Origins of creativity in the brain

Have you ever had the solution for a tough problem suddenly hit you when you're thinking about something entirely different? Creative thought is a hallmark of humanity, but it's an ephemeral, almost paradoxical ability, striking unexpectedly when it's not sought out.

And the neurological source of creativity -- what's going on in our brains when we think outside the box -- is similarly elusive.

But now, a research team led by a University of Utah Health researcher and based in Baylor College of Medicine has used a precise method of brain imaging to unveil how different parts of the brain work together in order to produce creative thought.

Their findings published in BRAIN on June 18.

The new results could ultimately help lead to interventions that spark creative thought or aid people who have mental illnesses that disrupt these regions of the brain.

Outside the bo

Higher cognitive processes like creativity are especially hard to study. "Unlike motor function or vision, they're not dependent on one specific location in the brain," says Ben Shofty, MD, PhD, assistant professor of neurosurgery in the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine and senior author on the paper. "There's not a creativity cortex."

But there's evidence that creativity is a distinct brain function. Localized brain injury caused by stroke can lead to changes in creative ability -- both positive and negative. That discovery suggests that narrowing down the neurological basis of creativity is possible.

Shofty suspected that creative thought might rely strongly on parts of the brain that are also activated during meditation, daydreaming, and other internally focused types of thinking. This network of brain cells is the default mode network (DMN), so called because it's associated with the "default" patterns of thought that happen in the absence of specific mental tasks. "Unlike most of the functions that we have in the brain, it's not goal-directed," Shofty says. "It's a network that basically operates all the time and maintains our spontaneous stream of consciousness."

The DMN is spread out across many dispersed brain regions, making it more difficult to track its activity in real time. The researchers had to use an advanced method of brain activity imaging to understand what the network was doing moment-to-moment during creative thought. In a strategy most commonly used to pinpoint the location of seizures in patients with severe epilepsy, tiny electrodes are implanted in the brain to precisely track the electrical activity of multiple brain regions.

Participants in the study were already undergoing this kind of seizure monitoring, which meant that the research team could also use the electrodes to measure brain activity during creative thinking. This provided a much more detailed picture of the neural basis of creativity than researchers had been able to capture before. "We could see what's happening within the first few milliseconds of attempting to perform creative thinking,"Shofty says.

Two steps toward originality

The researchers saw that during a creative thinking task in which participants were asked to list novel uses for an everyday item, like a chair or a cup, the DMN lit up with activity first. Then, its activity synchronized with other regions in the brain, including ones involved in complex problem-solving and decision-making. Shofty believes this means that creative ideas originate in the DMN before being evaluated by other regions.

What's more, the researchers were able to show that parts of the network are required specifically for creative thought. When the researchers used the electrodes to temporarily dampen the activity of particular regions of the DMN, people brainstormed uses for the items they saw that were less creative. Their other brain functions, like mind wandering, remained perfectly normal.

Eleonora Bartoli, PhD, assistant professor of neurosurgery at Baylor College of Medicine and co-first author on the paper, explains that this result shows that creativity isn't just associated with the network but fundamentally depends on it. "We moved beyond correlational evidence by using direct brain stimulation," she says. "Our findings highlight the causal role of the DMN in creative thinking."

The activity of the network is changed in several disorders, such as ruminative depression, in which the DMN is more active than normal, possibly related to increased dwelling on negative internally directed thoughts. Shofty says that a better understanding of how the network operates normally may lead to better treatments for people with such conditions.

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Creative people enjoy idle time more than others

Creative people are more likely to make the most of their downtime during a typical day by exploring their mind, a new study by University of Arizona researchers suggests.

The study, published in the Creativity Research Journal, finds that creative people are more likely to fruitfully use idle time by letting one idea lead to another. Study participants who were more creative felt less bored when they sat alone in a room, researchers found. And during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when the world experienced unusually extended periods of unstructured time, creative people were less bored and more engaged with their thoughts.

