Creativity Starts Where the Answer Isn’t

What forty years of curiosity research says about the advice we get for being creative, and what to try instead

Have you been in this type of meeting? Someone puts a problem/question/challenge on the whiteboard, hands out sticky notes, sets a timer, and tells everyone there are no bad ideas. Forty minutes later there are two hundred sticky notes on the wall (of various colors). How many of the ideas are any good? Maybe four.

Is this really the best we can do to conjure up creativity?

Now think about the rest of the advice we get for being more creative. We’re told to add constraints, to use prompts, to ask “how might we” questions, to set a deadline because nothing focuses the mind like a deadline! (Who came up with this? Deadlines create anxiety and kill creativity). All of these work the same way: by opening a gap and then pushing us to close it. The only thing worse would be standing us at the edge of a cliff and telling us that if we don’t come up with something creative, we’ll get pushed off of it.

Why is this the case? It may be because for forty years we have been focusing research efforts on one kind of curiosity.

In 1994, the economist George Loewenstein set the stage. His information-gap theory says curiosity shows up when we notice a gap between what we know and what we want to know. The gap captures our attention. It feels like deprivation. Like having an empty stomach, we have a natural hunger to fill that gap. We go get the information, the gap closes, and the feeling stops (we’re no longer hungry). Think of forgetting the name of the actress on screen and not being able to enjoy the rest of the movie until you’ve looked her up.

The information gap was the model everyone had, so it became the thing researchers built experiments around. They used trivia questions, where people rate how badly they want the answer, and blurred images that slowly sharpen into a recognizable object, and card games where you can pay to find out what you missed. Every one of them opens a gap and measures the itch. The blurry image whets our lips, gives us a taste, and then we have a thirst to know.

Marieke Jepma and her colleagues ran one of these in 2012 using ambiguous images. When their research team induced curiosity, brain regions associated with conflict and arousal lit up. When they relieved that curiosity by letting people finally see the image clearly, a reward region lit up. Here’s how the sequence goes: an uncomfortable state, then relief when it ends, and the relief is what registers as reward. Wait a minute! That’s a habit loop (textbook reinforcement learning), and it was published as the neural basis of human curiosity.

Yikes.

Why did the field go in this direction? I don’t think anybody sat down and decided deprivation was the important kind of curiosity. It may be a matter of simplicity, ease and pragmatics: A gap can be easily opened in seconds, rated on a scale, and closed on command. Which means you can line it up and study it with a brain scanner. (Oh, how we scientists love to isolate variables and make tidy experiments to the detriment of real-world applicability!) The other type of curiosity (interest curiosity), where we wonder and are simply exploring doesn’t work that way, since it has no tidy start and stop. So the field measured the type of curiosity that could be easily isolated and controlled.

Jordan Litman named the two flavors back in 2005. He called one D-curiosity, for deprivation, the restless, unpleasant, need-to-know state, and the other I-curiosity, for interest, the pleasurable side of exploring. I wrote about this at more length in an earlier article (The Curiosity Hijack), if you want more details.

Here’s something interesting about D and I types of curiosity: when you measure them using self-report questionnaires, they correlate at about .7, which is pretty high. People who score high on one tend to score high on the other, which makes sense, since curious people tend to be curious about a lot of things, and in different ways. Yet a correlation between traits doesn’t tell us the two states feel the same from the inside, and it doesn’t tell us they affect our thinking (and creativity) in the same way. Litman found that only some of his subscales separated them cleanly. The measures are muddy (like much of psychology that is dominated by questionnaire-driven science).

So what happens when researchers stop measuring brains and start watching what people actually make? Here the picture gets more interesting.

In 2019, Lisa Hagtvedt and colleagues had people read an article about Houdini’s Vanishing Elephant trick and then come up with their own ideas for magic tricks. The group whose curiosity had been piqued produced ideas rated about a third more creative. They followed this with a two-week diary study of working artisans, where the days someone got curious predicted better work the next day. They described the mechanism as idea linking, where a piece of one idea becomes the seed of the next one.

They call this specific curiosity, meaning curiosity aimed at one particular thing. It sits close to Litman’s deprivation curiosity (the itchy kind), but isn’t the same. They function differently: deprivation ends when we get the answer whereas idea linking keeps going, one idea seeding the next. And notice what they were curious about: a magic trick, not their own performance. Nobody was standing over them with a timer.

Here’s a deprivation curiosity itch of mine that hasn’t yet been scratched: why are there so many different definitions, models and scales for curiosity? My leading hypothesis: it’s hard to put related but different concepts and experiences into words. For my research and clinical programs, I’ve found Litman’s D- and I-type curiosity the most helpful handholds for people to use.

To wit: Todd Kashdan and colleagues built a five-dimensional curiosity scale that separates joyous exploration, deprivation sensitivity, social curiosity, thrill seeking and one more: stress tolerance, meaning the willingness to sit in the discomfort of not knowing. (See my previous article on distress tolerance for a related deep dive). A recent study using his scale looked at which dimensions predict creativity, and the two strongest were joyous exploration and stress tolerance.

Read that again: the facet that best predicts creative output isn’t how badly we want to know. It’s whether we can stay in the not-knowing without bailing out.

Ready for this? Last year Nan Li and colleagues had people breathe through a resistance device, which makes breathing effortful and the body distinctly uncomfortable. Then, they measured how much participants explored for information while making decisions. In healthy participants, exploration dropped. Make the body uneasy and we stop looking around.

