Want To Be More Creative? Seek Out "Impossible Experiences"

Six ways to make ordinary life seem strange and fresh.

We are creatures of habit, and most of the time, that’s a good thing. Our habits and routines slice a path for us through the overwhelming complexity of life. This is true on a psychological level as well as a practical one: our “mental schemas,” as psychologists call them, help organize the world for us, shaping our expectations and guiding our behavior.

When we’re creating, however, we need to shift into a different mode. After all, creativity is about imagining and bringing into being something that’s never existed before. Familiar habits and routines won’t get us there. We need to strange-ify and bizarre-ify a world that has become too comfortably mundane.

In a recent paper, psychologists Richard Wiseman and Caroline Watt suggest one way to do so: seek out exposure to what they call “impossible experiences.” An impossible experience occurs, they write, when we encounter an event that we believe cannot happen. And yet, in some sense, it has. 

What happens next is what psychologists term a “schema disruption.” The mind is a prediction machine, and it uses its stock of well-established schemas to predict what will happen in every successive moment. When its predictions are defied—when we perceive something utterly unexpected—the mind snaps to attention. 

If this is possible, we ask ourselves, what other previously unimaginable things might also come into being? Wiseman and Watt, along with other researchers, have found that encounters with the impossible increase creativity. As they write: “Unusual experiences disrupt people’s schemata by modifying existing models and generating new categories, and thus result in more creative thinking.”

Technologies like virtual reality have made encounters with impossible experiences easier than ever to arrange: while wearing a VR headset, we can fly through the air or swim to the bottom of the sea. But impossible experiences are available to us in many more analog forms. We can relive our strange and improbable nighttime dreams, for example. We can read science fiction. We can check out magicians performing magic tricks. We can gaze at optical illusions. We can watch fantastical movies. We can take in surrealist art. 

Encounters with the impossible “violate people’s fundamental assumptions about themselves and the world,” as Wiseman and Watt observe. They can inspire feelings of discomfort and unease—but these affective reactions have an upside. When we experience such negative emotions, psychologists have found, our brains engage in a deeper level of processing. We’re driven to figure out what is going on, a motivated state that may lead us to new insight and understanding.

Of course, fans of sci-fi and fantasy can attest that contemplating the impossible can also feel exciting and even exhilarating. What matters is that we voluntarily choose to seek out these experiences, and that we approach them with a spirit of openness and curiosity.

But we do need to seek them out, deliberately and intentionally; otherwise we’ll remain enveloped in the world of mundane habit and routine. In making impossible experiences a regular part of our mental diet, we can take inspiration from the Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass:

Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Six Ways To Encounter the Impossible:

1. Dreams. Keep a dream journal of your own dreams, or read about other people’s dreams in the DreamBank. This is a searchable database of over 20,000 “dream reports,” collected by psychologists Adam Schneider and G. William Domhoff of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Read more here.

2. Science fiction. Peruse this list of the 50 best science fiction novels of all time.

3. Magic. Check out this collection of the world’s greatest magic tricks.

4. Optical illusions. Gaze at this gallery of mind-bending optical illusions.

5. Fantastical movies. Stream movies from this compilation of the best fantasy films.

6. Surrealist art. Take a look through this gallery of surrealist paintings and drawings.

How about you—have you ever been inspired to create by an encounter with an “impossible experience”?