Music-Induced Spontaneous Thought Reflects Individual Differences in Creativity

Creativity has traditionally been difficult to measure, partly because it is linked to a diverse set of mental processes that are considered stimulus-independent, like daydreaming and imagining. Music, however, provides a tractable window into these varieties of spontaneous thought. During music listening, people regularly imagine fictional scenarios that feel highly personal, but are actually reliably prompted by features of the music. Here, we show in two studies that creativity is reliably predicted by music-induced imaginings. We used natural language processing to extract measures of elaboration, originality, and appropriateness from these imaginings, and show that they are predicted by scores on the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, a standard measure of domain-general creativity. The ability to predict trait levels of creativity from spontaneous thought paves the way for more naturalistic, accessible measures of creativity that can be readily tailored to samples that share a socio-cultural background.