Creative minds at rest: Creative individuals are more associative and engaged with their idle thoughts.

Despite an established body of research characterizing how creative individuals explore their world, relatively little is known about how such individuals navigate their , especially in unstructured contexts such as periods of awake rest. Across two studies, the present manuscript tested the hypothesis that creative individuals are more engaged with their idle thoughts and more associative in the dynamic transitions between them. Study 1 captured the real-time conscious experiences of 81 adults as they voiced aloud the content of their mind moment-by-moment across a 10-minute unconstrained baseline period.