Imagine: How Creativity Works (3 page)

Dylan wasn’t bluffing. As promised, he returned from his British tour and rode his Triumph motorcycle straight out of New York City. He was leaving the folk scene of the Village behind, heading upstate to an empty house. He was done writing songs — he had nothing else to say. Dylan didn’t even bring his guitar.

Every creative journey begins with a problem. It starts with a feeling of frustration, the dull ache of not being able to find the answer. We have worked hard, but we’ve hit the wall. We have no idea what to do next.

When we tell one another stories about creativity, we tend to leave out this phase of the creative process. We neglect to mention those days when we wanted to quit, when we believed that our problems were impossible to solve. Because such failures contradict the romantic version of events — there is nothing triumphant about a false start — we forget all about them. (The failures also remind us how close we came to having no stories to tell.) Instead, we skip straight to the breakthroughs. We tell the happy endings first.

The danger of telling this narrative is that the feeling of frustration — the act of being stumped — is an essential part of the creative process. Before we can find the answer — before we probably even know the question — we must be immersed in disappointment, convinced that a solution is beyond our reach. We need to have wrestled with the problem and lost. And so we give up and move to Woodstock because we will never create what we want to create.

It’s often only at this point, after we’ve stopped searching for the answer, that the answer often arrives. (The imagination has a wicked sense of irony.) And when a solution does appear, it doesn’t come in dribs and drabs; the puzzle isn’t solved one piece at a time. Rather, the solution is shocking in its completeness. All of a sudden, the answer to the problem that seemed so daunting becomes incredibly obvious. We curse ourselves for not seeing it sooner.

This is the clichéd moment of insight that people know so well from stories of Archimedes in the bathtub, and Isaac Newton under the apple tree. It’s the kind of mental process described by Coleridge and Einstein, Picasso and Mozart. When people think about creative breakthroughs, they tend to imagine them as incandescent flashes, like a light bulb going on inside the brain.

These tales of insight all share a few essential features that scientists use to define the “insight experience.” The first stage is the impasse: Before there can be a breakthrough, there has to be a block. Before Bob Dylan could reinvent himself, writing the best music of his career, he needed to believe that he had nothing left to say.

If we’re lucky, however, that hopelessness eventually gives way to a revelation. This is another essential feature of moments of insight: the feeling of certainty that accompanies the new idea. After Archimedes had his eureka moment — he realized that the displacement of water could be used to measure the volume of objects — he immediately leaped out of the bath and ran to tell the king about his solution. He arrived at the palace stark-naked and dripping wet.

At first glance, the moment of insight can seem like an impenetrable enigma. We are stuck and then we’re not, and we have no idea what happened in between. It’s as if the cortex is sharing one of its secrets.

The question, of course, is how these insights happen. What allows someone to transform a mental block into a breakthrough? And why does the answer appear when it’s least expected? This is the mystery of Bob Dylan, and the only way to understand the mystery is to venture inside the brain, to break open the black box of the imagination.

1.

Mark Beeman was stumped. It was the early 1990s and Beeman, a young scientist at the National Institutes of Health, was studying patients who had suffered damage to the right hemisphere of the brain. “The doctors would always tell these people, ‘Wow, you’re so lucky,’ ” Beeman remembers. “They’d go on about how the right hemisphere was the minor hemisphere — it doesn’t do much, and it doesn’t do anything with language.” Those consoling words re-flected the scientific consensus that the right half of the brain was mostly unnecessary. In his 1981 Nobel lecture, the neuroscientist Roger Sperry summarized the prevailing view of the right hemisphere at the time he began studying it: The right hemisphere was “not only mute and agraphic but also dyslexic, word-deaf and apraxic, and lacking generally in higher cognitive function.” In other words, it was thought to be a useless chunk of tissue.

