How Creativity Might Stem From Satisfaction of Basic Needs, and Curiosity

To follow up on our exploration of creativity, the Scientific American paper ‘Where Creativity Comes From‘ makes the point that creativity occurs rarely in a very stressful environment where people have no time to seek opportunities or take the risk of inventing something new.

Rather, creativity seems to happen rather in settings where the basic needs are satisfied or at least alleviated temporarily. This allows curiosity and exploration initiatives to happen. As the paper shows this is being demonstrated in a number of settings, both in human and animal colonies.

Our previous post discussed that there needs to be a small amount of stress to foster creativity. Here we see that curiosity and exploration can only happen if basic needs are satisfied. This all brings us back to the conclusion of an optimum in between.