How Creativity Happens in the Brain

Arne Dietrich

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137501806
• Categoría: Psychology
• Categoría: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition

How Creativity Happens In The Brain is about the brain mechanisms of creativity, how a grapefruit-sized heap of meat crackling with electricity manages to be so outrageously creative. It has a sharp focus: to stick exclusively to sound, mechanistic explanations and convey what we can, and cannot, say about how brains give rise to creative ideas.

1

A Sneak Preview of the Journey Ahead

This is a book about creativity. Specifically, it’s about the brain mechanisms of creativity, how a grapefruit-sized heap of meat crackling with electricity conceives of mathematical theorems, creates beautiful art, discovers the laws of nature, thinks of space rockets, invents kitesurfing, and designs buildings that look like sea shells. To get a grip on this thorny issue, I will take you on a little trip into the hinterland of the mind to see how, exactly, it manages to be so outrageously creative.

Creativity is a topic where respectable people, even those of the highest scholarly standing, regularly rise to levels of speculation that can safely be called imprudent. Everyone, it seems, is an expert on creativity, what counts as creative (and what doesn’t), what makes a person creative, and how best to bring it out. Whole shelves of books exist that venerate the creative genius, tell you the seven traits of highly creative people, or list ten easy steps to tap into your unused creative potential. If you are looking for such a read, this isn’t it. I will neither attempt an exercise in advanced hindsight nor go for a proof by verbosity. The book you have started to read is a concise affair with a sharp focus: to convey what we can, and cannot, say about how brains give rise to creative ideas. The plan is to stick exclusively to sound, mechanistic explanations of how ideational combinations of information happen in the mind.

In the general spirit of truth in advertising, allow me to follow this up with one caveat and one reassurance. What you are about to read will almost certainly challenge some of your deepest intuitions about how the mind works. But the reward will be a better understanding of creativity, grounded in solid neuroscience thinking. One thing you shouldn’t fret over, though, is the neurolingo. I will make a concerted effort to decrypt the often impenetrable thickness of brainspeak that makes modern neuroscience seem so inaccessible to people.

The fountainhead of civilization

Suppose an advanced alien lifeform visits Earth to investigate if Homo sapiens is worth saving. Suppose further that they don’t have a portable consciousness-detector, a small antenna-held gizmo they can conveniently hold to our heads to check for signs of inner musings. What would they identify as the defining characteristic of being human? Taking a quick look around and seeing what we have done with the place, they’d be hard-pressed to put any other item on top of their list than our creativity and inventiveness. We are an intensely creative species and there isn’t an element of the periodic table we haven’t tinkered with to utterly transform the world we live in, modifying our own minds and bodies, too. Human culture, indeed all progress in the arts, sciences, and engineering, originates from the capacity to change existing thinking patterns, break with the present, and create something new. Creative thinking and its derivative products – the knowledge and artifacts that make up human culture – are the quintessence of our humanity.

At an ever-accelerating pace, new empirical evidence on the neural basis of the mind pours out of neurolabs at a dizzying pace. Trying to take in the contemporary writing on the topic, professional or popular, is a bit like drinking from a fire hose. No wonder many people feel that the meteoric rise of the intersection between neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science is nothing short of a revolution. Clearly, the brain no longer is the inscrutable clump of goo it once was. Arguably the single most notable gap in this triumphant parade is creative thinking. For all its prominence at the apex of human mental faculties, we know next to nothing about how brains generate creative ideas, let alone facilitate their occurrence. From a perspective of a few steps back, this is stunning. Given that creative achievements represent, perhaps, the clearest expression of our humanity, one would have thought that psychologists and neuroscientists would attack this problem with much greater resolve.

But the bare fact is that creativity has a dubious distinction in the behavioral and brain sciences. I cannot think of a mental faculty so central to the human condition for which we have so little understanding as to how brains do it. One might be tempted to argue that this lamentable position is held by the problem of consciousness, but at least there we have some load-bearing proposals – global working space, social brain hypothesis, competing neuronal coalitions, higher-order thought, among rather many else – that have so far escaped the dustbin of wishful thinking. Not so for the underlying neural mechanisms of creativity, as we will see in Chapter 2. We may find, in due course, that this is an even harder problem.

