When Jonathan Schooler and Madeleine Gross were designing an experiment on creativity, they needed a type of media to contrast with the empty-calorie content of cat videos and the like on YouTube.
The scientists settled on challenging animated shorts. “We wanted to push the poles as far apart as possible,” Gross — who like Schooler conducts her research at the University of California, Santa Barbara — said in an interview.
The results after doing so were eye-opening even to them: among a totally random population, levels of creativity for the people watching the experimental films were immediately higher compared to those watching YouTube videos, which didn’t move much at all. So was openness to seeing the world in new ways.
For years many people have had the sense that the kind of low-nutrition, algorithmically driven videos that flash across our feeds and brainscapes dozens of times per day are bad for us. Schooler and Gross
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