The average person can come up 10 to 20 unique and innovative uses. Those considered creative geniuses can imagine upwards of uses. Understanding the creative mind of divergent thinkers is a goal of many scientists, from psychologists to business leaders. In a landmark study conducted in the late s, George Land, a systems scientist, and Beth Jarman, an educator and organizational leader, used the Alternative Uses Test to discover who some of these creative geniuses were.
The participants were 1, children, who were questioned over a period of about 10 years. They were first asked at around age five and then every five years afterward, until they were age The implications were concerning and have continued to ripple through society into the 21st Century.
Not only do these results suggest that educational systems may be wringing creativity from youth — a point that Sir Ken Robinson, a professor emeritus of arts education at the University of Warwick in the U. Studies, including ones from the U. It found, among other things, that three-quarters of the educators queried think students with these skills will have better employment prospects because future jobs that require creative problem solving are less likely to be impacted by automation and will also pay more.
This is actually what makes creativity unique compared to other brain functions, like language or motion, that originate in a specific region. A recent study adds to this growing understanding. In a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers explain how they combined the Alternative Uses Test with functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI to look at the brain activity of creative people.
The team asked about volunteers to undergo an fMRI scan while thinking of creative uses for common objects, like a brick, a knife, a box and some rope. For people who scored the highest, the resulting images showed they had a distinct pattern of brain activity across three brain networks.
The lead author on the research papers, Roger Beaty, a postdoctoral fellow in Cognitive Neuroscience at Harvard University, summarizes the networks in article for The Conversation. He writes,. This network may play a key role in idea generation or brainstorming — thinking of several possible solutions to a problem.
This network may play a key role in idea evaluation or determining whether brainstormed ideas will actually work and modifying them to fit the creative goal.
This network may play a key role in alternating between idea generation and idea evaluation. Another method of investigating the brain uses something called functional mapping, which involves the use of technologies to measure activity in the brain. Two functional mapping technologies are called functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI , which uses magnetic fields to observe movement of blood bringing fuel materials to parts of the brain that have been active, and electroencephalography EEG , which measures the electrical activity of the brain.
In one study, scientists looked at both fMRI and EEG images taken of participants while they worked on different tasks that involved coming up with creative ideas [ 4 ]. The EEG study showed that when they were coming up with creative ideas, study participants had synchronized firing together brain activity in the frontal cortex and the parietal lobes.
In the fMRI study, more creative responses were related to increased activation or usage of the frontal cortex in the left hemisphere. Combining the results from the patient studies and functional imaging studies, we see that there are a lot of parts of the brain involved with creative thinking.
Have you ever been asked if you are left brained or right brained Figure 3? This question refers to the idea that each hemisphere of the brain is specialized for different abilities. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, was thought to specialize in processing non-verbal information, spatial information, music, emotions, and creativity. As we see in creativity and other complex functions, a number of specialized structures in the brain work together to accomplish something.
Localization of certain abilities to one side of the brain or the other was first found in certain individuals who had the main communication between their hemispheres, the corpus callosum , cut so that each hemisphere was essentially working independently. In most people, however, the two sides of the brain are able to communicate, so while brain structures may have some specialization, most complex brain functions require many parts of the brain working together.
Similar to the myth that you can only be either left brained or right brained, some think that you can only be intelligent or creative. Intelligence is usually defined as the ability to obtain and use knowledge.
While intelligence and creativity are somewhat related, they are not the same thing and people can be both creative and intelligent, or one or the other [ 5 ]. Important factors that make people highly creative probably have something to do with personality—things such as openness to new experiences. Some people have suggested that there is a link between creativity and mental illness.
Mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder , schizophrenia , depression , and alcoholism have been studied for their potential link to creativity. The findings suggest that highly creative people are not necessarily mentally ill, but may often think in ways similar to individuals with mental illness. In fact, Nancy Andreasen, a leading scholar on the neuroscience of creativity, who has worked with some of the most intelligent and creative people in modern science and the arts, has suggested that many highly creative individuals who were diagnosed with mental illness were not creative because of the mental illness but were creative despite the mental illness working against them [ 6 ].
While creativity may be a fundamental human ability and pursuit, the study of the source of creativity in the brain has only just begun, so we still have a lot to learn. While scientists continue to learn more about creativity, one thing we already know is that being creative has a number of benefits Box 3.
So even if we do not know exactly which mental processes or parts of the brain are involved with creativity, we can still suggest that you and your friends should go out and be creative, because it will help you and your brain. You may have experienced a flow state if you have ever lost track of time while doing something you enjoy.
Energizes you : by pursuing something that you enjoy, being creative can help give you energy by focusing your attention on something that you like rather than dwelling on the worries or bothers of the day.
Helps your emotions : a number of recent therapies, including music therapy, dance therapy, and art therapy, are being used to help patients with different emotional disorders, including depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. By being creative, you can work through your own emotions and feelings. By being creative and pursuing creative activities, you can learn more about other people and cultures. Increases brain plasticity : your brain makes connections and changes throughout your lifetime.
Creating art can stimulate communication between different parts of the brain and having a well-connected brain is thought to be more important for things such as intelligence than the sheer size of various brain structures.
So now that you have all this information about creativity—go out and exercise and showcase your own creativity! Many of us think that we are not creative because we might not be good at drawing or do not have great musical abilities, but everyone possesses some degree of creativity within them.