But Beeman noticed that many patients with right hemisphere damage nonetheless had serious cognitive problems even though the left hemisphere had been spared. He started making a list of their deficits. The list was long. “Some of these patients couldn’t understand jokes or sarcasm or metaphors,” Beeman says. “Others had a tough time using a map or making sense of paintings. These might not seem like debilitating problems, but they were still very unsettling for these people, especially because they weren’t supposed to exist. Their doctors had told them not to worry because the right hemisphere wasn’t supposed to be important.” The struggles of these patients led Beeman to reconsider the function of the right side of the brain. At first, he couldn’t figure out what all these deficits had in common. What did humor have to do with navigation? What possible link existed between sarcasm and visual art? The mental problems triggered by right hemisphere damage just seemed so incomprehensibly varied. “I couldn’t come up with a decent explanation,” Beeman remembers. “I couldn’t connect the dots.”

And then, just when Beeman was about to give up, he had an idea. Perhaps the purpose of the right hemisphere was doing the very thing he was trying to do: find the subtle connections between seemingly unrelated things.
 (This notion of the right hemisphere as a connection machine originated in the 1870s with the English neurologist John Hughlings Jackson. After studying numerous patients with injuries to the right side of the brain, Jackson concluded that, while the left hemisphere was suited for logical analysis and “willfull speech,” the right hemisphere was focused on finding “associative laws.”)
 Beeman realized that all of the problems experienced by his patients involved making sense of the whole, seeing not just the parts but how they hang together.

“The world is so complex that the brain has to process it in two different ways at the same time,” Beeman says. “It needs to see the forest and the trees. The right hemisphere is what helps you see the forest.”

Take the language deficits caused by right hemisphere damage. Beeman speculated that, while the left hemisphere handles denotation — it stores the literal meanings of words — the right hemisphere deals with connotation, or all the meanings that can’t be looked up in the dictionary. When you read a poem or laugh at the punch line of a joke, you are relying in large part on the right hemisphere and its ability to uncover linguistic associations. Metaphors are a perfect example of this. From the perspective of the brain, a metaphor is a bridge between two ideas that, at least on the surface, are not equivalent or related. When Romeo declares that “Juliet is the sun,” we know that he isn’t saying his beloved is a massive, flaming ball of hydrogen. We understand that Romeo is trafficking in metaphor, calling attention to aspects of Juliet that might also apply to that bright orb in the sky. She might not be a star, but perhaps she lights up his world in the same way the sun illuminates the earth.

How does the brain understand the line “Juliet is the sun”?

The left hemisphere focuses on the literal definition of the words, but that isn’t particularly helpful. A metaphor, after all, can’t be grasped by making a list of the adjectives that describe both entities. (In the case of sun and Juliet, that would be a very short list.) We can grasp the connection between the two nouns only by relying on their overlapping associations, by detecting the nu-anced qualities they might have in common. This understanding is most likely to occur in the right hemisphere, since it’s uniquely able to zoom out and parse the sentence from a more distant point of view.

This hemisphere’s ability to “see the forest” doesn’t apply just to language. A study conducted in the 1940s asked people with various kinds of brain damage to copy a picture of a house. Interestingly, the patients drew very different landscapes depend-ing on which hemisphere remained intact. Patients reliant on the left hemisphere because the right hemisphere had been incapacitated depicted a house that was clearly nonsensical: front doors floated in space; roofs were upside down. However, even though these patients distorted the general form of the house, they carefully sketched its specifics and devoted lots of effort to capturing the shape of the bricks in the chimney or the wrinkles in the window curtains. (When asked to draw a person, this type of patient might draw a single hand, or two eyes, and nothing else.) In contrast, patients who were forced to rely on the right hemisphere tended to focus on the overall shape of the structure. Their pictures lacked details, but these patients got the essential architecture right. They focused on the whole.

The challenge for Beeman was finding a way to study these more abstract cognitive skills. He wanted to understand the right hemisphere — he just didn’t know which questions to ask. “The right hemisphere was tainted by all this pop-psychology stuff about right-brain people being more artistic or imaginative,” Beeman says. “And so when you said you wanted to investigate that kind of thinking in the right hemisphere, grant committees assumed you weren’t very serious. Studying metaphors and holistic thinking seemed like a sure way to ruin a scientific career.” But in 1993, Beeman heard a talk on moments of insight by Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist now at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Schooler presented the results of a simple experiment: he’d put undergraduates in a tiny room and given them a series of difficult creative puzzles. Here’s a sample question:

A giant inverted steel pyramid is perfectly balanced on its point.

