Cafe Noise Can Make You More Creative
For some people it’s the shower or a long lazy soak in the bath, for others a walk in the countryside will do, while still more will swear by a cup of coffee.
We all have our own favorite ways to enhance creativity when the little grey cells seem to flag, but maybe you should add the cafe to your repertoire of brain boosters.
New research led by Ravi Mehta from the University of British Columbia and featured in Atlantic magazine reveals that moderate noise levels in cafes enhance creative cognition.
The full study, Is Noise Always Bad? Exploring the Effects of Ambient Noise on Creative Cognition was published in the Journal of Consumer Research and consisted of five experiments to understand how ambient sounds affect creative cognition.
Far from being any kind of distraction researchers found that a moderate (70 decibels) versus low (50 dB) level of ambient noise enhanced performance on creative tasks. In addition it also increased the likelihood of buying innovative products.
Perhaps not surprisingly a high level of noise (+85 dB) hurts creativity.
A Noise Doesn’t Annoy
According to the study authors, “Process measures reveal that a moderate (vs. low) level of noise increases processing difficulty, inducing a higher construal level and thus promoting abstract processing, which subsequently leads to higher creativity. A high level of noise, however, reduces the extent of information processing and thus impairs creativity”.
So the next time you have a problem you want to solve or an innovation to perfect, head down to your nearest cafe, grab a steaming cup of Joe and get thinking.
The paper backs this up by musing that instead of sitting in a quiet room to figure out a solution, a relatively noisy environment may “trigger the brain to think abstractly, and thus generate creative ideas.”
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