Mapping Creativity in the Brain
KYLAH GOODFELLOW KLINGE
MAR 21, 2016
New
research sheds some light on the neuroscience of improvising.
The writer Edith Wharton, a
self-professed “slow worker,” dismissed the idea of easy creative triumph.
“Many people assume that the artist receives, at the outset of his career, the
mysterious sealed orders known as ‘Inspiration,’ and has only to let that sovereign
impulse carry him where it will,” she wrote in her 1925 book The Writing of
Fiction. The artistic impulse, she continued, was instead achieved
through “systematic daily effort.”
But while she championed diligence,
Wharton was also driven by something she found more difficult to describe.
Writing in The
Atlantic in 1933, she sought to explain
that “central mystery” of spontaneous creative expression—the “teeming visions
which, ever since my small childhood, and even at the busiest and most agitated
periods of my outward life, have incessantly peopled my inner world.”
“It is as impossible to fix in words,” she wrote, “as that other mystery
of what happens in the brain at the precise moment when one falls over the edge
of consciousness into sleep.”
There are many types of creativity,
but in recent years, researchers have begun to understand more about the kind
of creative flow Wharton described—the state that today is colloquially
referred to as “being in the zone.”
In a 2008 study published in the journal PLOS, Charles Limb, an
otolaryngologist at the University of California, San Francisco and
accomplished jazz saxophonist, and Allen Braun, a speech researcher at
the National Institutes of Health, designed a clever way to observe creative
expression in the brain: an fMRI machine with a specially made musical
keyboard. The two men recruited six professional jazz musicians for the study;
while in the fMRI, the participants performed musical exercises ranging from a
memorized scale to a fully improvised piece of music.
So what determines what creative
path a person takes at any given moment?
Observing the musicians’ brain
activity as they performed each task, Limb and Braun found that when their
subjects improvised, a region called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC)
became less active. Like a neural mother hen, the DLPFC is connected to
planning, inhibition, and self-censorship; its deactivation has been suggested
to play a role in altered states of consciousness such as daydreaming,
meditation, and REM sleep. (A separate imaging study published in the journal Nature in 2012 found a similar
lulling of the DLPFC during freestyle rap.) This pattern of brain activity, Limb
and Braun wrote, may be “intrinsic to the creative process,” which “can
apparently occur outside of conscious awareness and beyond volitional control.”
Their findings support a
fundamental model of creativity developed by Arne Dietrich, the author of How
Creativity Happens in The Brain and a professor of psychology at the
American University of Beirut. Dietrich argues that the brain’s prefrontal
cortex is central to creativity, and depending on the particular creative
activity, the region will either significantly slow—as it did in the jazz
study—or ramp up.
In other words, creativity is
necessarily a variable phenomenon. At times, it’s the composer’s strict pen:
intentional, revisionary, critical. And at times, it’s the spontaneous new
melody: unconscious, experiential, flexible. So what determines which creative
path a person takes in a given moment?
Earlier this year, Limb co-authored
a new study led by Malinda McPherson, a doctoral candidate at the Harvard-MIT
Program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology, to address that
missing element. The study also asked jazz pianists to improvise in an fMRI
scanner; this time, though, the musicians were instructed to first review
photographs of a woman wearing a positive, negative, or neutral expression, and
then to try to match the photo’s mood with their improvised melodies.
The results were somewhat
surprising. McPherson’s team predicted the creativity-related DLPFC
deactivation from the previous study would be found equally in the negative and
positive improvisations, but it was much more pronounced during the happy
trial. The researchers also found that the negative-photo improvisations showed
greater activity in certain brain regions connected to cognitive control and
reward; specifically, there was increased connectivity between the insula, an
area that controls visceral awareness, and the substantia nigra, an area
responsible for reward and pleasure.
Positive emotion seems to be
related to a deeper state of creative flow.
Broadly, McPherson’s findings
support Dietrich’s argument that creativity doesn’t stem from one easily
definable process or brain pattern. The results also indicate that “emotion has
a huge effect on the way our brains can be creative,” McPherson says. Positive
emotion, for instance, seems to be related to a deeper state of creative flow.
Her findings also seem to indicate that unhappy artistic expression requires
more conscious restraint than happy music—but may also be, on some level, more
rewarding.
