Healthy Brain, Happy Life (33 page)

THE CREATIVE BRAIN:
Sparking Insight and Divergent Thinking

T
wenty years ago—even ten years ago—I would never have thought of myself as a creative person. I was a science geek who acquired knowledge, trained my attention, built up my memory for facts and ideas, and deliberately and consciously analyzed information. None of these skills seemed remotely creative. Indeed, like most people, I thought that creativity was the exclusive realm of artists, musicians, dancers, actors, and other people who seemed to express themselves in recognizably artistic or creative ways. Sure, there were innovators and scientists from Albert Einstein to Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg, who are deemed creative because of the sheer brilliance of their work. But in a general way, creative thinkers seemed to have some unaccountable, mysterious quality that most of us do not possess.

Over the past few years, that has all changed for me. Not only do I now think of myself as creative but I believe we all have the potential to be creative. In many ways, this entire book is a narrative about my journey to find my own personal creative process—beginning with the connection I first made between exercise and my own brain and continuing up to this moment. For the past few years, I have been diving into all sorts of foreign territory for me, breaking down the barriers that have constrained the very way I think to uncover and understand just what creative thinking is all about. Creativity and science now go hand in hand for me.

And being creative feels different now too. I know that I am at my creative best when I feel open to life and its possibilities, I make connections between ideas easily, and I feel more spontaneous in my thinking and uninhibited by what others think of my ideas. And this perspective has carried over into my work: My research over the past few years has been much more varied, original, and spontaneous. Ten years ago, if someone had told me that I would be a certified exercise instructor studying the effects of exercise in people, I would have laughed at them! Today I bring African-style drummers to my talks to help demonstrate intentional exercise to big crowds made up of hundreds of people. I’ve come a long way, baby!

So if I now see myself as creative, what has changed? Am I now thinking in a different way from the way I had for the first twenty years of my career as a scientist? The answer to these questions is twofold: In some ways, I have always been a creative thinker, even if I didn’t look at myself that way. As a scientist, I ask questions and constantly strive to look at problems in new ways. Yet, in another way, I also believe that I have become more creative.

So what do we mean when someone is creative?

In this chapter, I share with you not only how I discovered and embraced my own creativity but how you might be able to discover and embrace yours as well.

THREE MYTHS OF CREATIVITY DEBUNKED

Before we get into the discussion of the neuroscience of creativity, I want to address three long-standing myths about creativity.

Myth 1: Creativity = Right Side of the Brain

This idea is all over the Internet and is often proclaimed by the media. People are classified as either a highly creative and intuitive right brain type or a cool, collected, and highly analytical left brain type. Well, I’m here to tell you that there is no truth to the idea that only one side of the brain participates in or is responsible for creativity. While it is clear that language is housed (in most people) on the left side of the brain, the most recent studies suggest people who use both sides of their brain more are the most creative. Next time someone says he is a right brain creative type, you can simply tell him that the newest neuroscience research suggests that widespread brain areas focused in the prefrontal cortex are involved in creativity, and both sides of the brain are actually used for creative pursuits.

Myth 2: Only Certain People Are Creative

You can strike the myth that only some people are creative off your list of excuses for why you have not come up with the perfect solution for your home storage crisis. Creativity is not a mysterious process available only to geniuses like Matisse or Marie Curie. Recent evidence suggests that creative thinking is just a variant of regular everyday thinking and therefore can be studied like any other cognitive function. The difficulty becomes defining the best task or tasks to use when trying to study the brain basis of creativity.

Myth 3: All Creative Ideas Are Original

Despite my early dreams of being a neuroscience pioneer and discovering something that nobody else had ever even thought to look for, the truth is that the vast majority of creative ideas are based on preexisting notions. These new ideas are different, but are often built on the shoulders of previous work. This is especially true in science, where detailed and deep knowledge of all current research is the basis on which new experiments and new research are done. But this doesn’t make new ideas any less creative. Remember that saying, There is nothing new under the sun? True words and valuable to remember. Many of the most “creative” breakthroughs are better understood as creative remixes. One of the most famous examples is Steve Jobs and the personal computer. Technically, Jobs didn’t invent any of the elements of the personal computer, Xerox did that. What Jobs did was perfect the technological tools and package them for the home market, which ended up starting an empire. Another famous example is Thomas Edison. He didn’t invent the light bulb, but he sure did construct six thousand trials of materials for the filament and perfected it so it could be used commercially.

The truth behind these myths should serve to make us all a little bit more optimistic, and excited to be creative. I for one feel better knowing that my whole brain, and not just the right side, has the capacity to contribute to my creative thinking. I also take comfort in the thought that creativity is not some mythic ability that comes out of thin air but is grounded in normal cognitive processes and inspired by current bodies of knowledge. In other words, everyone is capable of creativity, and moreover, like any other cognitive skill—math, speaking French, working crossword puzzles, or playing Candy Crush—the more you practice creativity, the better you become at being creative.

