Imagining Mind Wandering
Breakthrough creative insights often emerge during mind-wandering, moments when our attention drifts inward, away from focused tasks. Yet researchers have not yet investigated how to deliberately encourage these productive creative mental states. This pioneering research project addresses that gap by developing the first intervention study designed to guide mind-wandering toward creative thinking. This project also introduces a novel framework to reconceptualize creative thinking as a transformative process of meaning making. This project speaks directly to AI-human alignment through its aim to offer new cognitive models to train AI systems which both support human creativity and also expand the model’s own generative capacity for creative thinking.
Do you ever wonder where your creative ideas came from or how to harness them? Through targeting our mind wanders this intervention study aims to entice creative thoughts through targeted prompts and regular engagement with artworks. Imagine the possibility to train your ability to not only generate, but also engage with your creative ideas with the possibility of manifesting them into something more tangible and shared. These are just some of the aims of my research project at UC Berkeley’s Social Interaction Lab run by the PI Dacher Keltner.
Muju(무주, 無住) - not staying, 2018 - 2020, courtesy of artist Hana Yoo who developed this artwork for a class I taught on mind-wandering at the University of the Arts Berlin
NEWS
I will use this page as a space to update the progress of my project, inclusive of any related activities which might be of interest.
WE ARE LOOKING FOR PARTICIPANTS FOR OUR STUDY:
Interested in participating in my intervention study? By participating you will have the chance to engage with your mind-wanders and explore your own creative thinking processes. It is a three week commitment with about 30 minutes of participation per day (Mon - Friday). If you are interested in joining, please email me at: marjan_sharifi at berkeley.edu
This project has been generously fully funded by the European Commission Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship. The participating institutions in my project include University of California, Berkeley and École normale supérieure.