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Man smelling food
Cognition and perception

Big picture: Imagining the impossible before breakfast

Image/words by Jan Cosgrave & Dalena Van Heugten (University of Oxford).

11 January 2016

Dissociative symptoms include phenomena that encompass excessive daydreaming, memory problems, severe absentmindedness, and impairments and discontinuities in perceptions of the self, identity and the environment. An example would be ‘zoning out’ a lot, or, in more severe cases, not recognising yourself in the mirror. People scoring high on dissociation also tend to have more rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. REM is a sleep phase that has been hypothesised as an ideal state for hyperassociative connections to be made. We wished to investigate whether such connections could predict enhanced creativity during the day.

To test this, we conducted a creative photo contest where participants took one photo per day for five consecutive days, based on specific daily themes (consisting of single words). The participants also completed daily measures of dissociation and a short sleep diary.

The photos and their captions were ranked by two professional photographers and two clinical psychologists based on creativity, originality, bizarreness and quality. As predicted, we found that dissociation predicted a higher ranking on creativity when taking a photo that day.

Displayed here are the photographs for our winner in chronological order for each of the themes: three; green; freedom; desire; and home. This work has recently been published in Frontiers in Psychology (tinyurl.com/zjzyedz) for highlighting an innovative approach to both studying creativity and informing dissociative symptomatology.

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