How Creativity and Sound-Sensitivity Are Linked

Does the noise in your office – people rustling crisp packets, playing YouTube videos, and crunching on their apple and celery sticks – drive you bonkers?

If so, you could be a creative genius, say scientists.

The inability to block out noise and other irrelevant sensory stimuli while you are working seems to be strongly linked to creativity.

Top academics like Charles Darwin, Franz Kafka and Anton Chekhov were all highly sensitive to sound.

And the famous French writer Marcel Proust was so sensitive to noise that he insulated his home with cork.

This trait of distractability is given the scientific name of ‘leaky sensory gating’. It was investigated in an in-depth study published in the journal Neuropsychologia earlier this year.

Experts examined people’s ability to filter out irrelevant audio stimuli and linked it to their ability to think “outside the box.”

They found a robust link between creativity and being bad at filtering out irrelevant sound.