The Excuse I Wanted to Be True

A version of the same claim keeps reaching me: science says smart people are basically childlike. Playful, curious, silly, allergic to growing up. It arrives as a permission slip, and it lands, because my working life looks like the evidence. I follow threads with no deadline attached. I disappear into a research question the way other people disappear into a book. I run a studio and treat half of it like a sandbox. If playfulness were proof of intelligence, I'd have an alibi for my entire method.

Which is precisely the situation in which I've taught myself not to trust a claim. Wanting something to be true is the strongest reason to check it. So I did the thing I once wrote a whole essay about doing and went to the sources. They do not say what the meme says. What they say instead is smaller, more contested, and considerably more useful.

The three sources, checked

The claim usually travels with three exhibits. None of them proves it.

The first is a playfulness study, and it's the one worth getting right, because the misreading is so clean. Mary Ann Glynn and Jane Webster built a scale to measure adult playfulness, and their follow-up paper carries the title everyone quotes: correlates of playfulness for highly intelligent adults. Read fast, it sounds like a result. Read the paper and the phrase describes who was in the room. The 550 highly intelligent adults were the test sample, a fixed feature of the study, and it never once correlated playfulness with any measure of intelligence. It found that playfulness went with innovative attitudes and intrinsic motivation, and against personal orderliness. It could not have found that playful people are smarter, because everyone in it was already selected as smart. The most-cited evidence for the claim is evidence of nothing about the claim.

The second exhibit is a brain scan. Tian and colleagues put twenty-four people in an fMRI scanner and showed them jokes, hunting for the neural signature of the moment you get one. They found it, in the language and insight networks, the same circuitry that fires when any problem suddenly resolves. It is a real, careful, small study about the "aha" of comprehension. It says precisely nothing about childlikeness, or intelligence, or play. Its only honest link to the theme is that getting a joke and cracking a problem share a mechanism, which is genuinely interesting and not what it was recruited to prove.

The third is Einstein, who really did write that "combinatory play" seemed to be the essential feature of productive thought. The line is genuine and beautifully on-theme. It is also one brilliant man's introspection about his own head, offered in a letter. I'm allowed to find it moving. I'm not allowed to count it as data.

The thesis

So the viral version is mis-sourced. But there's a defensible essay underneath it, and it's better than the meme, because it asks for less and delivers more.

• Playfulness, openness, curiosity, and flow are genuine cognitive-creative modes, with real, replicated support. The support is modest, mostly correlational, and sometimes null, and saying so is the point.
• The thing worth defending is a stance, not a trait and not a regression: exploration over exploitation, intrinsic over instrumental motivation, absorption over performance. It can be adopted. You were not simply born clever-and-playful.
• The trait most reliably tied to both creativity and intelligence is openness, and it comes apart: the exploratory, aesthetic side predicts creativity, the reasoning side predicts fluid intelligence. They are not one faculty in a party hat.
• For me, two neurodivergent attention systems turn out to be two flavors of the same exploratory stance, one broad and one deep. That last part is synthesis, not established science, and I'll flag it when I get there.

Method, as before: solid findings cited plainly, contested ones flagged in the same breath, and anything that is only my experience marked as exactly that.

Openness, and the useful split

Start where the ground holds. Of the broad personality traits, the one most consistently tied to both creativity and intelligence is openness to experience, and its most useful feature is that it divides. DeYoung and colleagues showed openness splits into two correlated aspects: openness proper, the pull toward perception, aesthetics, and fantasy, and intellect, the pull toward abstract reasoning. Nusbaum and Silvia then isolated the dissociation that matters: openness predicts creativity but not fluid intelligence, and intellect predicts fluid intelligence but not creativity. The party trick and the exam are different muscles.

The magnitudes keep everyone honest. The largest meta-analysis to date, Anglim and colleagues across roughly 163,000 people, puts the openness-intelligence correlation at about .20, and finds it lives disproportionately in crystallized intelligence, the knowledge you've accumulated, rather than fluid intelligence, the raw processing. That fits a quiet, unglamorous story. Curiosity doesn't make you sharper on the spot. It sends you looking, for years, and the looking builds a deep store of knowledge that reads, later, as being smart. The mechanism is time, not magic.

