Does an hour in total darkness make people more creative?
People who had just spent over an hour doing everyday activities in total darkness scored lower, not higher, on a creativity test than people who did the same activities in daylight.
Source
The Effects of an Ecological Diversifying Experience on Creativity: An Experimental Study
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Between-subjects field comparison: 'dialogue in the dark' (activities in total darkness led by blind guides) vs the same activities in a park in daylight; creativity tested immediately afterwards. Groups were recruited at different places rather than randomly assigned.
- N
- N=133 · Study 2 (the experiment): 133 sighted adults, 71 in the darkness group and 62 in the lit control group. Study 1 was a separate descriptive sample of 30 adults who only did the darkness experience.
- Population
- Sighted Italian adult volunteers in Milan
- Outcome
- Divergent thinking on the Torrance 'unusual uses of a box' task (fluency, flexibility, originality, elaboration); also positive/negative affect and personal impact of the event
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
In a first study, 30 adults rated how unusual and intense the 'dialogue in the dark' experience was, and two weeks later how much it had affected them. In the main study, 133 adults either did the darkness experience (walking on grass, playing ball, tasting spices, guided by blind people) or the same activities in a park in daylight. Straight afterwards everyone listed unusual uses for a cardboard box for 10 minutes and filled in mood and life-impact questionnaires.
What they found
The darkness experience was rated as far more unusual, unexpected, involving and intense, and it produced more positive mood and higher ratings on several 'this changed me' items. Despite that, the darkness group performed significantly worse than the control group on all four creativity scores. Controlling for openness to experience and need for closure did not remove this difference.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Participants were not randomly assigned: the darkness group was recruited at the Institute of the Blind and the control group through social media, so the groups may differ in ways that were not measured. Creativity was measured only once, immediately after an intense experience, so the result may reflect fatigue or cognitive overload rather than a lasting effect; the authors call for follow-ups after a week and a month. The paper does not report effect sizes for the creativity differences, and the control activity was not an established format like the darkness experience.
Key terms
- Diversifying experience
- An unusual, unexpected event that breaks with a person's normal routine and violates their usual mental schemas.
- Schema violation
- Encountering something that contradicts the mental templates we use to predict how the world works.
- Divergent thinking
- Generating many different possible answers to an open problem, often used as a proxy for creativity.
- Fluency, flexibility, originality, elaboration
- The four scoring dimensions of the Torrance tests: number of ideas, number of idea categories, rarity of ideas, and amount of detail.
- Cognitive flexibility
- The ability to shift attention and switch between ways of thinking when the situation changes.
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Quiz yourself
What did the darkness group do differently from the control group?
Common questions
Why would darkness be expected to boost creativity?
Theory says moderate schema-breaking experiences push people out of habitual thinking and increase cognitive flexibility, which should help them generate unusual ideas.
Why might it have lowered creativity instead?
The authors suggest the experience was so intense that it overloaded attention and felt uncontrollable, leaving fewer resources for a demanding creative task done straight afterwards.
Does this mean unusual experiences never help creativity?
No. It only shows no immediate boost after one very intense experience; benefits might appear later, once the experience has been digested, which this study did not test.
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