The central, motivating intent of this book is to show that there is a way out of the disciplinary insolvency where the neuroscience of creativity finds itself. We know less about creativity than the gurus of the innovation industry and some of my phrenology-tinged neuroscientist colleagues pretend, but more than you might think. And a genuine neuroscience of creativity is stranger and more fascinating than the recycled clichés about right brains, divergent thinking, autistic savants, bipolar disorder, the mad genius, or grand proclamations that original thinking is located in some unpronounceable part of the neocortex. To pursue in earnest the question of how brains compute creative insights, I will bring to the fore, and then interconnect, a number of concepts that, despite being securely anchored in the bedrock of mainstream cognitive neuroscience, have so far been ignored in the quest to find the how and where of creativity in the brain and, by extension, the wellspring of human culture.

Separating the Schaden from the Freude

Given the time-tested ability of pop-psychologists and self-help gurus to expand in a vacuum, creativity has become a hotbed for useless piffle, nebulous fluff, and – to adopt an expression of art from the philosopher Harry Frankfurt – bullshit. A battle-hardened legion of creativity couches and leadership consultants circle the globe in a tireless effort to emit such vacuous banalities about the creative process as this: “Don’t be afraid to fail; your ego is the biggest obstacle to creativity.” Or consider this hidden gem: “Always look at things from a new perspective; if you are passionate about what you do, your true creativity, your true self comes out.” And, don’t forget: “Always think positive; the worst enemy of creativity is self-doubt!” This is probing stuff.

To forestall the risk that the content of this book ends up as fodder for a Gabfest where meme-laundering motivational speakers go to seek audiences suffering from uncritical idolatry, I’d like to make an opening announcement: Here are the ideas you will not find in this book:

You will not read anything about lateral thinking, collective creativity, out-of-the-box thinking, or brainstorming. I will not give you neuroscience-informed tips on how to break the ice, rediscover your inner child, or go with the flow. I will also not tell you to listen to your intuition, wait until it comes to you, or go for a run. And I definitely will not analyze the creativity crisis in America. I promise not to refer to anyone’s creative juices, creative personality, or creative state of mind. And we will not unleash our creativity by sitting in a circle, throwing a bean bag around, and reporting the first thing that comes to mind. If you want to know what a stunted idea that is, all you have to do is realize that this is all what cavemen did after sundown 30,000 years ago. I will also not be claiming that education kills creativity, that kids need to reach beyond the traditional four-wall classroom environment, and that we all need to keep an open mind. Open minds are good, but you should never open your mind so far that your brain falls out.

There will also be no social media jargon on offer in this book. No re-tweet to announce a #hashtagcreativity podcast. There will be no hands-on state-of-the-art networking, no problem solving using big data, no crowdsourcing for innovative partnerships, and no user-generated content. This book will not go viral in the blogosphere and you will not like it on Facebook. We will not push past creative barriers, interface in the cloud, or rewire our brains for the digital age. And we will definitely not let the unconscious mind take over.

There will also be no academese used here. No long passages in the passive voice that seemingly emanate from no-person or a series of lifeless paragraphs that have the appearance of being committee-written. For instance, I will not argue for or against some obscure position only to conclude with the need for more research. You will not find a long-winded analysis of the pros and cons of creativity-with-a-big-C, get treated to the nuances of various definitions of creativity, or see footnotes that provide a painstaking elaboration of the references cited in the text. And you will not be asked to ponder the psychological consequences of Andy Warhol’s childhood experiences or digest the deeper meaning of cute creativity quotes like “imagination is more important than knowledge” or “creativity is 98 percent perspiration.” If that is what you are after, you certainly grabbed the wrong book off the shelf.