“Sadness in art is perplexing,” McPherson says. “People love performing
and listening to sad music, but generally try to avoid sadness in other areas
of their lives.” It may be that the arts give us the chance to safely practice
and experience a range of emotions, she says—or, as Wharton writes, to
experience feelings “quite unrelated to the joy or sorrow caused by real happenings,
but as intense.” Sad music, then, could be especially pleasurable because the
musician “knows that the sadness is coming from the art, and not from any other
loss,” McPherson speculates. Happy art, on the other hand, may allow a deeper
creative flow because it carries less emotional risk, even if it also means
less of a reward or release.
But Dietrich advises caution in
extrapolating too much from McPherson's study or any neuroimaging research on
creativity. “Even for the wilderness of human thinking, creative ideas seem to
be deliberately designed to defy empirical enquiry,” he says, adding that some
ideas pitched as neural explanations for creativity have “completely failed” to
produce coherent results. Dietrich remains skeptical that fMRI-bound
improvisations are an accurate representation of truly freewheeling creative
flow. Even so, he says, the McPherson study is a “genuine addition to the
literature.”
Of course, the more questions that
are answered, the more questions arise: Do the findings about jazz
improvisation apply equally to other forms of art and music? If there are
distinct paths to creativity, how can we steer our brains to enter a state of
creative flow? What happens to the brain during those more deliberate creative
efforts, such as revising an artistic work?
As they move forward, Limb and his colleagues are working to both deepen
their understanding of musical improvisation and extend the research to other
areas of creativity. “There are so many deep and critical questions when it
comes to the neuroscience of art,” he says. “It may take a while before we are
able to unify the knowledge across disciplines.”
Stanford
Study Reveals This Brain Booster Increases Creativity by 60 Percent By Logan
Chierotti
PUBLISHED ON: APR
20, 2017
Many business people
are now looking for brain-enhancing substances and techniques that increase
creativity and focus.
A new form of
"cognitive enhancing" drugs called nootropics are sweeping through the business world. Said to
increase productivity, creativity, and focus, these legal drug compounds are beginning
to find a following across a variety of industries. Part of the larger biohacking
movement, nootropics come in
many forms, from prescription drugs like Adderall and Modafinil to over the counter brands such as
Nootrobrain, TruBrain, and Nootroo.
These cognitive
enhancers are all the rage, with programmers, salespeople, and even executives
testing out drugs that claim to offer a mental edge.
But, when it comes to
stimulating creativity, as opposed to increased mental focus proposed by
proponents of nootropics, a Stanford
University study offers a basic,
alternate prescription - walking.
Yes, you read that
right. The most basic form of movement, walking, is one of the most beneficial
activities to stimulate creativity.
So, if you're looking
for increased mental focus, you can purchase a variety of these so-called smart
drugs, most of which contain some combination of caffeine, B vitamins, CDP
Choline and L-Theanine. However, none of the nootropics brands are FDA
approved, and thus far, reviews are mixed.
I've experimented
with many of these "smart drugs" and from my experience, the negative
side effects outweigh the short term benefits.
However, if
creativity is what you're looking for, there seems to be a simpler medication.
Stop staring at your computer screen, stand up from your desk, and walk
outside.
In the long run, the
latter option is cheaper, healthier and more impactful. Yes, outworking the
competition is one route to success. But wouldn't you rather disrupt a market,
or create an entirely new one, through a burst of creative genius.
And if you're someone
that makes decisions based on results, the creative benefits of walking found
in the Stanford University study should not be ignored.
Here's are the
findings between creativity and walking:
• Divergent thinking, one's ability to generate
creative ideas through many possible solutions, significantly accelerates while
walking.
• 100% of participants completed complex analogies
while walking outdoors, compared to 50% of those seated inside.
• Overall, creative output increased by an average of
60% when walking.
Apparently, you don't
even have to be walking outdoors to receive the metal benefits of movement. The
study found that even walking indoors on a treadmill led to creative jumps.
So next time you see
that strange guy walking on a treadmill in the
office space next to
yours, don't hate. Sure, he might be sweating through his dress shirt at 10:30
AM, but he could be on the verge of a creative outpouring the likes of which
the world has never seen.
