Pinpointing Creativity In the Brain

The Times Online has a lengthy story about the work being done to solve mysteries regarding the brain and various aspects of neuroscience. They discuss some of the "brain-training" myths and look at the quest to determine when and where creative thought originates. Quoting: "In fact, the whole process seems to be centred on one small part of the brain: the anterior superior temporal gyrus. This seems to be the point at which bits of information stored far apart in the brain are brought together. This may be an important clue as to how the brain organises itself. But it's only the beginning. At Goldsmiths College in London, Dr Joydeep Bhattacharya says the real issue is not the 'Aha!' moment itself, but the way it is produced in the brain and how we recognise it. 'We need to know the brain processes involved, to find how this moment is strong enough to reach consciousness. We know insight does not come from the sky.' This is the problem with all neuroscience. We don't really know what we are seeing."

Comments

This article is a mess

[Anonymous Coward]

This is some sloppy neuroscience journalism for sure. For example, Phineas Gage *didn't* recover, he was left with an altered and uncontrolled psyche by his tamping rod accident--they missed the entire point of his story.

The article is a wandering slop of poorly presented and disparate facts.

Brain Workshop

[De Lemming]

From the article:

But don't despair: Susanne Jaeggi, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, may be able to help. She has devised a brain-training game that actually works. It's a strange, complex game involving sequences of squares on a computer screen, and it definitely improves "fluid intelligence" - the part of your mind that deals directly with the raw newness of experience or, as defined by Jaeggi, "the ability to reason and to solve new problems independently of previously acquired knowledge".

Here is a link to the abstract of her study. And the project Brain Workshop has released an open source version of the game used in the study.

Re:Brain Workshop

[Dr_Banzai]

I'm the author of Brain Workshop, an implementation of Suzanne Jaeggi's Dual N-Back task. The scientific basis of the dual n-back task differentiates it from regular Brain Age-type games. I highly encourage everyone to try it out. There is currently more research underway to confirm the positive effects on short term memory and fluid intelligence.

Brain Workshop works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and is completely free.

Join the Dual N-Back, Brain Training & Intelligence forum & mailing list for some interesting discussions.

Re:Creativity a gift, or learned?

[negRo_slim]

Completely wrong. Stress increases focus on a singular task, while creativity needs to look at how many bits fit together.

Cortisol, commonly referred to as the stress hormone. I believe is less about focus and more about creating memory for difficult or life threatening situations. Of course that only works when the stress is short term. Nowadays... well you know...

Re:Neuroscience, creativity and the brain

[ceoyoyo]

One thing you have to remember is that those colourful scans are basically showing p-values. The coloured bits are the parts that are statistically associated with some stimulus to some significance threshold.

fMRI can't even image anything except change, and even then, if you look at the raw data you get something MUCH more complex than the neat little statistical blobs.