Can creativity actually be trained?

The core finding

The most cited work here is a meta-analysis by Scott, Leritz and Mumford (2004), which pooled results from 70 years of creativity training studies. It found that well-designed training produces substantial, measurable improvements in creative performance — and, importantly, that the effects transfer beyond the training tasks themselves.

The same analysis found that not all training is equal. The approaches that worked shared a specific shape: they taught concrete cognitive strategies, gave people realistic problems to practise on, and required extended, repeated practice rather than a one-off workshop. That finding is the single biggest influence on how Gletch is designed.

What's happening in the brain

Beaty and colleagues (2018), published in PNAS, showed that creative thinking ability is predicted by the connectivity between three large-scale brain networks — the default mode, salience, and executive control networks. Their model predicted individual creative ability from brain scans alone.

What makes this relevant to a training app is that this connectivity isn't fixed. It responds to what you repeatedly do. Creativity looks less like a trait you're issued at birth and more like a capacity that strengthens with use.

Why breaks and walking matter

Baird and colleagues (2012) found that people produced significantly more original solutions after an undemanding task — the kind of activity that lets your mind wander — than after either a demanding task or straight rest. This is the incubation effect, and it's why stepping away from a problem so often solves it.

Oppezzo and Schwartz (2014) at Stanford found that walking increased creative idea generation by an average of around 60% compared with sitting, and that the effect persisted after people sat back down. Both findings shape how Gletch paces practice — it's built to be used in short sessions, away from a desk, rather than in long grinding blocks.

What we don't claim

We want to be straight about the limits of this evidence, because a lot of apps in adjacent categories aren't.

• Most creativity research measures performance on validated laboratory tasks — divergent thinking tests and insight problems. These correlate with real-world creative achievement, but they are not the same thing as it.
• Gletch itself has not yet been through a controlled trial. The exercises are built on published research; the specific combination in this app has not been independently tested. Running that study is something we intend to do, and we'll publish the results either way.
• No app makes you a genius. Deliberate practice reliably improves the skill of generating ideas. What you do with that is still down to you, your field, and a considerable amount of work.

References

• Scott, G., Leritz, L. E., & Mumford, M. D. (2004). The effectiveness of creativity training: A quantitative review. Creativity Research Journal, 16(4), 361–388.
• Beaty, R. E., et al. (2018). Robust prediction of individual creative ability from brain functional connectivity. PNAS, 115(5), 1087–1092.
• Baird, B., et al. (2012). Inspired by distraction: Mind wandering facilitates creative incubation. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1117–1122.
• Oppezzo, M., & Schwartz, D. L. (2014). Give your ideas some legs: The positive effect of walking on creative thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(4), 1142–1152.