Great artists and original thinkers often seem instinctually drawn to the darker hours. The writer Toni Morrison once told The Paris Review that watching the night turn to day, with a cup of coffee in hand, made her feel like a “conduit” of creativity. “It’s not being in the light,” she said, “it’s being there before it arrives.” Whether they join Morrison before dawn or get going after dusk, many of history’s most imaginative minds have been inspired by dim lighting.

Happy New Year! We’re saying good-bye to 2013 by revisiting some of our favorite stories of the year. Enjoy.

Merely thinking about different types of light influenced a person’s creativity.

Turns out you need not possess a Nobel Prize in Literature to appreciate the creative confines of a dark room. Psychologists Anna Steidel and Lioba Werth recently conducted a series of clever experiments designed to measure how creativity responded to various lighting schemes. In a paper published last month, Steidel and Werth reported some of the first evidence for what creative masters know by nature: when the lights switch off, something in the brain switches on.

“Apparently, darkness triggers a chain of interrelated processes, including a cognitive processing style, which is beneficial to creativity,” the researchers concluded in the September issue of the Journal of Environmental Psychology.

Image via Shutterstock

The work takes the study of illumination in a new direction. In the past, office managers asked to rate the creative potential of a work environment prefer bright lighting–the better, perhaps, to keep an eye on employees. Likewise, the symbol of a light bulb has given people brief boosts of insight, but brightness itself wasn’t a factor in these tests. Steidel and Werth wanted to see how people actually performed on creative tasks when the lights went low.

To start, the researchers demonstrated in three tests that merely thinking about different types of light influenced a person’s creativity. In one experiment, study participants spent five minutes describing either a bright or dark location in detail, then drew a picture of an alien from another galaxy. The aliens drawn by people who’d thought about darkness had more imaginative features–X-rays eyes, for instance, or legs connected to heads–and independent judges rated them as more creative.