Slashdot Mirror
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."
I remember talking to one of my teachers once and saying to him that creativity can't be taught. He disagreed and said creativity comes from pressure and deadlines. Not really anything to do with this article, but I thought it was an interesting point nonetheless...
FTFA:
The song Cold Missouri Waters is based on that event.
(Note: There are a lot of bands that covered that song, but I like the cover by Cry Cry Cry the best, so that's the one I linked to. They also do a really good cover of REM's Fall on Me.)
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.
Ditto on not reading the article. I do however read a lot of Scientific American in it's various flavors. And I encourage you all to read SciAm: Mind Volume 19, Number 5, Oct/Nov 2008: Page 67. It's an article on how "colorful scans have lulled us into an oversimplified conception of the brain as a modular machine". Quite simply to try and suggest there is a creativity center when so many processes in the brain can be involved, and with as little as we really know, is as absurd to me as announcing they found a copy of the "Windows Task Manager" in the brain.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
They also picked an unfortunate example here:
"The discovery of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick in 1953 was a clear example of convergent thinking â" the one correct answer was a double helix."
Watson's story of the discovery moment of the double helix is a classic example of just the opposite: he says he was in a dream-like state and he saw the double helix floating in front of him.
Or not, but you know there are some rather large and rather vocal groups out there who would rather humanity not be as creative as it is...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Nobel Prize genius Crick was high on LSD when he discovered the secret of life
BY ALUN REES
FRANCIS CRICK, the Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics, was under the influence of LSD when he first deduced thedouble-helix structure of DNA nearly 50 years ago.
The abrasive and unorthodox Crick and his brilliant American co-researcher James Watson famously celebrated their eureka moment in March 1953 by running from the now legendary Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge to the nearby Eagle pub, where they announced over pints of bitter that they had discovered the secret of life.
Crick, who died ten days ago, aged 88, later told a fellow scientist that he often used small doses of LSD then an experimental drug used in psychotherapy to boost his powers of thought. He said it was LSD, not the Eagle's warm beer, that helped him to unravel the structure of DNA, the discovery that won him the Nobel Prize.
See http://www.miqel.com/entheogens/francis_crick_dna_lsd.html
I have bipolar disorder, a reasonably high IQ, and count myself as a creative person. It's difficult to describe how it feels to come up with something new, sometimes someone will just explain a problem to me, and I'll say straight away, "have you tried...." and they'll just look at me. It's kind of instant analysis and solution - I don't know where it comes from. When I was studying for my degree, I would try and come up with solutions that were non-standard, but still worked, just because I thought that was more interesting. At other times I'll get a sense that there's an answer wrapped up in the problem, one that no one else has found, but I have to really sit down and think about it. The longest I've thought about a problem (and come up with a solution) is 24 years. Of course, that was on and off thinking. It felt great when I got the answer.
IBM doesn't play chess with the Universe.
Creativity and bipolar disorder was studied lately, and it seems there is some correlation. Cognitive deficits in bipolar disorder seems insignificant or absent. Generally mental disorder often associated with super-creative people, and not only artistic. Goedel and arguably Perelman come to mind.
Exeriments on neural nets suggest that a trained net may generate 'ideas' based in its training if the 'neurons' are deliberately somewhat noisy.
Some drugs make some people more creative. Weed has that effect on me... is it just ramping up the background neural noise level?
My brother, who is Mister Focus with respect to my Miss Random, gets little or no effect from weed. Quote: 'It gives me a slight buzz; that's all'.
Anyone ever done an MRI study on the effects of drugs?