THE ULTIMATE BRAIN MYTH: YOU ONLY USE 10 PERCENT OF YOUR BRAIN

If there is only one new fact you take away from this book, let it be this. The idea that we use only 10 percent of our brain is 100 percent false. We know from functional imaging and other studies that we use all of the brain, maybe not all the time, but with all of the cognitive, brain-based tasks we do all day and every day, our entire brain is getting a workout. So why has this myth persisted for so long? The answer to that question can be described as a combination of plausibility and hope. If it were reality, it would mean that each of us would be in possession of an amazing well of potential in our brain, if only we tapped into it. It’s a myth tailor-made for the self-help industry too. Luckily, we do have the potential to build, stretch, and enhance the 100 percent of our brain that we are using every day because of neuroplasticity.

THE MEANING OF CREATIVITY AND ITS DIFFERENT FLAVORS

Over the past ten years, progress has been made in the field of the study of human creativity, and there is a growing but by no means unanimous consensus about the precise definition of the term. One definition of
creativity
is “the ability to produce work that is both novel (i.e., original, unexpected) and appropriate (i.e., useful, adaptive concerning task constraints).” The definition used by most scientists is “the production of something both novel and useful.” In other words, creativity is about developing new ideas to solve old problems. Some examples are Uber, Airbnb, and Spotify. Despite this simple definition, the expression of creativity is essentially as wide as our collective imagination and can be achieved in a vast number of ways.

Generally, creativity can be deliberate or spontaneous (the Aha! moment). Each one of these two major categories of creativity can be further characterized as coming from a cognitive point of view or an emotional one. Many science experiments are characterized as deliberate cognitive kinds of creativity. These are typically experiments that discover something important and new but are informed by a whole slew of previous related findings. For example, my own discoveries of the importance of the cortical areas surrounding the hippocampus; discovering the role of the perirhinal and parahippocampal cortices (see Chapter 2) for memory is a classic example of a deliberate cognitive form of creativity. These areas had simply been ignored, and it just took someone to apply some powerful experimental approaches to identify their critical role in memory. But not all science experiments are deliberate. Other scientific discoveries have been inspired by more spontaneous Aha! moments. One classic example comes from Otto Loewi, a Nobel Prize–winning physiologist who studied heart functions in frogs. The story goes that he had a dream one night in 1921 during which he visualized a simple yet elegant experiment that would definitively show whether communication between different brain cells occurred through electric or chemical signals. He sat up in bed and scribbled some notes, but to his dismay, when he arrived in the lab the next day, he found he could not read his notes or remember the dream. Luckily for the field of neuroscience, the dream came to him again the next night and instead of waiting until the morning he immediately went to the lab and did the experiment that night. And so he showed definitively that in addition to electrical signals the nervous system uses chemical signals to communicate. Why was this experiment so important? We call these chemical signals neurotransmitters, and once identified, our understanding—both medically and scientifically—of how the brain works became much clearer. Loewi’s discovery was an example of a spontaneous cognitive form of creativity. Isaac Newton and his understanding of gravity by watching an apple fall from a tree is another example of a spontaneous cognitive form of creativity.

What about the emotional side of creativity? This typically does not come out as often in the realm of science, but examples of emotional forms of creativity (deliberate emotional or spontaneous emotional) abound in the arts. For example, an example of deliberate emotional creativity are the cutout forms Matisse created, deliberately experimenting with different shapes and sizes and colors inspired by the emotional response he had to the resulting striking visual images. An example of a spontaneous emotional form of creativity is Picasso’s famous painting
Guernica,
which was said to be inspired by learning of the tragic bombing of the city of Guernica in the Basque country of Spain during the Spanish Civil War. While these categories of creativity can be useful, creativity can also mean conceptualizing a whole new way to paint or sing or perform and then having the raw talent to execute that new conceptualization. Think of Frida Kahlo, Billie Holiday, and Lady Gaga—all of these artists reinvented their specific art form so that we experience a completely unique vision of the world through their painting, voice, and performance.

THE NEUROANATOMY OF CREATIVITY

Given the complexity of creativity and the wide range of different kinds of creativity currently recognized (deliberate, spontaneous, cognitive, and emotional), it makes sense that multiple areas of the brain are involved in these processes. One of the major brain areas involved in creative pursuit is the prefrontal cortex, a region that we’ve discussed throughout this book. Specifically, researchers have discovered that one particular subdivision of the prefrontal cortex, called the dorsolateral portion (DLPFC), is involved in three key functions critical for creativity. The first is working memory, which is the ability to process information online or, in other words, to keep information in mind as you are trying to solve a problem. Working memory is what allows us to monitor ongoing events and keep relevant information in mind so we can consider, evaluate, and mentally manipulate it to solve a problem.