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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."
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...
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.
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.
So they are not looking for the 'Aha! moment', but for the 'Aha!, an Aha! moment'... I feel some sort of recursive problem arising.
wait...
AHA!
I think I've found my new porn star name!
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
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