The creativity trick no one told you about: Read the obituaries

October 29, 2025Last Updated: October 29, 2025

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The creativity trick no one told you about: Read the obituaries

By Keith Sawyer | Published: 2025-05-02 13:31:00 | Source: Smart Skills – Big Think

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I’ve been reading obituaries for as long as I can remember. At first glance, it may seem like little more than a collection of dates and achievements. But for me, they have become a wellspring of creativity – each a glimpse into a life I could never have imagined. As decades of research on creativity indicates, the most creative ideas often come from unexpected sources.

For this reason, one of the popular tips for boosting creativity is to learn something new every day. But here’s the problem: This only works if this new information is correct Very different From what is already in your head. This is where most of our modern habits fail. For example, Internet searches provide you with information related to what you already know, or information you already care about. So, how do you escape this cycle and stumble upon something unexpected, something you didn’t even know you should be looking for? Obviously the deaths – but I’ll come back to that.

In February, I Interviewed by Yoed Kennetwho studies high-level cognition and creativity, for my podcast “The Science of Creativity.” His research shows that creativity flourishes by making connections between very different concepts. The basic idea is simple: Our ability to create depends on prior knowledge, and our creative potential increases when this knowledge is organized into conceptual networks that help us search for, connect with, and generate new ideas – what Kennett calls “the Google of the mind.”

This research dates back to the 1960s, when psychologist Sarnoff Mednick was studying the thinking patterns of people diagnosed with schizophrenia. He was exploring the idea that highly creative individuals may share certain relational patterns with those diagnosed with schizophrenia, namely the tendency to make connections between seemingly unrelated ideas. in A classic 1962 experienceMednick asked participants to say the first word that came to mind when they heard a quick like table. Less creative participants tended to respond with clear associations e.g chair or man. The more creative participants also gave these answers, but they also came up with more surprising answers, e.g food Or even Mouse.

Mednick’s observations led him to suggest that highly creative people have a different kind of memory structure, one that holds a broader range of ideas and makes unexpected connections between them. He called his theory The associative theory of creativity. His research has shown that creative ideas are more likely to arise from clusters of concepts that are spaced apart in the mind’s conceptual network. The greater the distance between two ideas, the more original and surprising their combination will be. More recent researchThese observations are confirmed by Kennett et al.

Psychologist Deidre Gentner Also found The more distant the two ideas are conceptually, the more creative their combination will be. For example, I found that if you asked 100 people to imagine a chair and a table—two closely related objects—most of them would imagine something like a school desk. It’s a clear match within the furniture category. But if you asked 100 people to imagine a chair combined with a pony — very far-fetched concepts — the results would be much more varied and surprising: a chair you sit on while grooming a foal, a chair a foal sits on, one shaped like a pony’s head, or one covered in fur.

Gentner calls this Property mapping – When people borrow features such as texture or shape from one concept and apply them to another concept. It’s a kind of connection at a distance, and obviously more creative than imagining a regular school desk. But Gentner identified something even more powerful: Structural mapping. This happens when transferring Relational structure From one concept to another. Let’s say you combine ‘pony’ and ‘chair’ and imagine a pony-shaped chair – this is still just property mapping, but more detailed. But if you imagine a small Chair, you’ve made a bigger leap. This is structural mapping: relying on the idea that a pony is smaller than a horse, and applying that relationship to redefine the size of a chair. These types of mappings – especially when the underlying relationships are abstract or unclear – tend to produce the most original and surprising combinations.

You can enhance your ability to make connections at a distance by exposing yourself to a wide range of information, especially from conceptually different domains. Most of us stick to what we know. We don’t usually encounter far-fetched concepts in our daily lives, so stretching our minds into unfamiliar territory takes some effort.

Which brings me back to deaths. I’m not talking about half-page writing by celebrities or politicians. I mean the little obituaries in New York Times The Sunday edition – the one collected in eight columns on one page, paid for by friends and family. These people are not famous. But their lives, lovingly and vividly described by those who knew them best, are often more surprising than any obituary headline. It is a perfect way to boost your creativity.

It is important to read all obituaries on Sunday. If you filter your reading by only choosing people who are similar to you, you will not be able to absorb new, more different and surprising information.

Here are two I read recently on a Sunday morning:

Berta Escora Born in 1924 in San Pedro de Luque, Peru. She was a follower of British spiritual writer and thinker Rodney Cullen when he moved to Mexico City in 1948. In 1963, she moved to New York City and founded the Spanish International Network (SIN) with Rene Anselmo. SIN was the first television network in the United States to broadcast entirely in Spanish. Anselmo later went on to found PanAmSat, the world’s first private international satellite system.

Norton Garfinkel He died on March 20, 2025, at the age of 94. Garfinkel was a professor at Amherst College and a serial entrepreneur. He founded a landmine detection company for the United States and foreign governments. He invented a news database search algorithm and sold it to Reuters. He developed PLAX, the first pre-brushing tooth rinse. He started Electronic Retail Systems, which provided self-checkout systems for supermarkets. Founded a publishing company Lamaze magazine for parents.

See what I mean about being interesting? You’ve probably never heard of either. (I didn’t do that). But reading their stories introduces you to a mix of fields—broadcast, aerospace, esoterics, oral hygiene, database design, and prenatal publishing—that you rarely encounter all in one place. It’s exactly the kind of conceptually distant material that helps fuel creative thinking.

Here’s how you can use obituaries to boost your creative cognition.

First, start reading it slowly, without looking for a big idea. Let the details wash over you – the places she lived, the professions she pursued, the strange hobbies she pursued. Notice what sticks.

It’s not just about learning new facts, of course, it’s about asking questions. Why was the British mystic in Mexico City? How did Spanish-language television develop in the United States? What prompted someone to invent PLAX or create search tools for financial news decades before Google? Even if you don’t find all the answers, just asking questions helps you flex the creative muscles that thrive on curiosity and connection.

Will any of the life stories you read give you an amazing creative vision? No one can tell. but Research shows that Distant similes They often lead to creative breakthroughs, often in unexpected ways. What you’re doing is filling your brain with a bunch of very different cognitive materials.

In every person’s life story, there is always a story, always a deeper principle at work. How did a Peruvian woman get to Scotland, Mexico City, and then New York? How did an Amherst College professor find so many different companies, with so many different technologies and in so many industries? Find that deeper principle, ask “why?”, and look for distant connections with your own life. Creativity is a daily practice available to anyone.

this condition Originally published on MIT Press Reader.