The trick to unlocking creativity might be packing up and moving to a new place, or at least dividing your time across multiple locations. According to a recent study published by researchers from The Ohio State University and New York University in Abu Dhabi, Nobel Prize winners who frequently changed their physical whereabouts tended to begin their award-winning research earlier than their more sedentary counterparts. The study, featured in the International Economic Review, sheds interesting light on the creative processes of top minds.
Professor Bruce Weinberg, co-author of the study and a faculty member at The Ohio State University, and his colleagues discovered that laureates on the move started on their groundbreaking work up to 2 years earlier than those who planted roots in a single location. They found that while clustering brilliant minds together, like in Silicon Valley or Cambridge, has benefits, being exposed to diverse ideas from different places could catalyze innovation. Nobel laureates, after committing themselves to a life of packing and unpacking, launched into their prize-winning research up to 2.6 years quicker than those who stayed put.
"They're hearing interesting ideas at one place and different ideas at another location. They are putting these things together in novel, important ways," Weinberg said in the Ohio State News release. He further suggests, "If they stayed in one place, it would take much longer to happen or may not happen at all." This insight comes from an extensive dataset on Nobel laureates in chemistry, medicine, and physics dating from 1901 to 2003, meticulously documenting the scientists' whereabouts and the inception of their Nobel-worthy projects.
What this research insinuates is that a static environment, no matter how intellectually rich, eventually leads to a sort of echo chamber. "You can be in one place with lots of brilliant people, but after a while, you've talked to all of them and you develop a common understanding of how things work," Weinberg told the Ohio State News publication. This shared understanding among peers is precisely the barricade that moving or working in multiple locations can help to topple, jumpstarting the process toward an Eureka moment by potentially years.
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