When Jonathan Schooler and Madeleine Gross were designing an experiment around creativity, they needed a kind of media that would contrast with the empty calorie content of cat videos and the like on YouTube.
Scientists settled on challenging animated shorts. “We wanted to push the poles as far back as possible,” Gross — who, like Schooler, conducts her research at the University of California, Santa Barbara — said in an interview.
The results after doing so were remarkable even for them: among a completely random population, the creativity levels of people watching experimental films were immediately higher compared to those watching YouTube videos, which didn’t change much at all. So was the openness to seeing the world in new ways.
For years, many people have had the feeling that the kind of low-feed, algorithm-driven videos that appear across our feeds and mindscapes dozens of times a day are bad for us. Schooler and Gross have a new column of scientific evidence. Most importantly (and encouraging): they have a prescription for what to do about it.
Just watching a few minutes of an ambiguous or challenging video — such as short films shown at film festivals or in Short Films of the Week — can make a difference. It’s a “even light exercise can add years to your life” kind of discovery, just for the brain.
“What we found is that even small doses of it can have real value,” Schooler, a distinguished professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and a well-known researcher, said in his own interview. The results will be published in the academic journal Psychology of aesthetics, creativity and the arts.
Traditional experiments on the cognitive value of the arts have tended to focus on more intensive and ongoing programs, such as arts education for children. But the new findings suggest that even something quick can make a difference. It can occur in brains that developed long ago. These traits of openness and creativity are not fixed based on past experiences, let alone birth, Gross says.
While the results appear to be sponsored by A24, the experiment was designed with a great deal of scientific rigor. The researchers divided nearly 500 random participants into two groups: those who watched animated shorts (which came from the Shorts of the Week platform powered by Sugar 23) and those who watched viral video content (“home video-style domestic antics”).
They then asked participants to come up with a five-sentence short story, and also sought to measure “openness” and “conceptual expansion” — the researchers’ terms for a flexible, multimodal type of thinking — by asking them to notice connections between seemingly different concepts. People who watched difficult films scored significantly higher on both measures. This is despite (or because of) the fact that participants actually reported liking viral videos more.
“What he told us is that we enjoy these kinds of things [social-media] videos but they don’t do much for our brains. “The tough shorts had an immediate positive impact,” Gross said.
Researchers say this may have happened because ambiguity forces our brains to consider alternative and original possibilities rather than simply falling into well-worn mental grooves. Think of it as a salad versus a cheeseburger: it may not taste good, but it will go a long way in improving your quality of life.
In some way, the special trait of openness, Gross says, could be linked to a longer life.
A trend has developed in recent years towards considering the impacts of social media platforms and their engagement-optimized algorithms, and limiting in-kind intake. When people start thinking about their media-based diet as much as they think about their diet, studies like the UCSF report could be key in that effort.
It is possible that this movement will gain further momentum in the age of AI content, with a potential wave being instantly generated to suit personal needs in a way that could never be produced through social media content.
Schooler and Gross say their findings should be taken with some caveats. But they add that this does not mean that the benefits are intangible.
“I don’t want to suggest that everyone turns into John Updike when watching seven-minute movies,” Schooler said. “But there’s a wide range of abilities that each of us has, and almost all of us are not at the top of that range. We can all get closer by doing something like this.”
