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Pinpointing Creativity In the Brain

Posted by Soulskill on from the brain-and-brain-what-is-brain dept.

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."

3 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. AHA! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

  2. Dr. Joydeep by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I think I've found my new porn star name!

  3. Neuroscience, creativity and the brain by davecrusoe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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