stress. As a person’s goals, energy, and accomplishments grow less and less attainable, stress increases, and creative output is diminished (Davidson, Eden, Westman, Cohen-Charash, Hammer, Kluger, Spector, 2010). These resources can be thought of as a type of fuel: much like a car cannot run without gasoline, the creative mind cannot function properly without personal resources.
Dolnicar (2012) defines vacation as infrequent leisure activities that take place away from one’s normal setting., where both travel and satisfaction are end-goals. Travel provides an opportunity to witness new cultures, experience history, and aid people in feeling refreshed from daily routine, ultimately improving quality of life and happiness (Petrick & Huether, 2013). It provides the opportunity for personal resources to be adequately replenished, with individuals often returning to their routines with a greater QOL. Bloom, Ritter, and Geruts (2014) found that workers who were given adequate time to recover from job stress through vacation returned with not only a more profound sense of happiness, but a better ability to think divergently and with more openness to new ideas. It enhances creative output through the possibility of new, uncommon, and diverse experiences.
Designer Stefan Sagmeister shuts his New York City studio down when he feels the aesthetics of his products are becoming unoriginal and uninspired, and travels. He feels that the time spent away and experiences gained from a setting that is not his norm ultimately flows back into his company, providing him with fresh ideas as well as a rested mind and body (Sagmeister, 2009). Experiencing new cultures while taking a needed break from routine can provide a boost in creative output.
Openness to New Experience
It was September of 1989 when newly-elected Soviet official Boris Yeltsin visited a Houston, Texas grocery store. He marveled at the variety of food, a sight unfamiliar in his home country, a sight he could not help but ponder over the entire flight back home. In 1991, Yeltsin, now President of Russia, took the first steps into introducing a market economy (Maddux & Galinsky, 2007).
Travel takes people to new, unfamiliar, or places that are at least out of the norm. Having new and unusual experiences provides raw materials for the generation of new ideas, creative achievement, and innovation: disrupting your familiar senses prompts a fresh way of seeing things (Kaufman & Gregoire, 2016). Psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman (2015) found that having an openness to new experiences is highly correlated with full creative achievement, more so than other factors frequently associated with creativity, such as IQ and general divergent thinking. The drive to explore is human nature, and a pillar of creative achievements. Sticking to habits and familiar settings can kill creativity, preventing us from finding solutions to the problems before us. On openness to new experience, Kaufman (2016) says: “…the drive for exploration, in its many forms, may be the single most important personal factor predicting creative achievement (pg. 84).”
Integrative complexity is the capacity to recognize new patterns, as well as discovering links between unrelated pieces of information, similar to a creativity tool known as forced connections (Vehar, Firestien, Miller, 1997). While integrative complexity can be achieved through travel and boost creativity, cognitive flexibility may benefit the most.
Cognitive Flexibility
To date, there is not an adequate amount of research to determine the effect of travel and vacation on the originality of ideas. Creativity can be defined as the creation of original and useful ideas, and is a skill that can be both taught and learned (Amabile, 1998). The key component of creativity thinking that does receive a notable increase though is cognitive flexibility (Bloom, Ritter, Geruts, 2015) which Beghetto and Kaufman (2007) define as the ability to break ordinary patterns of thought, overcome functional repetitiveness, and avoid reliance on conventional ideas. Traveling to different settings provides people with a wide variety of new cognitive elements to absorb. Like Yeltsin in the grocery store, each time an individual experiences a new place they take in much of what is around them. This exposure to unique and original experiences provides the creative person with a wealth of new material to draw from.
In 2014, a study was conducted of 58 individuals on their cognitive flexibility and originality before and after being sent on a vacation. The results (Fig. 2) showed an increase in cognitive flexibility when it came to idea generation, though no change when it came to the originality of the ideas. It is important to note that this study was one of the first of its kind (Bloom, Ritter, Geruts, 2014). If creativity (originality) can be taught and learned though, it would seem cognitive flexibility is just another piece of the puzzle when it comes to enhancing creativity, one that can be gained upon and improved by travel.
