How Remembering the Past Can Make You More Creative in the Present

Memory and imagination draw on the same mental capacities.

Creativity is a process of envisioning what might be—of conjuring up an entity that doesn’t exist now, but could in the future. It turns out that this capacity to imagine is strongly related to the capacity to remember. The brain regions that are activated when we remember an old episode are also recruited when we generate ideas that are brand new. And—engaging in the detailed recall of a past event primes us to be more creative in the present.

That finding comes from a program of research led by Harvard psychology professor Daniel Schacter. He and his colleagues note that when we recall in some detail an incident from our past, we are engaging in an act of “scene construction,” pulling together a mass of information about what happened, where, and with whom.

Research by Schacter and others has found that this is no simple process of playing back the tape: when engaged in immersive recall, our brains are working hard at creating a coherent scene. In a similar fashion, coming up with creative ideas requires us to construct scenes that have yet to take place: future scenarios in which the idea or object we are creating takes shape.

In a study published in the journal Psychological Science, Schacter and his coauthors showed two groups of participants a video of a man and a woman engaged in various activities inside a house. Afterward, one group was asked some offhand questions about what they had seen. “Did you like the video?” they were asked. “What were your general impressions of the video?” 

The second group was asked far more probing and specific questions. (The questions were actually based on a protocol used by forensic investigators to increase the number of accurate details that eyewitnesses recall about an event.) 

“Close your eyes and get a picture in your head about the surroundings of the video you watched,” they were instructed. “Once you have a really good picture in your head, I want you to tell me everything you remember about the surroundings.” More questions followed: about the people in the video and what they looked like; about the actions performed by the people. “Try to be as specific and detailed as you can,” the experimenter urged.

After being questioned, members of both groups were administered a test of creative thinking. Participants who had been prompted to give a more detailed account of the video they had seen went on to generate a greater number of creative ideas than the participants who had only been asked to offer their general impressions of the video. 

Why would remembering a previous episode in great detail have this effect on creativity? Schacter and his coauthors propose that engaging in detailed scene-setting based in the past primes us to apply that same capacity for vivid scene-setting to the future—to the act of imagining a reality that doesn’t yet exist. 

Try it for yourself! Choose an event from your past and remember it in glorious detail. (You might use the protocol below, borrowed from Schacter’s research, as a guide.) Then turn to your current creative endeavor, bringing that same depth and breadth of detail to your vision of what you’re trying to make. 

Like Marcel Proust and his memory-evoking madeleine, you may find that remembering the past is a doorway into a richly imagined act of creation in the present.

Episodic Specificity Induction Script (adapted from Daniel Schacter et al.) 

“So now I’m going to ask you a few questions about the video you watched. First I want you to close your eyes and get a picture in your head about the surroundings of the video you watched. I want you to think about what types of things were in the environment and how they were arranged and what they looked like. Once you have a really good picture in your head, I want you to tell me everything you remember about the surroundings. Try to be as specific and detailed as you can. 

“Now I want you to close your eyes and get another picture in your head, this time about the people in the video you watched. I want you to think about what the people looked like and what they were wearing. Once you have a really good picture in your head. I want you to tell me everything you remember about the people in the video. Again, try to be as specific and detailed as you can. 

“Now I want you to close your eyes and get a picture in your head about the actions in the video you watched. I want you to think about what the people were actually doing in the video and how they did these things. Once you have a really good picture in your head, I want you to tell me everything you remember about the actions starting with the first one and ending with the last one. Try to be as specific and detailed as you can.”

Have remembered experiences of the past ever inspired you to create in the present?