When the body gets uncomfortable and we don’t know how to be with it, we stop exploring. We go get the answer, any answer, so the feeling will stop. The deadline, the timer, the edge of the cliff, all of these make the body uncomfortable, and then we wonder why we can’t be creative in those moments.

A bit more neuroscience while we’re here (sorry, can’t help it). The insula, one of the regions that lit up in Jepma’s curiosity induction, is an interoceptive region: it processes internal body signals, reads the body so to speak (e.g. hunger, heartbeat etc). The insula also activates in studies of anxiety. Is it possible that deprivation curiosity and anxiety are running through some of the same machinery? Nobody has tested this directly, but my hunch is yes.

How can we pull all of this together?

If the problem were simply that we need more curiosity, the advice would be to want to know things more badly, and we’re already doing plenty of that (we can thank the 24/7 availability of information via the internet for this!). Instead, if the problem is that discomfort collapses our exploring. As such, the skill to developl isn’t wanting more. It’s first, learning to stay in the space of not knowing, and then learn (or remember) to enjoy it.

In my Going Beyond Anxiety program and my clinical practice, I have people practice something that often comes across as goofy at first, until they try it and see how powerful it is.

I first have them feel into the itchy urge of D-curiosity, and note whatever their version of that “Oh, no, I need to get this information” voice is in their head. Then, I have them open their eyes really wide and say “Ohhh?!”, what does ‘Oh no!’ feel like in my body”? Sometimes I’ll even have them explore where they feel it more in their body: on the right side, or left side. Because there is no specific knowledge-based answer here, it helps them tap into genuine interest curiosity. They can learn to run straight toward the discomfort with a mental notebook to collect information and in the process discover that they can not only be with discomfort, but that curiosity helps them explore something that can feel uncomfortable at first, but when injected with interest, not only isn’t so bad, but helps us learn in the process.

After they get the hang of the flip from OH NO to Ohhh?!, they can start to bring interest curiosity into meetings and yes, creativity sessions. They can flip from time-bounded tasks to interest-induced curiosity fests (which may still end after an hour, but eyes are less on the clock and more on the process).

So try this the next time you are aiming to awaken your own curiosity. Take ten seconds first and check in with your body. Is there a tightness in your chest? Is your jaw set, are you leaning toward the screen? Is there a sense that there’s one specific thing you need and you need it right now? That’s deprivation, and you don’t have to scratch the itch. Instead, get interested in it. What does that restless energy actually feel like? Where is it? Does it have edges? Is it moving? Nothing needs to change for this to work.

And notice what happens next, because that’s the opening into interest curiosity.

Watch a four year old find a beetle on the sidewalk. They crouch down. Their eyes go wide. And out comes some version of “Ohhh?!” (usually followed by forty questions we can’t answer). They aren’t being creative on purpose, and nobody told them to do this. They simply haven’t learned yet that not knowing is something to hurry out of.

Somewhere along the way most of us did learn that, and as we “grew up”, we’ve been closing gaps ever since. Yet the capacity doesn’t go anywhere (but backwards).

So the next time someone hands out the sticky notes and starts the creativity timer, check in with your body before you look at the whiteboard. See if you can get curious about the tightness first, and then about the problem in front of you.

Judson Brewer MD PhD is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist and professor at Brown University. He is the author of Unwinding Anxiety (NYTimes bestseller), The Craving Mind, The Hunger Habit and The Unwinding Anxiety Workbook. He co-founded MindshiftRecovery.org which provides free support for people with any type of addiction.

If you are struggling with anxiety, Dr. Brewer’s Going Beyond Anxiety program brings together his research and clinical experience to help people build effective skills to reduce anxiety and cultivate calm (www.goingbeyondanxiety.com).

Copyright © 2025, Judson Brewer, MD, PhD. All rights reserved.

REFERENCES:

Hagtvedt, L. P., Dossinger, K., Harrison, S. H., & Huang, L. (2019). Curiosity made the cat more creative: Specific curiosity as a driver of creativity. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 150, 1–13.

Jepma, M., Verdonschot, R. G., van Steenbergen, H., Rombouts, S. A. R. B., & Nieuwenhuis, S. (2012). Neural mechanisms underlying the induction and relief of perceptual curiosity. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 6, 5.

Kashdan, T. B., Stiksma, M. C., Disabato, D. J., McKnight, P. E., Bekier, J., Kaji, J., & Lazarus, R. (2018). The five-dimensional curiosity scale: Capturing the bandwidth of curiosity and identifying four unique subgroups of curious people. Journal of Research in Personality, 73, 130–149.

Li, N., Lavalley, C. A., Chou, K. P., & Smith, R., et al. (2025). Directed exploration is reduced by an aversive interoceptive state induction in healthy individuals but not in those with affective disorders. Molecular Psychiatry.

Litman, J. A. (2005). Curiosity and the pleasures of learning: Wanting and liking new information. Cognition and Emotion, 19(6), 793–814.

Litman, J. A. (2010). Relationships between measures of I- and D-type curiosity, ambiguity tolerance, and need for closure: An initial test of the wanting-liking model of information-seeking. Personality and Individual Differences, 48(4), 397–402.

Liu, Longkun, Xingnan Cui, and Jiang Qiu. “Which type of curiosity promotes creativity? An investigation based on the five-dimensional curiosity construct.” Acta Psychologica 264 (2026): 106593.

Loewenstein, G. (1994). The psychology of curiosity: A review and reinterpretation. Psychological Bulletin, 116(1), 75–98.