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 have a new column of scientific evidence.  Even more important (and encouraging): they have a prescription for what to do about it. 

Just watching a few minutes of an ambiguous or challenging video — the kind of shorts shown at film festivals or on the indie-minded Short of the Week — can make the difference. It’s a kind of “even mild exercise can add years to your life” discovery, only for the brain.

“What we found is that even small doses of it can have real value,” Schooler, a distinguished professor at UCSB and well-known researcher, said in his own interview. The results will be published in the academic journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.

Traditional experiments on the cognitive value of the arts tend to focus on more intensive, ongoing programs, like arts education for kids. But the new findings suggest that even something quick can make a difference. And they can happen in minds already long developed. These traits of openness and creativity, Gross says, are not fixed based on previous experiences, let alone birth.

While the results sound like they were sponsored by A24, the experiment was designed with plenty of scientific rigor. Researchers split nearly 500 random participants into two groups: those who watched the animated shorts (which came from the Sugar 23-backed platform Short of the Week) and those who watched the viral-video content (“home-video-style domestic antics”).

They then asked subjects to devise a five-sentence short story and also sought to measure subjects “openness” and “conceptual expansion” —  the researchers’ terms for a flexible, multimodal sort of thinking — by asking them to note connections between seemingly different concepts. The subjects who watched the challenging films scored much higher on both metrics. This despite (or because) of the fact that the participants actually reported liking the viral videos more.

“What it said to us is that we enjoy these kinds of [social-media] videos but they aren’t doing much for our brains. And the challenging shorts were having an immediate positive impact,” Gross said.

The researchers say this may have happened because the ambiguities force our brains to consider alternate and original possibilities instead of simply falling into well-worn mental ruts. Think of it as a salad vs. a cheeseburger: it may not taste as good, but it’s going to do a lot more for your quality of life.

In one way, literally — the particular trait of openness can even be correlated, Gross says, to a longer life.

A trend has been developing in recent years toward considering the effects of social-media platforms and their algorithms optimized for engagement, and limiting intake in-kind. As people start considering their media diets as much as as their food-based ones, then, studies like the UCSB report could be key to that effort.

The movement could gain even more steam in the age of AI content, with its likely wave of slop instantly generated to fit personal wants in a way that more blindly produced social-media content never could.

Schooler and Gross say that their results should be taken with some caveats. But, they add, this doesn’t mean the benefits aren’t tangible.

“I wouldn’t want to suggest everyone can turn into John Updike with exposure to seven-minute films,” Schooler said. “But there’s a range of capacity that we each have, and almost all of us are not at the top of that range. We can all get closer by doing something like this.”