The Link between Creativity and Color

Color and Subjectivity

Many artists and highly creative individuals have claimed that color can have profound effects on the human mind. The Russian painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky is reported to have associated different sounds with different colors – when he painted, he often felt as though he was creating music as well as visual art. This capacity for cross sensory stimulation is known as ‘synesthetics’ – the ability to hear, taste, smell or feel a color; and Kandinsky shared it with other creative masters, such as the composer Franz Liszt and author F. Scott Fitzgerald. When composing, Liszt would say that a sequence needed to be more pink, or that a musical phrase was too black. Fitzgerald wrote evocatively about an orchestra playing ‘yellow cocktail music.’

So-called ‘primitive’ peoples – those whose consciousness has been less shaped by high-tech, turbo-charged commodity markets – as well as small children are known to share this capacity for creative fusion between distinct senses. Developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst Daniel Stern described a pre-verbal infant, less than a year old, gazing in wonder at sunlight reflected on his nursery wall by a shimmering pond outside. Warmth, movement, color – all seemed fused into one sensory experience rather than segmented into distinct perceptual modes, a phenomenon which Stern called ‘amodal perception’ in his book ‘The Interpersonal World of the Infant.’

But is there any scientific evidence to support the belief that color can powerfully influence subjectivity? Artists, poets, novelists and musicians may see and feel more intensely than many, but is it possible to establish whether colors can play a role in creativity? For the more skeptical reader, the surprising answer appears to be ‘yes’.

The Science of Color

600 volunteers were recruited by researchers at the University of British Columbia in order to determine whether colors might play a part in different kinds of cognitive-affective tasks. The colors selected were red and blue, and subjects were asked to perform a variety of tasks with images or words depicted against a background of one or other of these two colors. The results were striking.

When the volunteers were engaged in tests requiring higher levels of focused attention and recall, such as checking spelling and punctuation or recalling words, groups working to a red background did noticeably better. However, for those engaged in more imaginative tasks, such as creating toys from shapes or inventing creative uses for a brick, a blue background significantly enhanced their performance.

The study was devised and conducted by Juliet Zhu (Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of British Columbia’s Business School) and doctoral student Ravi Mehta. Zhu believes that the study suggests that if individuals are attempting to do a task requiring concentrated and painstaking attention, such as proof-reading, a background color of red will significantly enhance their performance. However, if the task is to brainstorm a strategy to reduce child obesity, say, or reduce adolescent smoking or even to launch a new product, participants will do well to sit in a blue-hued room.

These findings have a certain degree of intuitive ‘fit’. The strong implication that focusing and concentrating intently on solving specific tasks is enabled by the color red makes sense when one considers that, for generations, human beings have associated it with danger and alarm (red, after all, is the color of blood). To this day it is used in ‘Stop!’ signs and swiftly conveys warnings of danger and caution.

The association of blue with a more relaxed form of playful creativity is a little more difficult to explain. However, as neuroscience journalist Jonathan Lehrer argued in an article in The New Yorker (July 28, 2008), bursts of creative insight – the ‘Eureka!’ moment – are far more likely to occur when people are in a state of peaceful relaxation.

The Relaxed Cortex, the Right Hemisphere and Creativity

Commenting on work conducted by cognitive neuroscientists Mark Jung-Beeman (North Western University) and John Kounios (Drexel University) on the process of creative insight, Lehrer realized that it involved a delicate mental balancing act. Prior to the necessary phase of relaxation, the brain seems to need to control itself – brain imaging techniques show the preliminary activation of the prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulated regions, areas associated with executive control. Attention is a finite resource in the brain and it gets deployed onto singular issues, like self-control. However, once a certain threshold of focused attention is reached, the same imaging techniques suggest that the cortex begins to relax.

This is when the more creatively intriguing phenomena begin to happen. When the cortex relaxes, the usually less accessible right hemisphere of the brain, associated with creativity and imagination, appears to become more influential. This hemisphere, Jung-Beeman and Kounios believe, is the seat of creative insight. Jung-Beeman regards the relaxation phase as critical, and accounts for the fact that so many bursts of insight occur while in the midst of a warm, relaxing shower, or upon waking early in the morning – the relaxed brain, unwound and uncluttered with the practical affairs of wakefulness, is far more open to the hints and spins of the right hemisphere than the alert, attentive brain.

Blue: The Key to Reaching the Creative Unconscious?

These discoveries, intriguingly, lend considerable support to Freud’s ideas. Freud regarded nocturnal dreams as worthy of scientific analysis precisely because they appeared to him to be produced by parts of the brain that would struggle to gain clear expression during wakefulness. He also suggested that both psychoanalysts and patients cultivate the art of relaxed, playful speaking and listening (‘free association’ and ‘evenly suspended attention’ respectively) in order to allow the less deliberately focused parts of the mind to gain expression. Asking focused questions about specific ‘symptoms’, he found, simply shut down these creative, imaginative responses.

For Lehrer, Jung-Beeman’s ‘warm shower’ link to creative thinking is a powerful explanation for why Archimedes shouted ‘Eureka!’ while taking a warm bath. Aligning these ideas with the color research findings of Zhu and Mehta, Lehrer ‘synesthetically’ suggests that a warm shower or bath is akin to the color blue. If blue soothes the mind and subdues the cortex into relaxation, subjects become more capable of playfully eavesdropping on those right-hemisphere promulgated associations – associations which can lead to powerful epiphanies.

Red can be important – especially when decisiveness is called for; but blue can unleash the creative ‘unconscious’ in everyone.

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