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 prompted by features of the music. Here we show that creativity is reliably predicted by music-induced imaginings. Across two studies, participants (total n = 466) listened to a variety of well-validated musical excerpts and gave written descriptions of stories that they imagined. Participants also completed divergent thinking tasks from the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, a standard measure of domain-general creativity. Using natural language processing tools, we extracted measures of Originality, Appropriateness, and Elaboration from the music-induced imaginings. Measures of Elaboration and Appropriateness were reliably predicted by scores on the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, suggesting that more creative individuals spontaneously imagine scenarios that are more attuned to the cultural associations of the perceptual environment. Taken together, results show that spontaneous thought during music listening reflects individual differences in human 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.