Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

by Tim Harford

A few years ago a team of researchers including Shelley Carson of Harvard tested a group of Harvard students to measure the strength of their ability to filter out unwanted stimulus.13 (For example, if you’re having a conversation in a busy restaurant, and you can easily filter out the other conversations going on around you and focus only on the conversation at hand, you have strong attentional filters.) Some of the students they studied had very weak filters—their thoughts were constantly being interrupted by the sounds and sights of the world around them. You might think that this was a disadvantage. Yet these students were actually more creative on all sorts of measures. The most striking result came when the researchers looked at precociously creative students—those who had already released their first album, published their first novel, produced a stage show of sufficient prominence to be reviewed by the national press, been awarded a patent, or some similar achievement. There were twenty-five of these super-creatives in the study; twenty-two of them had weak or porous attention filters. Like Brian Eno, they simply couldn’t filter out irrelevant details. But then, who is to say what is irrelevant?