Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions from 31 to 40.
[I] Some people say great ideas come when we do not expect them, and many psychologists agree: creative insights can occur more often after a period of "incubation" – in which you focus on something entirely different from the task or problem that you need to find unique ideas or solutions for. [II]
There are many reasons why a period of incubation could lead to new and inventive insights. [III] According to one popular theory, it depends on the power of the subconscious mind: when we leave our task, the brain continues to work and connect separate ideas in the background without us knowing, until a good solution pops out. [IV] Also, it allows us to gain some psychological distance from our task. When you spend a long time focusing on one problem, you can become stuck on certain obvious solutions, so incubating should help widen your mental focus so you can come back with a fresh perspective.
In 2012, the psychologist Benjamin Baird tried to test these ideas with an experiment in which participants were first asked to find as many surprising uses as possible for common objects like a brick. After some minutes of brainstorming, there was a short incubation period in which some students were allowed to rest completely while others were either given a simple mental task, which requires focus but still allow the mind to wander, or a difficult task that demands full concentration. The benefits of performing the undemanding task during the incubation were striking, with these participants showing a 40% rise in the creativity of their ideas when returning to the task. More importantly, there were no benefits for the participants who rested or had to fully focus on a task during the incubation.
It may seem surprising that the rest period had not boosted creativity, but Baird suspects that we still need to distract our focus with something to provoke the optimum amount of mind wandering. This is good news for procrastinators, since many of our ‘time-wasting’ activities may offer the best level of distraction for greater creativity. The key is to find moderation, as evidenced by a study from professors Jihae Shin and Adam Grant, who asked participants to brainstorm the best ways someone could spend $10,000 and also gave them links to funny YouTube videos that they could access during the exercise. In the end, those who took a few short breaks to watch the videos tended to generate more creative ideas than those who did not take breaks or delayed too much.
Facing an impending deadline, we may fear taking any time away from the task at hand. But there should be no guilt about spending a few moments of pleasant distraction or leaving the task altogether as we allow an innovative solution to slowly appear while our mind wanders from time to time.
(Adapted from bbc.com)
