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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."
It's different for different people I suppose. Those nuts who are always saying "I love a challenge, I love working under pressure."
Without having read the study, my contribution is that it's still early to concede that any particular part of the brain is the center of creativity, or that psychology actually has a specific definition for creativity.
My own work focused on a different squiggly piece of cortex, called the Prefrontal Cortex, that is implicated in a range of abstract thinking processes, including those that don't seem to emerge until later adolescence.
The good Doctor does seem to have an important insight in his work, which is that the locus of creativity (probably) starts much earlier than a thought present in our conscious mind.
One possible idea is that our brain is constantly combining and recombining disparate data stored in memories; the presence of a creative thought is a novel combination that, when applied to a specific problem, results in a novel and perhaps workable solution.
And, in finishing, I would agree that short-term training is unlikely to produce creativity, unless a) the training is extremely specific and b) the test is extremely specific, in which case I would wonder whether we're measuring creativity.
Overall, however, scientific processes (MRI, etc) are so rough that it will be quite some time before we're able to actually "explore" and "find" the center of whatever creativity really is, and identify how it differs from other, more pedestrian thought processes.
Cheers,
--Dave
Just for this little bit here:
[The brain] shrinks and deteriorates with age. By the time you're 30 you're probably past your intellectual peak. This is a problem, as we're living longer and longer, and the danger is that we'll just get stupider and stupider.
It's a particular problem for baby-boomers, the large, rich, spoilt generation born after the second world war.
... ah, delicious schadenfreude.
âoeThereâ(TM)s no empirical evidence that these games produce improvements,â says Nancy Andreasen
That may very well be the case but are they forgetting about the Placebo effect a game like Brain Age might induce? Or for that matter, isn't using your brain in any active matter preferable to just letting it sit idle and passive in front of say, a tv?
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
More complicated than that. And, nothing's localized so precisely that you can selectively remove one function completely while leaving all others intact.
What the article doesn't mention (out of scope, really) is that they've found differences between the hemispheres when it comes to this kind of creative thought. Specifically, they've found that remote associations between concepts (things that are related but in an abstract way you'd rarely think of) cause activity in the right-hemisphere parts, whereas local associations (use the scissors to cut the paper) are localized to the left hemisphere. Destroying someone's right temporal lobe might impact this kind of thought - but I'd bet that the person would be surprisingly normal regardless.
'assembling information' is kinda abstract, and something they don't have a great handle on yet. Consciousness and the brain (with associated ethical restrictions) are awfully difficult things to reverse-engineer.
Your comment is nearly spot-on. Creativity comes from obsession. Albert Einstein was quoted attributing his success to his passion rather than his natural talent. And there is no question as to whether Isac Newton was obsessed with his work. No one got their work done in a day, in fact, even though you can learn some of their accomplishments in less than a week (sometimes faster), it took them years to create and perfect. Although there is always a defining moment that they realize something, there is always some gradual progress that it takes to get there. Also, TFA mentions brain training and hints at neuroplasticity, but it has no mention of neurofeedback. The brain is similar to a muscle in that it can be improved, but only with the proper use. Neurofeedback doesn't have to be used for treatment, it can also be used to improve the mind and even to induce a hypnogogic state, which is shown to dramatically increase creativity. Just use wikipedia to read more into the subject, as the links I could post here wouldn't fit.
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