From the same study, Bloom (2014) concluded that upon returning to their normal lives (home, work), people were more likely to consider multiple aspects of thought, avoiding conventional solutions to problems and being more likely to seek wild and unusual solutions instead. Increase cognitive flexibility opens the mind to new ways of performing everyday tasks, which, in turn, increases creativity by providing a broader spectrum on how a problem might be solved.
Cultural Collision
Boris Yeltsin was not the first to find inspiration within a new culture. Writer’s Ernest Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald both lived in Paris for a time as a means for finding creative inspiration, as did composer Igor Stravinsky (Stone & Petrick, 2013). It would seem openness to new experience was vital to their success, and that experiencing new cultures by traveling abroad go hand-in-hand with openness to new experiences, and ultimately in increasing creativity.
When different cultures interact, they often have a profound effect on one another. Creativity often increases within civilizations when they open themselves up to others (Maddux & Galinsky, 2007). In a 1997 study, Dean Keith Simonton (1997) found that periods of immigration have preceded great periods of creative achievements in various cultural contexts. Much like the early Native Americans taught the early North American settlers about agriculture (Vaughn, 1965), there is much to be gained when traveling to different regions and experiencing new cultures. The more people adapt to living in a different region with a culture they consider different from their own, the better their creative output is in terms of ideas generated (Maddux & Galinsky, 2007). In a 2007 study by Maddux and Galinsky (2007), two sets of people were given a problem to solve, with one set having traveled abroad, and the other never have. The results showed that those who traveled abroad produced more creative and correct solutions to the problem at hand than those who did not. On the creative benefits of his time spent abroad, Richard Stern (2013) said:
Once I went, it was extremely exciting for me to become a new personality, to be detached from everything that bound me, noticing everything that was different. That noticing of difference was very important. The languages, even though I was no good at them, were very important. How things were said that were different, the different formulas... So being abroad has been very important (pg. 4).
The Creative Excursion
Father of brainstorming and co-founder of creative problem solving Alex Osborn was keen on the creative benefits of travel, whether abroad, a different city, or even a part of your hometown never explored prior (Osborn, 1963). He believed that creative insights could be drawn from a simple change of setting: travel to boost creativity, in this sense, could be as easy as taking a walk outside of your office (Osborn, 1964). It is important to note though, that, much like Stephen King’s inspiration for The Shining, while a new setting can stun us with a sudden new idea or solution to a problem (Parnes, 1975), that it also helps for one to employ their own ingenuity while seeking ideas from travel (Osborn, 1964).
Excursions, as a tool for creativity, have the user take a trip to a different setting as a means of drawing inspiration from the setting around them, employing all of the senses at hand (Vehar, Firestien, Miller, 1997). The more outlandish the setting to the specific individual’s mind, often times the more the creative imagination is stretched (Osborn, 1964). A city-dweller may find inspiration within the rural woods, while the rural dweller may be inspired by the city.
The excursion does not even need to be physical for creative inspiration to strike. Simply meditating and imagining yourself in a different setting can provide a much-needed creative boost (Vehar, Firestien, Miller, 1997). Indeed, it has also been show that simply mentally accessing the memories of time spent within a different region can temporarily boost creativity (Maddux & Galinsky, 2007).
Conclusions
Whether a vacation to a new country, township one county over, or even within the mind, travel can have a positive effect on the creative mind. Creativity is a skill that can be taught and learned, and one of the largest effects that travel has on creativity is an increase in cognitive fluidity. New settings and cultures provide the mind with a plethora of new experiences from which to draw from. This increased variety in cultures and experiences can provide the individual with new perspectives on problems and new, innovative ways on how to solve them. On travel, Osborn (1964) said: “Whether our travel be out of this world, or into the suburbs, it does add to our experience; thus it adds to the knowledge out of which imagination can generate ideas (pg. 105).”
So the next time you’re in a creative rut, perhaps it’s time to take a break. Hopefully a unique vacation is on the horizon; or maybe a weekend getaway out of state. If not, it might be time to take walk around the office on break, or through the park around the corner, or push back, close your eyes, and imagine yourself anywhere but your desk. No matter where you end up though, traveling away from the ordinary might just help you find your problem’s solution.
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