The Perks of Being a Weirdo

My childhood was, by most definitions, pretty strange. I grew up a Russian Jewish immigrant in Midland, Texas, in a region whose biggest claims to fame are being the onetime home of George W. Bush and the inspiration for Friday Night Lights. In preschool, I got in trouble for not praying before eating my snack; later, I didn’t know what this “Super Bowl” everyone kept talking about was. I felt hopelessly different from everyone else in our town.

Even after we moved to a Dallas suburb, I never encountered another Russian immigrant kid like me. I rode the bus alone. I spent almost every evening alone. I began talking to myself—a habit that has unfortunately stuck. Once, someone toilet-papered our house, and I had to explain to my parents that this is what American kids do to losers. Undeterred, my dad eagerly raked the toilet paper into a garbage bag and put it in my parents’ bathroom for future use. “Free toilet paper!” he said happily over dinner

All I wanted to be was normal. I wanted to be as American as my classmates; I wanted a past that, when I explained it to people, compelled no one to ask “Why?” about any part of it. But with time, I’ve come to realize that there’s an upside to being different from everyone around you. In fact, a body of social-science research suggests that being an oddball or a social reject can spark remarkable creativity.

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An unusual childhood is not the only thing that can make you more creative. Being considered “weird” in your culture can also enhance an element of creativity called “integrative complexity.” People who are strong in integrative complexity tend to handle uncertainty well and excel at reconciling conflicting information. They’re often able to see problems from multiple perspectives.

Chris Crandall, a psychology professor at the University of Kansas, told me that people who are on the periphery of society tend to be freer to innovate and change social norms. “Fashion norms come from the bottom up,” he said. Outsiders are less concerned with what the in-crowd thinks of them, so they have more leeway to experiment.

In fact, people who don’t fit neatly into a particular group have been found, over and over, to perform better at outside-the-box thinking. Foreigners are often considered strange, but there are psychological advantages to feeling like a stranger. Children who are exposed to multiple languages—perhaps because, like me, they were raised in a country far from where they were born—are better able to understand an adult’s perspective, and they may go on to become better communicators overall. In one experiment, people who had lived abroad were especially good at finding hidden solutions to word and conceptual problems. That might help explain why Pablo Picasso began experimenting with Cubism in Paris, and George Frideric Handel composed his Messiah while living in England.

In fact, people who don’t fit neatly into a particular group have been found, over and over, to perform better at outside-the-box thinking. Foreigners are often considered strange, but there are psychological advantages to feeling like a stranger. Children who are exposed to multiple languages—perhaps because, like me, they were raised in a country far from where they were born—are better able to understand an adult’s perspective, and they may go on to become better communicators overall. In one experiment, people who had lived abroad were especially good at finding hidden solutions to word and conceptual problems. That might help explain why Pablo Picasso began experimenting with Cubism in Paris, and George Frideric Handel composed his Messiah while living in England.

Happily for those who have never lived abroad, this creativity boost can also happen for people who live in unusual frames of mind, rather than exotic locales. In a small study, Rodica Damian, an assistant psychology professor at the University of Houston, and her colleagues had college students engage in a virtual-reality exercise in which the laws of physics didn’t apply. In this virtual world, things fell up instead of down. When compared with another group that performed an exercise in which the laws of physics functioned normally, those who had the physics-warping experience were able to come up with more creative answers to the question “What makes sound?”

Damian has a theory she’s researching: that all kinds of unusual experiences can boost creativity. For example, people often report having breakthroughs after magic-mushroom trips or extreme adventures. “The idea behind this is that once you’ve experienced things that violate norms and rules and expectations, you’re more open to more things like that,” Damian told me. “You experienced that the world doesn’t have to work by your rules, so you can break the rules.”

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Read the whole story (subscription may be required): The Atlantic