Any movement of the pyramid will cause it to topple over. Underneath the pyramid is a $100 bill. How do you remove the bill without disturbing the pyramid?

Reflect, for a moment, on your own thought process as you try to solve the puzzle. Almost everyone begins by visualizing the pyramid perched precariously on the valuable piece of green paper. Your next thought probably involves some sort of crane that would lift the pyramid into the air. (Unfortunately, such a con-traption violates the rules of the puzzle.) Then you might imagine a way of sliding the money out without tearing the bill. Unfortunately, for most people, no workable solutions come to mind, which is why they reach the impasse stage. The subject gets flustered and frustrated, since he has followed his train of thought to its logical conclusion. And then he starts to give up. “One of the common reactions is for people to get annoyed at the scientist,” Schooler says. “They say: ‘Why’d you give me this puzzle? It’s stupid. It’s impossible.’ You have to reassure them that the problem really has a solution.”

At this point in the study, Schooler began giving the subjects hints. He subliminally flashed them a sentence with the word fire or told the subjects to think about the meaning of remove. Interestingly, these hints were much more effective when selectively presented to the left eye, which is connected to the right hemisphere. “We’d give people these funny goggles that allowed us to flash hints to one eye at a time,” Schooler says. “And it was startling how you could flash a really obvious hint to the right eye [and hence left hemisphere] and it wouldn’t make a difference. They still wouldn’t get it. But then you’d flash the exact same hint to the other eye, and it would generate the insight. Only the right hemisphere knew what to do with the information.” (If you’re still wondering, the solution is to set the hundred-dollar bill on fire. The insight, then, is that the bill just needs to be removed, not salvaged.)

To Beeman, Schooler’s finding was a revelation. It made perfect sense that the right hemisphere excelled at solving insight puzzles since that side of the brain was better able to see the hidden connections, those remote associations between separate ideas. While the left hemisphere was frantically trying to lift the pyramid into the air — that’s the obvious way to “remove” the money — the right hemisphere was busy thinking about alternative approaches. “I suddenly realized that moments of insight could be a really interesting way to look at all these skills the right hemisphere excelled at,” Beeman says. “It was a rigorous way to study some very mysterious aspects of the mind. I had an insight about insight.”

2.

Mark Beeman has a tense smile, a receding hairline, and the wiry build of a long-distance runner. He qualified for the Olympic trials in 1988 and 1992 with a time of 3:41 in the fifteen-hundred-meter race, although he gave up competitive running after, as he puts it, “everything below the hips started to fall apart.” He now subsists on long walks and the manic tapping of feet. When Beeman gets excited about something — whether it’s the cellular properties of pyramidal neurons or his new treadmill — the pace of his speech accelerates and then he starts to draw pictures on whatever scratch paper is nearby.

In the mid-1990s, when Beeman began studying moments of insight, the standard scientific approach to the subject involved giving people difficult puzzles and asking them questions about how they solved them. “The problem with this method is that everything that leads you to the insight happens unconsciously,” Beeman says. “People have no idea where the insight came from, or what thoughts led them to the solution. They can’t tell you anything about it. The science had hit a wall.” Beeman wanted to extend the research on insight by looking at the phenomenon from the perspective of the brain. He was eager to use the new tools of modern neuroscience, such as PET scans and fMRI machines, to locate the source of epiphanies inside the skull. However, this approach immediately led to a major experimental complication. In order to isolate the brain activity that defined the insight process, Beeman needed to compare moments of insight to answers that arrived by conscious analysis, that is, by people methodically testing ideas one at a time. In conscious analysis, people have a sense of their progress and can accurately explain their thought processes. (The left hemisphere is nothing if not articulate.) The problem is solved through diligence and hard work; when the answer arrives, there is nothing sudden about it.