According to researchers only 17 percent of children create their own imaginary worlds - paracosmos, as scientists call them.

A new study into the childhood behaviour of creating imaginary parallel worlds found that children who experience paracosmos exhibit higher levels of creativity. More specifically, these children seem to be more apt at open-ended thinking. But this apparently also came at a cost. The most creative kids also struggled with inhibitory control tasks, which is another way of saying that they had trouble focusing their attention.

But that's not necessarily a bad thing; it's just that inhibition and creative thinking appear to be at different ends of a spectrum. Excelling at one requires a cost with the other, is what this study seems to suggest.

One of the surprises of the study was that it also found that many of these creative children do not develop their imaginary worlds alone. Several of them shared and even developed their worlds together.