Explore and exploit

The most respectable version of "think like a child" comes from Alison Gopnik, and it is not sentimental. She frames childhood as a protected period of high-temperature search, a stretch of life evolution set aside for wide, wasteful exploration before the pressure to exploit what works arrives. Young children explore more broadly than adults, and sometimes beat them on exactly the tasks that need an unusual hypothesis, the ones where the obvious answer is wrong. The frame is borrowed from reinforcement learning, where every agent faces the same tradeoff: exploit the option you know pays, or explore for a better one you might never find. Childlike cognition is not less developed. It is tuned to the exploration end of a real dial, which is precisely the setting research needs and adult life keeps turning down.

There's a reason the exploration feels like appetite rather than duty. Curiosity is intrinsically rewarding: reviewing the neuroscience, Kidd and Hayden describe the brain treating new information like a primary reward, routing it through the same dopamine-linked circuitry as food. Following a thread with no visible payoff is not procrastination wearing the costume of work. It is the reward system doing what it evolved to do, and the fact that it doesn't feel like effort is the feature, not the bug.

Flow, and the value of the long way round

Exploration that goes deep enough acquires a name. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called it flow, complete absorption in an activity that has become its own reward, where the goal is clear, the feedback immediate, and the self quietly drops away. He found it first in artists who worked past hunger and fatigue, and it is the mechanism by which "purposeless" deep play turns generative: intrinsic motivation and autotelic focus are the exact conditions under which anyone sustains the long attention real work demands.

Even stepping away has a measured payoff. Sio and Ormerod's meta-analysis of 117 studies found a real if modest incubation effect, larger for the divergent, many-answers problems creative work is built from. The detail I keep is the shape of it: incubation helped most when the break was filled with an undemanding task, not with nothing and not with something hard. Going off to play at something light while a problem cooks is not avoidance. On the evidence, it is a technique.

Where the flattering version breaks

Now the discipline, because everything above licenses a stance and none of it licenses the meme, and the gap is where these essays usually cheat.

Playfulness measured as a trait behaves worse than the story wants. Proyer's model treats it as four flavors, one of them explicitly intellectual, and it does correlate with feeling creative, with innovative attitudes, with intrinsic motivation. But when you stop asking people how creative they feel and test what they can actually generate, the link to measured idea fluency is weak and often absent. Playfulness relates reliably to the self-report and unreliably to the output, and a good part of the published correlation survives only because the playfulness and creativity questionnaires quietly measure the same thing.

Divergent thinking, the workhorse test behind most creativity claims, is itself contested: its scores predict real creative achievement only modestly, and its correlation with intelligence sits around .25, which makes creativity and intelligence neither identical nor opposite but overlapping, sharing the executive machinery for switching between ideas. And the causal claim, the one the meme actually makes, is the weakest link in the chain. Lillard and colleagues reviewed the evidence that pretend play causally builds cognitive skill and found it unconvincing: the correlations were inconsistent, and the effects tended to evaporate when the people scoring them didn't know which children had played. Others have pushed back hard, so the honest word for the causal question is open. Play travels with good cognition. Whether it produces it is unproven.

My two engines, two kinds of play

This is the part that is mine, and I'll mark the seam clearly: what follows is synthesis, an interpretation I find generative, not a result anyone has demonstrated.

I've written before about running an autistic attention system and an ADHD one in the same head. The explore-exploit dial is the cleanest way I've found to describe how they split the labor. The ADHD engine sits near the exploration end: novelty-seeking, easily pulled toward the new, bored by the known. And that bias may not be purely a deficit. In a foraging task, people who screened positive for ADHD left depleting patches sooner and, in that environment, collected more reward than those who didn't, which is what an explorer's environment pays out. One study, promising, not settled, and I hold it that lightly. But it names something I recognize: the restlessness is a search strategy, mistuned for a world of desk work.

The autistic engine is the other kind of play, and the word deep is exact. Monotropism describes autistic attention as flowing into a few interests at high intensity, deep basins it doesn't want to climb out of. Framed as pathology, that is obsession. Framed honestly, it is the sustained, intrinsically motivated, high-focus absorption that the flow literature spends its whole length trying to explain, aimed at a research question instead of a piano. My vault of a few thousand linked notes is not scattered curiosity, and it is not diligence. It is deep play: exploit inside a narrow space, the same autotelic engine, pointed at how systems mean things and left running for years.

So I don't have one childlike mind. I have two exploratory ones, a broad and a deep, and the honest version of the meme, for me, is that neither is a party trick and neither is a flaw. They are two settings of the same old dial.

Where this leaves me

The meme wanted to hand me a flattering fact: you are smart because you never stopped playing. The literature won't sign it. What it will sign is quieter and, to me, more useful. There is a cognitive stance, exploration over exploitation, curiosity over utility, absorption over performance, that is genuinely tied to creative and, more loosely, intellectual work. It is a setting, not a gift. It can be chosen, protected, engineered for, or flattened by a schedule that only ever rewards exploitation.