You will also search in vain for an in-depth discussion on the thin line between genius and madness. Take, for instance, troubled Vincent van Gogh, famed nineteenth-century painter who suffered from bipolar disorder, cut off part of his left ear, and eventually committed suicide. Or Isaac Newton, eccentric seventeenth-century physicist, general headcase and, judging from his leviathan superego, a candidate for making the diagnostic criteria of at least half a dozen psychological disorders. No sooner do we contemplate this aberrant pair, a whole army of mad geniuses springs to mind led by such illustrious figures as autistic Wolfgang Amadeus, depressed Ludwig van, or tortured Edgar Allan. Like Franz Kafka, Robert Schumann, Michelangelo, Virginia Wolf, Richard Strauss, John Nash, or Ernest Hemingway, they were all, at some point in their lives, anguished, tormented, alcoholic, angst-ridden, manic, outright psychotic, or just plain weird. Add the mind-boggling savant syndrome, throw in a quote from a venerable ancient Greek for good measure – say, Aristotle: “No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness” – and we have the making of mythconception.

Tales from the insanity zone are nuggets of pure gold for the true believer. What if we could just open “the doors of perception”? What would we have lost had Prozac turned Nietzsche into a regular bloke? It isn’t uncommon, even in the rarefied air of peer-reviewed psychology journals, to read articles galloping through so many esoteric life episodes, irrelevant factoids, and delicious gossip (did you know that the reclusive William Cavendish insisted on having a chicken roasting at all hours of the day?), that the veracity of the mad genius link is all but a foregone conclusion. But it is one thing to be enchanted by folklore, it is quite another to forego the purifying powers of statistical reasoning for anecdotal storytelling. For the entire thesis of the highly gifted mentally ill is simply the result of a lethal dose of selective data reporting.

Finally, I promise that this book is guaranteed, 100 percent phrenology free. Unlike physics, neuroscience is data rich and theory poor. But this is no reason to pull conceptual rabbits out of metaphysical thin air. One would think that serious researchers need not set foot in pop-neuroscience land, but, alas, some of my colleagues’ writings brim with just as many thoughts that are either so simplistic that nothing good can possibly come out of them or, given what we know about the brain, factually mistaken. I pledge, for instance, not to sell you a colorful brain image from a neuroscanner as a substitute for an explanation. And I will not present you with a location in the brain when I mean to provide you with a neural mechanism. You will not read here that creativity is in the superior temporal gyrus, associated with white matter density, dependent on alpha enhancement, or boosted by neurogenesis in the hippocampus. To not put too fine a point on it, this is neurobunk, fragments from an imaginary science.

I could go on and on. In fact, I think I will. Creative people are said to use more of their brain – somehow, for no one can tell you exactly how, let alone link this to creativity – use less brain more efficiently (which is, come to think of it, the opposite claim), have more dopamine receptors (or was it serotonin?), have more densely packed neurons, or more synaptic connections, or a thicker corpus callosum. Einstein’s brain, for instance, was unremarkable in all these aspects. And what would we do if we find out that Stephen Hawkins or Quentin Tarantino had a bigger visual cortex or more acetylcholine synapses in the basal forebrain, eh? Surely, they must have, like all of us, some quirk upstairs.

What we should expect to see, based on what we know

For the challenging task that lies ahead it is a good idea to get a brief overview of the book. The upcoming attractions are organized into eight chapters, each designed to take a small step toward the goal of understanding how creative ideas might come into existence in the vast inner space of the human brain. Paradoxically, we are forced to begin the project by first getting back to square one. This is because the neuroscientific study of creativity has been moving in the wrong direction for some time and gotten itself thoroughly stuck in a rut. But as Artemus Ward put it: “It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us in trouble. It’s the things we know that just ain’t so.” So, before we can pursue our quest, and prevent it from derailing prematurely – or anywhere along the way, really – it is necessary to give the myopic theorizing causing all the trouble its proper neuroscientific funeral.

As a consequence, Chapter 2 should be understood as a sustained and disciplined demolition project aimed at sanitizing our bad habits of thinking about creativity. It first logically, and then empirically, demonstrates that the ideas currently floating about – right brains, divergent thinking, defocused attention, low arousal, alpha enhancement, dreams states, or unconscious processes, to name a few popular ones – are irreparably incoherent and cannot do the explanatory work we need. Being false category formations (with their opposites also leading to creativity) as well as compound constructs involving many different cognitive processes (with no one knowing what, exactly, is creative about them), they beg the question. And if you fail to isolate the subject matter under study in your experimental paradigm, you cannot use neuroimaging tools to hunt for brain mechanisms. You just don’t know what the brain image shows! It shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn, therefore, that review studies have exposed the data set of the field to be a total mess. To be clear, the primary target for demolition here are not the ideas themselves but the basic error in thinking that underlies them. They all emanate from the monolithic entity fallacy, the failure to understand how thoroughly distributed in the brain and multifaceted in its processes creativity must be, given all the diverse forms it manifests itself in the human population. The chapter concludes by arguing that the current experimental work on the neural basis of creativity satisfies the criteria for phrenology. Ouch.