"I am particularly interested in creativity because we wanted to know what's going on in the mind of creative individuals, especially in situations where nothing constrains their thoughts," said lead study author Quentin Raffaeli, a graduate student in the UArizona Department of Psychology.

In psychology and neuroscience, most studies on human thoughts either prompt participants to think in a certain way or ask them to report on thoughts they experienced, but less is known about how thoughts naturally arise and unfold over time in unprompted contexts, said Jessica Andrews-Hanna, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology and senior author of the paper.

"This is where our study comes in," Andrews-Hanna said.

History is filled with anecdotes of famous scientists, artists and philosophers who enjoyed being alone with their thoughts, and those people often generated some of their best ideas during idle time, Andrews-Hanna said.

"In today's busy and digitally connected society, time to be alone with one's thoughts without distraction may be becoming a rare commodity," she added.

The researchers divided the study into two parts. For the first experiment, the researchers asked each participant to sit alone in a room for 10 minutes without any access to digital devices. In the absence of any particular prompt, the participants were asked to voice their thoughts aloud in real time. The recorded files from 81 participants were then transcribed and analyzed.

The researchers assessed the participants' creativity through a "divergent thinking test," a lab-based verbal test that measures a person's ability to think outside of the box. Participants who performed well in the divergent thinking test had thoughts that flowed freely and were associated with one another, often indicated by phrases such as "this reminds me of" or "speaking of which."

"While many participants had a tendency to jump between seemingly unrelated thoughts, creative individuals showed signs of thinking more associatively," Raffaeli said.

The first experiment also found that creative people were more engaged in their thoughts when they were left alone without distractions, such as cell phone and internet.

"Creative people rated themselves as being less bored, even over those 10 minutes. They also spoke more words overall, which indicated that their thoughts were more likely to move freely," Andrews-Hanna said.

To complement their initial findings, the researchers extended their study in the context of a much larger span of time -- the COVID-19 pandemic -when many people were alone with their thoughts more often.

For the second experiment, over 2,600 adults answered questions through a smartphone app called Mind Window, developed by Andrews-Hanna and her graduate student Eric Andrews. Participants who self-identified as being creative reported being less bored during the pandemic.

"As we become more overworked, overscheduled and addicted to our digital devices, I think we need to do a better job in our homes, our workplaces and our schools to cultivate time to simply relax with our thoughts," Andrews-Hanna said.

The researchers are continuing this line of work using their Mind Window app. They encourage people to download and use the app to help scientists understand how people across the world think in their everyday lives.

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Anyone can be trained to be creative

Researchers have developed a new method for training people to be creative, one that shows promise of succeeding far better than current ways of sparking innovation.

This new method, based on narrative theory, helps people be creative in the way children and artists are: By making up stories that imagine alternative worlds, shift perspective and generate unexpected actions.

The narrative method works by recognizing that we're all creative, said Angus Fletcher, who developed the method and is a professor of English and a member of The Ohio State University's Project Narrative.

"We as a society radically undervalue the creativity of kids and many others because we are obsessed with the idea that some people are more creative than others," Fletcher said.

"But the reality is that we're just not training creativity in the right way."

Fletcher and Mike Benveniste, also of Project Narrative, discussed the narrative method of training creativity in a just-published article in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

The two researchers successfully used the narrative approach to train members of the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College. Fletcher wrote a publicly available training guide based on his methods that was tailored to officers and advanced enlisted personnel.

They have also worked with the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, the Ohio State College of Engineering and several Fortune 50 companies to teach creativity to their staffs and students.

The current foundation of creativity training is the technique known as divergent thinking, which has been in use since the 1950s. It is a "computational approach" to creativity that treats the brain as a logic machine, Fletcher said.

It works through exercises designed to, among other things, expand working memory, foster analogical thinking and promote problem-solving.

But divergent thinking hasn't delivered the results that many hoped for, Fletcher said. A major issue is that its computational approach relies on data and information about the problems and successes of the past.

