The downside of this quality is that it might make creative people more prone to distraction than others. Darya Zabelina found that people with a "leaky" sensory filter--meaning that their brains didn't filter out as much irrelevant information from the environment--tend to be more creative than those with stronger sensory gating. Zabelina observed that highly creative people are more sensitive to noises in their environment--a clock ticking, a conversation in the distance--than less creative people. "Sensory information is leaking in--the brain is processing more information that it is in a typical person."