Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement

by Rich Karlgaard

The test taker’s job was to make their sequence of answers appear as unpredictable as possible to a logical computer program. The researchers discovered that peak randomness (and implied creativity) occurs at twenty-five, as expected. To their surprise, however, they found the drop in random thinking ability (and implied creativity) very slight all the way through the sixties. Elkhonon Goldberg, a neuropsychologist and cognitive neuroscientist at New York University and author of the 2018 book Creativity, says our creative yield increases with age. Dr. Goldberg thinks the brain’s right and left hemispheres are connected by a “salience network” that helps us evaluate novel perceptions from the right side by comparing them to the stored images and patterns on our left side. Thus a child will have more novel perceptions than a middle-aged adult but will lack the context that turns novel perceptions into useful creative insights, or creative yield.