"What it can't do is help prepare people for new challenges that we know little about today. It can't come up with truly original actions," Fletcher said. "But the human brain's narrative machinery can."

The narrative method of training for creativity uses many of the techniques that writers use to create stories. One is to develop new worlds in your mind. For example, employees at a company might be asked to think about their most unusual customer -- then imagine a world in which all their customers were like that. How would that change their business? What would they have to do to survive?

Another technique is perspective-shifting. An executive at a company might be asked to answer a problem by thinking like another member of their team.

The point of using these techniques and others like them is not that the scenarios you dream up will actually happen, Fletcher said.

"Creativity isn't about guessing the future correctly. It's about making yourself open to imagining radically different possibilities," he said.

"When you do that, you can respond more quickly and nimbly to the changes that do occur."

Fletcher noted that the narrative approach of training creativity through telling stories resembles how young children are creative -- and research shows that young children are more imaginatively creative than adults.

But the ability of children to perform creative tasks drops after four or five years of schooling, according to studies. That's when children begin intensive logical, semantic and memory training.

The narrative approach to creativity can help people unlock the creativity they may have stopped using as they progressed through school, Fletcher said.

One advantage for organizations that train employees to be creative is that they no longer need to strive to hire "creative people," he said.

"Trying to hire creative people causes problems because the people that leaders identify as creative are almost always people just like themselves. So it promotes conformity instead of originality," Fletcher said.

"It's better to hire a diverse group of people and then train them to be creative. That creates a culture that recognizes that there are already creative people in your organization that you aren't taking advantage of."

While this narrative method of creativity training has already been received positively, Fletcher and his colleagues have started a more formal evaluation. They are conducting randomized controlled trials of the creativity curriculum on more than 600 U.S. Army majors who are part of the Command and General Staff College.

They are also continuing to work with new organizations, such as the Worthington Local School District in Ohio.

"Teaching creativity is one of the most useful things you can do in the world, because it is just coming up with new solutions to solve problems," he said.

Fletcher said this new method of training creativity "could only have come from Ohio State's Project Narrative.

"Project Narrative is all about how stories work in the brain. It is the foundation that helped us put together this new way of thinking about and training for creativity," he said.

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Do we get our most creative ideas when walking?

Movement helps us to think creatively. This insight is over 2000 years old -- and already known to the philosophers in ancient Greece.

However, what is the connection between movement and cognition from a scientific point of view? What happens in the brain when we walk? Are people who rarely move less creative?

"Our research shows that it is not movement per se that helps us to think more flexibly," says neuroscientist Dr Barbara Händel from Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) in Bavaria, Germany. Instead, the freedom to make self-determined movements is responsible for it.

Accordingly, even small movements while sitting can have the same positive effects on creative thinking. However, the researcher does not derive any concrete movement suggestions from her work: "The important thing is the freedom to move without external constraints."

Don't stare at small screens for too long

It is important, she says, that movement is not suppressed or forced into regular patterns. "Unfortunately, this happens when people focus for example on a small screen," explains the JMU researcher.

The increased use of mobile phones and similar devices -- also in the field of education at the time of the Corona pandemic -- could therefore have a negative effect on cognitive processes such as creativity.

The experiments that Barbara Händel and her doctoral student Supriya Murali conducted are described in detail in a recent publication in the journal Psychological Research.

Background

How do people perceive their environment? What effect do sensory stimuli have in the peripheral nervous system and what in the brain? What influence do body movements have on perception of sensory input? Researchers like Barbara Händel are interested in such questions for many reasons. In the long term, their findings could contribute to a better understanding of diseases that affect body movements as well as cognitive processes.

From February 2022, the scientist will continue her research at the Neurological Clinic of Würzburg University Hospital. There she plans to focus on the topics of Parkinson's disease and ADHD.