The thing that separates the truly creative people is how they chose to showcase their creativity. Some might illustrate their creativity in art forms such as writing, music, dance, and drawing, others might think about and question the natural world in new ways, but all creativity stems from a specific way of thinking. Push your brain to draw connections between seemingly different ideas, as creativity is just thinking outside the box—anyone can do that.
Being creative in your thinking will help you lead a more interesting, healthier, and happier life. The opposite of subjective information is objective information—analysis that is fact-based, measurable, and observable. Abstraction involves considering things that may not have concrete things, or specific objects. Planning is the process of thinking about and organizing activities required to achieve a goal. Mental representations can be thought of as mental imagery, or the ability to imagine things in your mind like traveling to a place you have never visited or doing things you have never done like fly like super hero.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The Art of Thought. Turnbridge Wells: Solis Press.
Hippocampal amnesia disrupts creative thinking. Hippocampus 23 12 —9. What relates newspaper, definite, and clothing? We may be trying to be creative when tasked to do so but this is not the same as being creative. AA: The difference there lies in directions of exploration when uncovering the brain basis of creativity. If your starting point is a process that is of special relevance to creativity, such as improvisation, and you examine the brain correlates of the same, you will be undertaking a process-to-brain exploration.
One can go the other way around as well—by starting at the level of a brain structure or brain activity pattern that is or stands to be of special relevance to creativity.
Is there any truth at all to this myth? AA: Like most persistent myths, even if some seed of truth was associated with the initial development of the idea, the claim so stated amounts to a lazy generalization and is incorrect.
It is also incorrect to conclude that the left brain is uncreative. In fact even the earliest scholars who explored the brain lateralization in relation to creativity emphasized the importance of both hemispheres.
Indeed this is what was held to be unique about creativity compared to other highly lateralized psychological functions. In an era that saw the uncovering of the dominant involvement of one hemisphere over the other for many functions, and the left hemisphere received preeminent status for its crucial role in complex functions like language, a push against the tide by emphasizing the need to also recognize the importance of the right hemisphere for complex functions like creativity somehow got translated over time into the only "creative right brain" meme.
It is the sort of thing that routinely happens when crafting accessible sound bites to convey scientific findings. SBK: What are some of the intricacies of frontal lobe function in relation to creativity? AA: Trying to pin down the nature of frontal lobe function in relation to creativity often feels like holding on to a slippery fish.
The first thing to bear in mind is that it is a massive heterogeneous structure covering about a third of the neocortex and that different parts of the frontal lobes are involved when we engage in creative ideation. Another feature of the frontal lobe function is that damage to different parts of this brain region results in some disadvantages in creative performance but also with specific advantages.
For instance, damage to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex has been associated with more success in insight problem solving and lesions in frontopolar regions with a greater ability to overcome the constraints of salient examples when creating something new. Whether the advantages and disadvantages in creativity are rooted in which specific aspects of creative cognition are being examined, or in the location and extent of lesion site in the brain, or in the dynamics of implicated wider brain networks, are as yet unknown.
SBK: What are the differing brain correlates of insight, analogy and metaphor cognitive processing? AA: All these operations of creative cognition have overlapping brain correlates, but what differs are the specific brain regions that are held to be of significance in each of these processes.
The role of frontal poles is emphasized in the case of analogical reasoning, the lateral inferior frontal gyrus in metaphor processing, and anterior aspects of the superior temporal gyrus in insight. A clear affirmation of the particular relevance of these brain areas for each of these processes would be to examine all of them within one experimental paradigm.
SBK: What happens in our brains when we operate in a creative mode versus an uncreative mode? AA: So far we have only scratched the surface of this big question. What is obvious is that a lot about what triggers a creative mode as opposed to an uncreative mode is situational.
The creative mode is called for in contexts that are unclear, vague and open-ended. The opposite is true of the uncreative mode. And so the uncreative mode involves walking firmly along the "path of least resistance" through the black-and-white zone of the expected, the obvious, the accurate or the efficient. Whereas the creative mode involves turning away from the path of least resistance and venturing into the briars so to speak in an effort to forge a new path through the gray zone of the unexpected, the vague, the misleading or the unknown.
We know a great deal about the receptive-predictive cycle of the brain in place during the uncreative mode. We know a lot less about the explorative-generative cycle that is in place during the creative mode. But what we do know is fascinating. For instance, several large-scale brain networks that are known to operate in circumscribed ways in the uncreative mode are engaged in an integrative and dynamic manner during the creative mode.
Examining creative thinking as a multifaceted construct has greatly improved our understanding of the roles of specific brain regions in specific aspects of creativity such as insight, imagery, analogical reasoning, overcoming knowledge constraints, conceptual expansion and so on.
Among the most thought-provoking findings is our ability to engage in creative pursuits despite disorder and degeneration at the neural level. This attests to the disorder-resistant power of the brain in enabling self-expression and communication. SBK: For instance, how can you determine which aspects of a domain, such as music and musicality, are creative and which ones are ordinary?
AA: This is a wonderful question that has several potential answers depending on the level of analysis or reflection that is adopted. In the domain of music and musicality that you mention, one can distinguish between the formats of listening, performance, improvisation and composition.
If one adopts the standard definition of creativity, then improvisation and composition would be considered the most clearly creative forms given that both evidence the potential invention of original responses. One has to, of course, bear in mind some caveats here: that all improvisation is not necessarily creative, for instance. But there is good reason to also consider musical performance as a creative endeavor given that original responses are possible not only at the level of invention but also at the level of expression.
This is after all among the key reasons why some musicians can command a higher ticket price than others—because of their originality in interpretation and expression.
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