Creative thinking can be promoted by certain meditation techniques – even in people who have never meditated before – according to a study by cognitive psychologists Lorenza Colzato and Dominique Lippelt at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Published in the peer-reviewed academic journal on psychology Mindfulness, the study investigated the influences of two different types of meditative techniques on creative thinking.

Forty individuals participated in the study, who had to meditate for a period of 25 minutes before undertaking thinking tasks. There were both experienced meditators and people who had never meditated before involved in the research.

Two types of meditation, ‘open monitoring’ – being receptive to every thought and sensation – and ‘focused attention’ – focusing on a particular object or thought – were carried out on separate occasions, before carrying out two different types of thinking tasks.

The two thinking tasks designed to test creativity are ‘divergent thinking’ – thinking up as many possible solutions for a given problem – and ‘convergent thinking’ – finding the one possible solution for a problem. The former is measured using the so-called Alternate Uses Task method, where participants think up as many uses as possible for a particular object. ‘Convergent thinking’, however, is measured using the Remote Associates Task method, which involves finding the common link between three unrelated words such as: ‘time’, ‘hair’, ‘stretch’. The common link word in this case is ‘long’.

‘Open monitoring’ meditation provided better results in divergent thinking tasks than ‘focused attention’ meditation – where there was no increase in creative thinking after this type of meditation.

The results suggest that while not all forms of meditation have the same effect on creativity, even novices may profit from meditation, especially ‘divergent thinking’ techniques, given the long-lasting influence meditation can have on human cognition – including how we conceive new ideas.