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Creative exploration followed by exploitation can lead to a career’s greatest hits

Before developing his famed "drip technique," abstract artist Jackson Pollock dabbled in drawing, print making and surrealist paintings of humans, animals and nature.

According to a new study from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University,this period of exploration followed by exploitation of his new drip technique set up Pollock for a "hot streak," or a burst of high-impact works clustered together in close succession. In Pollock's case, this was a three-year period from 1947 to 1950, during which he created all his drippy, splattered masterpieces that he is still famous for today.

By using artificial intelligence to mine big data related to artists, film directors and scientists, the Northwestern researchers discovered this pattern is not uncommon but, instead, a magical formula. Hot streaks, they found, directly result from years of exploration (studying diverse styles or topics) immediately followed by years of exploitation (focusing on a narrow area to develop deep expertise).

The research will be published on Sept. 13 in the journal Nature Communications.

With this new understanding about what triggers a hot streak, institutions can intentionally create environments that support and facilitate hot streaks in order to help their members thrive.

"Neither exploration nor exploitation alone in isolation is associated with a hot streak. It's the sequence of them together," said Dashun Wang, who led the study. "Although exploration is considered a risk because it might not lead anywhere, it increases the likelihood of stumbling upon a great idea. By contrast, exploitation is typically viewed as a conservative strategy. If you exploit the same type of work over and over for a long period of time, it might stifle creativity. But, interestingly, exploration followed by exploitation appears to show consistent associations with the onset of hot streaks."

Wang is a professor of management and organizations Kellogg School and of industrial engineering and management sciences in Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering. He also is director of the Center for Science of Science Innovationand a core member of the Northwestern Institute for Complex Systems.

Inspired by Van Gogh

In 2018, Wang and his colleagues published a paper in Nature, characterizing hot streaks in artistic, cultural and scientific careers. After establishing that these hot streaks do occur, Wang was motivated to discover what triggers them. He found a clue while visiting the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Van Gogh experienced an artistic breakthrough from 1888-1890, during which he painted his most famous works, including The Starry Night, Sunflowers and Bedroom in Arles. Before that, however, his work was less impressionistic and more realistic. He also tended to use somber earth tones rather than the bright, sweeping colors, for which he is best known today.

"If you look at his production before 1888, it was all over the place," Wang said. "It was full of still-life paintings, pencil drawings and portraits that are much different in character from the work he created during his hot streak."

Mining data from artists, scientists, filmmakers

In the new study, Wang's team developed computational methods using deep-learning algorithms and network science and then applied these methods to large-scale datasets tracing the career outputs of artists, film directors and scientists.

For artists, Wang's team used algorithms for image recognition to mine data from 800,000 visual arts images collected from museums and galleries, which cover the career histories of 2,128 artists, including Pollock and Van Gogh. For film directors, the team collected data sets from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), which included 79,000 films by 4,337 directors. For scientists, the team analyzed the career histories of 20,040 scientists by combining publication and citation datasets from the Web of Science and Google Scholar.

Wang and his collaborators quantified a hot streak within each career based on the impact of works produced, measured by auction price, IMDB ratings and academic paper citations. Then, they correlated the timing of hot streaks with the creative trajectories of each individual. Looking at careers four years before and after the hot streak, the researchers examined how each individual's work changed around the beginning of a hot streak.

Combination of creative experimentation, implementation is 'powerful'

The team found that when an episode of exploration was not followed by exploitation, the chance for a hot streak was significantly reduced. Similarly, exploitation alone -- that was not preceded by exploration -- also did not guarantee a hot streak. But when exploration was closely followed by exploitation, the researchers noted the probability of a hot streak consistently and significantly increased.

"We were able to identify among the first regularities underlying the onset of hot streaks, which appears universal across diverse creative domains," Wang said. "Our findings suggest that creative strategies that balance experimentation with implementation may be especially powerful."

"This knowledge can help individuals and organizations understand the different types of activities to engage in -- such as exploring new domains or exploiting existing knowledge and competencies -- and the optimal sequence to use in order to achieve the most significant impact," added study co-author Jillian Chown, an assistant professor of management and organizations at Kellogg School.

