LET'S GIST AGAIN!

On the 115^th anniversary of the death of the novelist who wrote: “Music is the shorthand of emotion,” (L. Tolstoy RIP/W&P) we peel, core and juice the Creative Process to learn how it gets down the gist of the matter…

Way back in the patchouli-scented ‘seventies, over far too much Macallan single malt for a sixteen-year-old, an affable Ealing solicitor pulled his paper Christmas hat up from around his bloodshot eyes and burbled:  “What is your special place, David?  That one place, and time, that you can return to in your mind. Where you feel most secure, most alive.”

“I don’t have one,” I told him after a few minutes’ thought.

“You must have. And you must find it. …Everybody has one,” he belched and promptly nodded off to his own safe place of garlic-and-thyme infused snores.

It took a bit of work, but I eventually found that place.  And for decades it has been my one of my ‘touchstones’ when the going gets tough creatively (…and personally, TBH).

What I didn’t know, back then in adolescent Ealing, was that I was consciously making a two-step dive into the creative soup:

a)     Plunging into a state of ‘diffuse attention,’ that pseudo-fugue mental-state some sports-folk call ‘in the zone’ (see BOP post: 'Georgia On My Mind) a pitch of focus where all irrelevant sounds, sights, thoughts, etc., are filtered out;

b)    Swimming in a sea of (almost) context-free content which would become known, a couple of decades later, as ‘memory gists.’

Last month a paper was released that shed a little light on my semi-mystical, teens-based modus operandi. Memory gist as a mechanism for creative thoughts.*

‘..The discussion of memory gists can be traced to the fuzzy trace theory, according to which our long-term memory stores both a verbatim memory trace and a gist trace (Reyna & Brainerd, 1995).  The former contains the details of the original experience, while the latter contains a schematic summary extracted from the original experience without the specific details.  The verbatim memory trace is often lost later on, while the gist is preserved. For example, in the famous Deese-Roedinger-McDermott paradigm, upon reading a list of words related to healthcare (“nurse, patient, hospital, ambulance, etc.”), subjects often from a gist trace. Based on the gist trace, they believe that they have read a list of words that share the commonality of being common words related to healthcare. Later, when tested on what words they saw, many had the illusion that they saw other healthcare-related words that weren’t on the list (e.g., “doctor”). One explanation why subjects have false memories in this case is that they use they use the gist trace to help them retrieves specific words (Roediger & McDermott, 1995).’

And the more liable we are to these ‘false memories,’ is believed, by some scientists, to be an important indicator of our general level of creativity:

“Thakral et al. (2021) found that individuals who tend to have more false memories in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm (i.e. recall more lure words that were not in the studied list) perform significantly better at several different creativity tasks compared to those who are more accurate in their word recall in the DRM paradigm.”

And one reason for difference, according to other researchers, may lie in our basic memory retrieval frameworks: 

'..Kennet and his collaborators (Kennet et al., 2014, 2016) show that more creative individuals retrieve memory contents very differently from less creative individuals. In one of their experiments, subjects are divided into a high creativity group and a low-creativity group based on their self-reported results in a questionnaire about their creative achievements… Both groups are then asked to complete a verbal fluency test, where they are prompted to generate as many animal categories as they can think of within 60 seconds… Kent and collaborators found that those who self-reported more creative achievements in the questionnaire generated less modular semantic networks. In other words, there are fewer sub groups isolated from each other in the network generated by the more creative group.  Instead, the sub-groups are all meshed together through a web of connections that link up categories in different sub-groups. To use one word as an example, in the less-creative group, “goat” is connected with “sheep,” “pig”, “chicken”, and “cow”, all of which are farm animals. Meanwhile, for the more creative group, “goat’ is also connected with some non-farm animals, including “bat’ and “turtle.” ’

So it would appear that in more creative individuals, the net is spread wider, and the mesh is set looser.  Who knows, your one-minute farmyard menagerie may even include rival Russian Revolutionaries ...if you’re an Old Etonian ex-homeless-person. But while the boundaries are stretched, the logic remains bounded:  

' ...Gist-guided memory search as well as diffuse attention are some of the mechanisms that enable highly creative individuals to generate creative ideas. Using memory gist to guide memory search enables creative individuals to search through disparate contents in memory, thanks to the fact that they share some underlying abstract features despite their superficial differences. The fact that these disparate contents all fit the gist also ensures that the generated idea is not only unusual but useful.’ 

But of course memory gists don’t only influence the production side of The Business of Pleasure.  They also play a huge part in how our audiences receive our work. One recent paper** on the appreciation of abstract art begins with:

But of course memory gists don’t only influence the production side of The Business of Pleasure.  They also play a huge part in how our audiences receive our work. One recent paper** on the appreciation of abstract art begins with:

‘… Artworks are often shown alongside informative contextual text. This can be as simple as its title and date, or it can be a more descriptive or elaborative explanation of the piece, such as describing its content or explaining the symbolism of the work.  Contextual information has been shown to have no impact on early viewing behaviour. A consistent impact on observer eye movement scan paths and fixations is only found in the later periods of looking. One explanation for this is that early eye movement responses to artworks support automatic low-level visual processing that quickly extracts a broad holistic gist or sense of the works, allowing rapid categorisation…’

And perhaps most interestingly…

One major determinant (if not the major determinant) of whether our audiences actually create their own ‘gist memories’ and remember the essence of our work over time…

(e.g. the insightful exposition of one of the central paradoxes of the human condition that we shine a relentless light on in our film, play, novel, concerto or plumber-based video-game...).

Or merely notice that one of the dinner plates doesn’t quite match the other ones…

(say, in Leonardo Da Vinci's ‘The Last Supper ‘).

May well be the mood in which our audience members take in the experience:

‘Apparently, how we perceive our environment is for a large part determined by what we think. However, perceptual processing is not only by cognitive or meta-cognitive processes. Emotion, and in particular mood, have been demonstrated to have an equally strong effect on perceptual processing. Mood affects the focus of processing: negative mood is associated with ‘local’ processing, whereas positive mood is associated with ‘global’ processing. When participants have to retell a brief story they have had to memorize, participants in a negative mood tend to report details, whereas participants in a positive mood tend to report the gist of the story. Interestingly, in perceptual processing, a similar effect is observed. In an experiment in which participants had to rate whether a target object was more similar to an object that matched its global features or an object that matched its local features, participants in a negative mood showed a bias for the local features, where participants in a positive mood showed a bias for global features.’ ***

Which may be a relatively new discovery for Science, but it is something that successful members of the live entertainment chapters of The Business of Pleasure have known for millennia; from Sophocles to Shakespeare, from Flo Ziegfeld to Cameron Mackintosh, and which informs their approach from booking process to venue impact and across all patron contact points.

Or in terms that even a sixteen-year-old South Londoner in the ‘seventies might understand, if we want our core content to make a lasting impression on our audiences (our guests and their guests) we may need to spend the rent money on a giant tin of Mr Sheen, a box of scented candles, soft music, and a bottle of Sainsbury’s ‘best’ plonk…

DT

20 November, 2025

*Memory gist as a mechanism for creative thoughts, Jocelyn Yuxing Wang, Centre for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University, published online 12 November 2025

**Viewing of abstract art follows a gist to survey gaze pattern over time regardless of broad categorical titles, Eugene  McSorley, Rachel McCloy, Louis Williams, Reading University, 12 June, 2025

***Music Alters Visual Perception Jacob Jolij, Maaike Meurs, 2011