Future Sight? Personality May Hold the Key
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Are creative people better at reading minds?
Imagine you're in a 1960s psychology lab where researchers are trying to solve a puzzle: Do creative people have some kind of sixth sense? Scientists at the University of Minnesota gathered 53 students and put them through an unusual battery of tests — measuring their creativity, curiosity, and belief in ESP, then actually testing their extrasensory perception abilities. What they found was a statistical surprise that still raises eyebrows today.
Creative students showed no ESP ability despite theoretical predictions.
In 1969, researchers at the University of Minnesota wondered if highly creative people might have stronger psychic abilities. Some theorists had suggested that creativity and extrasensory perception (ESP) might share common mental processes like intuition. The researchers decided to test this idea with psychology students during summer session.
The data showed that highly creative people performed worse on ESP tests than their less creative peers — the opposite of what researchers expected.
Key Findings
- Creativity and curiosity were strongly linked, as expected.
- However, the ESP results went against the theory: more creative students actually performed slightly worse on the ESP test, though this difference wasn't statistically significant.
- The study found no support for the idea that creative people have stronger psychic abilities.
What Is This About?
The researchers gave 53 psychology students a battery of tests and questionnaires. Students completed Torrance's creativity checklist, a curiosity test adapted for adults, and rated their own curiosity levels. They also took an ESP test and filled out the 'Sheep-Goat Scale' which measures whether people believe in psychic phenomena or not. The researchers then looked for statistical relationships between all these measures.
53 undergraduate students completed questionnaires measuring creativity, curiosity, ESP attitudes, and took an ESP test to examine relationships between these variables.
Strong correlations were found between creativity and curiosity measures, but a negative (though non-significant) correlation was found between creativity and ESP test performance.
How Good Is the Evidence?
The creativity-ESP correlation was -.16, meaning a very weak negative relationship. For comparison, the creativity-curiosity correlation was .58, showing a much stronger positive connection between these conventional psychological traits.
Supporters of psi research might argue that laboratory ESP tests don't capture the subtle, real-world manifestations of psychic creativity, and that the negative correlation could reflect different cognitive styles. Skeptics would point to this as evidence against the creativity-psi connection, noting that if anything, the data suggests creative people perform worse on ESP tasks. Both sides might agree that the small sample size and single study design limit firm conclusions.
Mainstream: This study provides evidence against any meaningful connection between creativity and psychic abilities, supporting the view that ESP claims lack empirical foundation. Moderate: The study shows no support for the creativity-ESP link, but the small sample and single-session design limit broader conclusions about whether such connections might exist under different conditions. Frontier: Laboratory ESP tests may not capture the real-world relationship between creative intuition and psychic functioning, and the negative correlation might reflect that highly analytical creative people perform worse on intuitive psychic tasks.
A common misconception is that creative or artistic people are naturally more psychic. This study suggests the opposite might be true, or at least that there's no positive connection between conventional creativity and ESP test performance.
To settle whether creativity and psychic abilities are related, we'd need large-scale studies with hundreds of participants, multiple ESP tests, validated creativity measures, and independent replication. This study provides one data point suggesting no positive relationship, but its small size means the findings could easily be due to chance.
Between the TCMI and the ESP Test, r was negative (.16)
Stance: Skeptical
What Does It Mean?
The most fascinating twist? Creative people — those we typically associate with 'thinking outside the box' — actually scored lower on tests of supposed psychic ability, completely flipping conventional wisdom about artistic intuition.
This is like testing whether people who are good at creative writing are also good at guessing lottery numbers. The researchers found that creative thinking skills don't translate into psychic abilities, even though some theories suggested they might share similar mental processes.
If these findings were robust, they might suggest that creativity and psychic sensitivity operate through different mental mechanisms — or that highly creative minds are actually more grounded in conventional reality than we assume. This could reshape how we think about intuition, artistic inspiration, and the relationship between different forms of non-analytical thinking.
This study demonstrates that correlation doesn't equal causation, and that negative results (finding no relationship) are just as scientifically valuable as positive ones for testing theories.
Understanding Terms
What This Study Claims
Findings
A negative correlation of -.16 was found between creativity measures and ESP test performance
weakStudents' self-ratings of curiosity correlated positively (.47) with the creativity inventory
moderateA significant positive correlation of .58 was found between the Torrance Creative Motivation Inventory and the curiosity test
moderateMethodology
The study tested the hypothesis that intuition or extrasensory perception is related to creativity
moderateThis summary is for general information about current research. It does not constitute medical advice. The scientific interpretation of these results is debated among researchers. If personally affected, please consult qualified professionals.