So where do we go from here? Once we are clear that the conceptual foundation of the current paradigm is leading us nowhere good, we can leave it behind and consider more capable candidates. If Chapter 2 is the reset button, Chapter 3 is the starter pistol for a fresh attack. From here on, we marinate our minds in the latest the brain sciences and related disciplines have to offer. Most of the ideas I bring to the fore are part and parcel of the standard conceptual toolbox of cognitive neuroscience, only their combination and application to creative thinking are original.

Without getting too technical about it, Chapter 3 lays down some groundwork by highlighting how the brain, in general, operates. It describes the brain’s connectionist or network architecture and its dual information-processing system (explicit vs. implicit) as well as basic concepts from cognitive psychology, such as task set, task-set inertia, and speed of processing that will become important later on. By definition, creative insights occur in consciousness, so a big part of the chapter tackles the intriguing topic of how information in the brain goes from unconscious to conscious, or at least what we know about these far reaches of conscious awareness. This, in turn, raises the specter of the Cartesian theater, perhaps the most powerful cognitive illusion we have about how the mind works. In fact, it is so intuitive, and so misleading, that breaking its back is a recurrent theme of the book and goes by the mantra of taking the Designer out of the design process.

With the ground cleared, and a few corrective thinking devices in hand, we are now in a better position to take the next step. Chapters 4 and 5 form a unit that rests squarely on Darwinian, not Aristotelian logic. The curious fact is that we already know of a functioning mechanism for creativity, namely the variation-selection process that does all the creating and designing in the biosphere. Extending Darwinian thinking upwards into culture remains ideologically controversial because of its implications, but all sides in the debate on cultural evolution concur that the basic generate-and-test algorithm holds for culture. What’s more, all parties also agree that in contrast to the algorithm driving Mother Nature, the cultural evolutionary algorithm is partially sighted, not blind. In other words, a common denominator exists that is, on the whole, unobjectionable. Culture is a variational evolutionary system involving some degree of coupling between variation and selection and the copying and transmitting of cultural information happens in brains! Despite this universal consensus, almost no neuroscience study has used the rationale of the evolutionary two-step to set up empirical protocols. A remarkable case of interdisciplinary disconnect.

Since this common denominator isn’t exactly news to those working on cultural evolution, the questions arise: Why hasn’t it percolated through to those working on the neural mechanisms of creativity? Why hasn’t it already trumped the current neuroimaging phrenology it must replace? The search for the brain mechanism of creative thinking is at the heart of anxiety about our creative agency and often gets distorted by a biophobia that is quite distinct from thoughtful skepticism. Some who have sensed the threat posed by taking the Designer out of the design process have seriously misrepresented the generative mechanisms of how brains compute new ideas. To close all the exits on this part of the journey, Chapter 4 x-rays the core issues of the cultural evolution debate for the sole purpose of securing this common ground. There is much to enjoy in this book but there are also no free passes here. A mechanistic explanation of creativity comes with hardcore materialism, a position that tends to give people existential vertigo in short order.

The fact that neuroscience has failed to ground its empirical studies in the most obvious of paradigms, the variation-selection algorithm of evolution, is surely the main reason for the lack of progress in the field, for variation and selection processes are likely to be very different beasts in the brain. As will be argued on several occasions in the book, both are distributed, occur at conscious and unconscious levels, and engage, at each of these levels, different cognitive processes and different brain regions. It is hard to imagine useful neuroimaging data from studies on creativity that blend them!

But once we have accepted the evolutionary paradigm, we have a clear way forward. So long as it is agreed that the common denominator of cultural evolution – a variati...