I read an interesting Bryan Lufkin piece on productivity “Why you’re more creative in coffee shops” published on January 20, 2021.
It starts off with a bold statement that “some of the most successful people in history have done their best work in coffee shops”.
Pablo Picasso, Bob Dylan, JK Rowling, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre – whether they’re painters, singer-songwriters, writers or philosophers, people across countries and centuries have tapped into their creativity working away at a table in a café.
I'm informed that research has shown that the stimuli in these places make them effective environments to work; the combination of noise, casual crowds and visual variety can give us just the right amount of distraction to help us be our sharpest and most creative. (So, no, it’s not just that double espresso.)
In fact, scientists have known for years that background noise can benefit our creative thinking.
A study “Is Noise Always Bad? Exploring the Effects of Ambient Noise on Creative Cognition” by Ravi Mehta, Rui (Juliet) Zhu and Amar Cheema published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 39, No. 4 (December 2012), pp. 784-799 showed that a low-to-moderate level of ambient noise in a place like a cafeteria can actually boost your creative output. The idea is that if you’re very slightly distracted from the task at hand by ambient stimuli, it boosts your abstract thinking ability, which can lead to more creative idea generation.
Another 2019 study “Altering brain dynamics with transcranial random noise stimulation” by Onno van der Groen, Jason B Mattingley and Nicole Wenderoth, which had similar findings, zeroes in on what’s called “stochastic resonance”, originally observed in animals – it’s the phenomenon in which just the right amount of noise benefits our senses. And this audio stimuli in the background even help us improve decision making, it is said.
Anyway, the point is that the jazz muzak, light conversation and barista banging coffee grounds out of the grinder aren’t a nuisance – they could actually help you come up with your next magnum opus. No kidding.
There’s also the fact that in a coffee shop, we’re surrounded by people who’ve come to do the same thing as us, which acts as a motivator.
A 2016 study backed up this idea when researchers asked participants sitting next to each other in front of a computer to do a task on the same screen. The study showed that “simply performing a task next to a person who exerts a lot of effort in a task will make you do the same”.
“Visual stimulation… has an effect on people’s creative thinking process. [It] is called convergent creative thinking”, says Sunkee Lee, assistant professor of organizational theory and strategy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business in Pennsylvania, USA.
In his research, he’s found that visual variety helps in “solving a problem that has an optimal solution, but requires you to think outside the box”.
Lee experimented by adding neon lights to the walls of his home office during the pandemic – but he soon found that the wacky addition quickly became familiar and boring.
Coffee shops, though, generally have visual stimuli in spades. (And hitting up different coffee shops each time keeps things even more varied).
“Even if you think that you are working in isolation – in the space of your computer screen and noise-cancelling headphones – there are still things going on around you”, says Korydon Smith, a professor of architecture at the University of Buffalo in New York, USA who co-wrote a 2020 article on the benefits of working in coffee shops, i.e. “Why being stuck at home – and unable to hang out in cafes and bars – drains our creativity”.
“People come and go. The daylight changes. The aromas of coffee and food vary. While we tend not take conscious notice of these micro-stimuli, and likely don’t overtly choose to work in this location because of them, these activities around us prod our brains to work a bit differently than at home".
As Lee highlights: “One of the biggest things about coffee shops is the social-facilitation effect: you go there, you see other people working and it puts you in a mood where you just naturally start working as well. Just observing them can motivate you to work harder”.
And while the stereotypical coffee-shop user might be a lone worker struggling with a creative endeavor, experts say these café settings can also benefit work groups who are brainstorming and building camaraderie.
“There is an implied formality when gathering on digital meeting platforms. By contrast, there is an air of informality when meeting up at a bar or café”, says Smith.
All those audio and visual stimuli help groups, too, compared to the dearth on Zoom or in a formal meeting room.
According to David Burkus, author of “The Myths of Creativity”, people intuitively knows they are “more productive or more creative when working from coffee shops”.
As research has shown, it’s not the caffeine; it’s the people. Simply being around other people who are working can motivate us to do the same.
In other words, creativity is social.
