Trending
I heard it often as a kid: "Burton William, clean your room! It looks like a pigsty."
Back then, it sounded reasonable -- at least to my parents. But science says cleaning the sty stifles creativity. It did keep me slimmer, though.
It's true.
According to a study reported by psychologist Kathleen Vohs in the journal Psychological Science, chaos and clutter are conducive to creativity. And questionable eating habits.
Or maybe, as I suspect, Snickers and Ho-Hos are the stuff that fuels genius. Especially if you leave the crumpled wrappers on your desk.
Vohs herded 188 adults into rooms that were either tidy or messy. They were offered "classic" or "new" fruit smoothies. In another experiment, they were offered chocolate or an apple on their way out of slick or sloppy.
The people stuck in the neat room tended to go with the safe choice - classic. And the folks forced to spend time among spickness and spanness usually chose a plain ol' apple over the chocolately goodness of a candy bar.
So I blame my poor eating habits on my furniture. My mind might whisper, "Raw broccoli," but my desk, bookshelves and all that's heaped upon them chant, "Warm chocolate chip cookies."
Vohs says diet aside, her experiments show clutter encourages trying unusual options, allowing for creative solutions to problems. Which sounds better than, "I want pudding."
We're creative. A friend once sent me a T-shirt that declares, "Organized people are just too lazy to look for their stuff."
I've never figured out if that was a dig at organized people for being lazy, or a backhanded blast at us creative types for all the time we waste sorting through the clutter.
Either way, don't confuse outward disarray with a disheveled mind. We creative types are the organized savants of clutter.
My college roommate and I each had stacks, piles and treasure troves everywhere. But what aggravated our neatnik friends was whenever they challenged us to locate a thing, we always knew the exact pile and how many layers down it hid. What the neaties deemed an impossible search took us five seconds. Ten, if we had to wade to the other side of the room first.
Our system worked because we each managed our own chaos. Then I married someone just as, uh, "creative" as I am.
One creative person with a seemingly random scatterings is no chaos at all. But turn two geniuses loose in the exact same space and now, I can't find anything.
"Terry!" I yelped as I dislodged a half-darned sock from between Play-Doh sets. "What happened to my note cards?"
But Terry can't hear me because she's too busy hollering from the living room. "Why are all these seed packets shuffled in with my newspapers? I can't find my coupons."
We traded piles of creativity, and I fished out her coupons while she retrieved my note cards.
You know, it's time that I lost a few pounds. I'm thinking of cleaning up my room, just until this craving for blueberry pie goes away.
Or until I find my storyboard and pushpins, and Terry gets her needlepoint back. We certainly wouldn't want to stifle our creativity for very long.
— Sort through Cole's creative clutter at the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook or at >burtseyeview@tribtoday.com.