Feeling uninspired? Start packing. The solution may just be somewhere else. As Ohio State News reports, a new study in the International Economic Review says Nobel Award-winning scientists who moved more frequently or worked in multiple locations began their prize-winning research significantly earlier than those who stayed in one place. Using data from Nobel laureates in chemistry, medicine, and physics from 1901 to 2003, the study revealed that working in several locations instead of one reduced the time before the scientists began their groundbreaking work by 2.6 years and that moving every five years shortened the time by 0.7 years.
Bruce Weinberg, co-author of the study and an economics professor at Ohio State University, said the reason for the creative boost largely stems from exposure to diverse ideas and collaborations in different places. "Going off into a completely different environment, a new context, might help creative people think in new ways," he said. "You're more likely to come up with that great new idea if you move around, meet new people, have new experiences, [and] encounter new ways of thinking."
But regardless of how brilliant those new people might be, even collaborating with them for too long can also limit innovation. "You can be in one place with lots of brilliant people, but after a while, you've talked to all of them and you develop a common understanding of how things work," Weinberg said. "You're less likely to come up with this great breakthrough unless you are exposed to a new set of ideas you haven't heard before." And although the study was focused on a specific subset of Nobel Prize winners, Weinberg thinks moving around will help more than just scientists. "I think the same might even be true of great painters and artists and anyone in a creative domain," he said. "Their genius is coming up with novel ideas and expressing them in novel ways. And it helps to move and meet others with different ideas." (More creativity stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
