BY NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY ON MARCH 3, 2015 COGNITION
The literary great Marcel Proust wore ear-stoppers because he was unable to filter out irrelevant noise — and lined his bedroom with cork to attenuate sound.
Now new Northwestern University research suggests why the inability to shut out competing sensory information while focusing on the creative project at hand might have been so acute for geniuses such as Proust, Franz Kafka, Charles Darwin, Anton Chekhov and many others.