Abstract
Anecdotal literature suggests that creative people sometimes use bodily movement to help overcome mental blocks and lack of inspiration. Several studies have shown that physical exercise may sometimes enhance creative thinking, but the evidence is still inconclusive. In this study we investigated whether creativity in convergent- and divergent-thinking tasks is affected by acute moderate and intense physical exercise in athletes (n = 48) and non-athletes (n = 48). Exercise interfered with divergent thinking in both groups. The impact on convergent thinking, the task that presumably required more cognitive control, depended on the training level: while in non-athletes performance was significantly impaired by exercise, athletes showed a benefit that approached significance. The findings suggest that acute exercise may affect both, divergent and convergent thinking. In particular, it seems to affect control-hungry tasks through exercise-induced “ego-depletion,” which however is less pronounced in individuals with higher levels of physical fitness, presumably because of the automatization of movement control, fitness-related neuroenergetic benefits, or both.
Highlights
Anecdotal literature suggests that creative people sometimes use bodily movement to help overcome mental blocks and to get deeper into a problem
Gondola (1986) used the same creativity tasks to compare the effect of long-term and acute physical exercise and found improvements for both conditions and all three creativity measures
PHYSIOLOGICAL AND MOOD MEASUREMENTS We found a main effect of session on Heart rate (HR), F(2,184) = 768.01, p < 0.00001, MSE = 109.063, η2p = 0.89, SBP, F(2,184) = 165.76, p < 0.00001, MSE = 163.793, η2p = 0.64, and DBP, F(2,184) = 29.18, p < 0.001, MSE = 104.509, η2p = 0.24
Summary
Anecdotal literature suggests that creative people sometimes use bodily movement to help overcome mental blocks and to get deeper into a problem. Long-term fitness training leads to an increase of oxygenation and glucose in the frontal brain regions, which has been found to produce rather selective benefits for executive-control processes (Colcombe and Kramer, 2003) This means that athletes may not exhibit the same effects as non-athletes. While the latter should show exercise-induced costs in more control-demanding tasks (like convergent thinking), the former might either not show such costs or perhaps even show exercise-induced benefits To investigate these possibilities, we tested the impact of acute physical exercise on convergent and divergent thinking in athletes and non-athletes. We took into account possible moderating factors, such as the intensity of the exercise (which was moderate or high, in different sessions) and the temporal overlap between exercise and creativity task (with the latter being performed during or after the exercise)
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