Which means my working life doesn't look like play by accident, or by permission. It looks like play because it is play, in the one sense the science actually supports: autotelic, exploratory, curiosity-driven attention, following a thread because the thread is the reward. I don't get to call that proof of intelligence. I do get to call it the right stance for the work, chosen on purpose, and defended against every calendar that would like me to grow out of it.

That's the excuse I was looking for, in the end. Not that playing around makes me smart. That playing around is the work, and worth protecting as if it were.

References

• Anglim, J., Dunlop, P. D., Wee, S., Horwood, S., Wood, J. K., & Marty, A. (2022). "Personality and intelligence: A meta-analysis." Psychological Bulletin, 148(5–6), 301–336. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000373 (N = 162,636 across 272 studies; openness–intelligence ρ ≈ .20, stronger with crystallized than fluid.)
• Barack, D. L., Ludwig, V. U., Parodi, F., Ahmed, N., Brannon, E. M., Ramakrishnan, A., & Platt, M. L. (2024). "Attention deficits linked with proclivity to explore while foraging." Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 291(2017), 20222584. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2022.2584 (Pre-registered, N = 457; cite as promising, not settled.)
• Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row. Autotelic engagement; the generative state of absorbed play.
• DeYoung, C. G., Quilty, L. C., & Peterson, J. B. (2007). "Between facets and domains: 10 aspects of the Big Five." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(5), 880–896. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.93.5.880 (Openness splits into Openness and Intellect aspects.)
• Einstein, A. (1954). Ideas and Opinions. Crown. The "combinatory play" line, from his correspondence with Jacques Hadamard; testimony, not data.
• Gerwig, A., Miroshnik, K., Forthmann, B., Benedek, M., Karwowski, M., & Holling, H. (2021). "The relationship between intelligence and divergent thinking: A meta-analytic update." Journal of Intelligence, 9(2), 23. https://doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence9020023 (112 studies, N = 34,610; overall r ≈ .25.)
• Glynn, M. A., & Webster, J. (1992). "The Adult Playfulness Scale: An initial assessment." Psychological Reports, 71(1), 83–103. https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.1992.71.1.83 (Scale development; no playfulness–intelligence finding.)
• Glynn, M. A., & Webster, J. (1993). "Refining the nomological net of the Adult Playfulness Scale: Personality, motivational, and attitudinal correlates for highly intelligent adults." Psychological Reports, 72(3), 1023–1026. https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.1993.72.3.1023 (The misread one: "highly intelligent" describes the sample; playfulness was never correlated with IQ.)
• Gopnik, A. (2020). "Childhood as a solution to explore–exploit tensions." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 375(1803), 20190502. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0502
• Kidd, C., & Hayden, B. Y. (2015). "The psychology and neuroscience of curiosity." Neuron, 88(3), 449–460. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.010
• Lillard, A. S., Lerner, M. D., Hopkins, E. J., Dore, R. A., Smith, E. D., & Palmquist, C. M. (2013). "The impact of pretend play on children's development: A review of the evidence." Psychological Bulletin, 139(1), 1–34. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029321 (Found the causal case for pretend play "not convincing"; contested.)
• Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). "Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism." Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398
• Nusbaum, E. C., & Silvia, P. J. (2011). "Are Openness and Intellect distinct aspects of Openness to Experience? A test of the O/I model." Personality and Individual Differences, 51(5), 571–574. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2011.05.013 (The dissociation: Openness→creativity, Intellect→fluid intelligence.)
• Proyer, R. T. (2017). "A new structural model for the study of adult playfulness: Assessment and exploration of an understudied individual differences variable." Personality and Individual Differences, 108, 113–122. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.12.011 (The OLIW model; playfulness–tested-creativity links are modest.)
• Sio, U. N., & Ormerod, T. C. (2009). "Does incubation enhance problem solving? A meta-analytic review." Psychological Bulletin, 135(1), 94–120. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014212 (Incubation effect larger for divergent tasks and undemanding interpolated activity.)
• Tian, F., Hou, Y., Zhu, W., Dietrich, A., Zhang, Q., Yang, W., Chen, Q., Sun, J., Jiang, Q., & Cao, G. (2017). "Getting the joke: Insight during humor comprehension – evidence from an fMRI study." Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 1835. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01835 (About the insight/"aha" moment, N = 24; not about playfulness or IQ.)