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Caffeine boosts problem-solving ability but not creativity, study indicates

Caffeine increases the ability to focus and problem solve, but a new study by a University of Arkansas researcher indicates it doesn't stimulate creativity.

"In Western cultures, caffeine is stereotypically associated with creative occupations and lifestyles, from writers and their coffee to programmers and their energy drinks, and there's more than a kernel of truth to these stereotypes," wrote Darya Zabelina, assistant professor of psychology and first author of the study recently published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition.

While the cognitive benefits of caffeine -- increased alertness, improved vigilance, enhanced focus and improved motor performance -- are well established, she said, the stimulant's affect on creativity is less known.

In the paper, Zabelina differentiates "convergent" from "divergent" thinking. The former is defined as seeking a specific solution to a problem, for example, the "correct" answer. The latter is characterized by idea generation where a large set of apt, novel or interesting responses would be suitable. Caffeine was shown to improve convergent thinking in the study, while consuming it had no significant impact on divergent thinking.

For the study, 80 volunteers were randomly given either a 200mg caffeine pill, equivalent to one strong cup of coffee, or a placebo. They were then tested on standard measures of convergent and divergent thinking, working memory and mood. In addition to the results on creativity, caffeine did not significantly affect working memory, but test subjects who took it did report feeling less sad.

"The 200mg enhanced problem solving significantly, but had no effect on creative thinking," said Zabelina. "It also didn't make it worse, so keep drinking your coffee; it won't interfere with these abilities."

From Science Daily

Want to boost creativity? Try playing Minecraft

The next time you need to get the creative juices flowing, playing some types of video games may help.

Video games that foster creative freedom can increase creativity under certain conditions, according to new research from Iowa State University. The experimental study compared the effect of playing Minecraft, with or without instruction, to watching a TV show or playing a race car video game. Those given the freedom to play Minecraft without instruction were most creative.

"It's not just that Minecraft can help induce creativity. There seems to be something about choosing to do it that also matters," said Douglas Gentile, a professor of psychology.

If you are not familiar with the game, Gentile says Minecraft is like a virtual Lego world. The game, which has sold more than 100 million copies, allows players to explore unique worlds and create anything they can imagine. Study participants randomly assigned to play Minecraft were split into two groups. The one receiving instruction was told to play as creatively as possible.

After 40 minutes of play or watching TV, the 352 participants completed several creativity tasks. To measure creative production, they were asked to draw a creature from a world much different than Earth. More human-like creatures scored low for creativity and those less human-like scored high. Surprisingly, those instructed to be creative while playing Minecraft were the least creative.

Gentile says there's no clear explanation for this finding. In the paper published by Creativity Research Journal, he, Jorge Blanco-Herrera, lead author and former master's student in psychology; and Jeffrey Rokkum, former Ph.D. student in psychology, outlined possible reasons why the instructed Minecraft group scored lower. Blanco-Herrera says the instructions may have changed subjects' motivation for play.

"Being told to be creative may have actually limited their options while playing, resulting in a less creative experience," Blanco-Herrera said. "It's also possible they used all their 'creative juices' while playing and had nothing left when it came time to complete the test."

Games teach creativity similar to aggression

Video games can have both harmful and beneficial effects. Gentile's previous research has shown the amount, content and context of video games influence what players learn through repeated experiences. While much of Gentile's research has focused on aggression or prosocial behavior, he says the same appears to be true for creativity.

Most video games encourage players to practice some level of creativity. For example, players may create a character and story for role-playing games or be rewarded for creative strategies in competitive games. The researchers say even first-person shooter games can potentially inspire creativity as players think about strategy and look for advantages in combat.

"The research is starting to tell a more interesting, nuanced picture. Our results are similar to other gaming research in that you get better at what you practice, but how you practice might matter just as much," Gentile said.

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