MINDRAMP’S Myths of Creativity: Creativity Demystified (available at www.mindramp.org/products.php) explores five prevalent myths and misunderstandings about creativity and innovation.

The Reality:  Insight is but one aspect of a complex and multifaceted creative process. Insight is the wonderful moment when a new idea pops into conscious awareness.  It is The Eureka Moment!, The Aha! Moment, that captures so much attention in both popular writings about creativity and in research on creativity.

But much creative work is necessary before an insight can occur. Insights very rarely occur out of the blue. They usually are the result of much thinking and exploration about a specific topic. The answer rarely pops into mind without first having asked an important question.  And then, there is much work to do after the moment of insight to capture it in writing, a picture, or some other symbolic system, then to implement it in some way that tests its value. Many highly creative ideas don’t work when put to the test.

• Creativity is a multi-phased process not just a single flash of insight.
• Historically, creativity researchers have identified five distinct phases of the creative process. MINDRAMP CONSULTING has added two additional phases resulting in a seven-phase creative cycle (Initiation, Saturation, Manipulation, Incubation, Illumination, Implementation and Verification).
• Creative Cycles can be traversed in a matter of moments or hours or can extend for a lifetime. Movement from one phase to the other is described sequentially, but in practice there is a lot of jumping back and forth between different phases.
• Perhaps the most important point about the phases of the Creative Cycle is that each phase requires a different type of mental activity and engages different cognitive functions. Hence, being “creative” entails knowing which type of mental activity to engage for each different phase, and how to move from one type of cognitive activity to another.
• Movement from one phase to another will often require the stimulation of one type of cognitive function in concert with the inhibition of another.
• Students of creativity generally focus on three areas of study: creative people, the creative process and creative products. MINDRAMP believes that process is the key to unlocking creative talents. 

People can improve the creative utility of their products by learning to effectively work the creative process.

MINDRAMP’S Myths of Creativity: Creativity Demystified (available at www.mindramp.org/products.php) explores five prevalent myths and misunderstandings about creativity and innovation.

The Reality:  The mythology around brainstorming has flip-flopped recently. The initial myth suggested that brainstorming was the key to creativity in groups.  The problem with this myth is that brainstorming is not designed to stimulate “creativity” it is designed to generate ideas, which is only one aspect of a larger creative process. As often happens with a popular idea, the original intent and scope of the concept gets lost through misinterpretation.

The newer myth, fueled by Jonah Lehrer, is that brainstorming never works.

The reality is that brainstorming can work if conditions are right and if the goal is to generate new and creative ideas. Brainstorming is an “idea generation” technique. A related myth concerns criticism of ideas. The new myth is that criticism is good for creativity and actually stimulates the production of new and useful ideas. This myth is false because it is too sweeping. Criticism is useful at certain stages of the creative process and is crippling at others. The trick is to know when criticism helps and when it hinders.

• Brainstorming is designed to generate new ideas, stressing volume of ideas above depth or quality.
• Brainstorming often fails because people don’t know how to do it.
• The success or failure of brainstorming sessions can depend significantly on who is doing the brainstorming, how they have been prepared, and who is leading the session.
• Once a successful brainstorming session has been completed, there needs to be follow up processes for: a) reviewing, critiquing and debating the relative merits of the ideas, b) selecting which, if any, of the ideas should be selected for development, and c) implementing the ideas.

MINDRAMP’S Myths of Creativity: Creativity Demystified (available at www.mindramp.org/products.php) explores five prevalent myths and misunderstandings about creativity and innovation.

The Reality:   Creativity is a whole brain activity. Creativity does not reside in one hemisphere of the brain, right or left, but requires coordinated and sequenced interaction between both hemispheres.  Further, creativity occurs throughout the various regions within each hemisphere. Creativity is a complex, multistep activity that utilizes a variety of cognitive functions, each one engaging different parts of the brain and often using different patterns of connection.

There is no creativity organ that we can turn on to juice up our normal activities. The attempt to localize creative brain function is grounded in the hope that we will be able to increase our own creativity by stimulating the brain’s creative center. Unfortunately, the task is more complicated — but not impossible.

• The two hemispheres of the brain share many functions, but also specialize in certain areas. Language, speech, reading writing, arithmetic, abstract thinking and logical problem solving are associated with the left hemisphere (LH). Face recognition, processing of sound and music, our sense of direction and holistic visual processing is associated with the right hemisphere (RH).
• As Elkhonen Goldberg suggests, LH specializes in processing routines and learned procedures while RH specializes in recognizing and processing novelty.  As discussed at the beginning of the book, both novelty and routine are essential elements of creativity. Hence, creativity arises from activation and interaction of both hemispheres.
• Lateralization of the brain seems to provide a division-of-labor that expands the capacity of the brain to handle two distinctly different tasks at the same time.

MINDRAMP’S Myths of Creativity: Creativity Demystified (available at www.mindramp.org/products.php) explores five prevalent myths and misunderstandings about creativity and innovation.    

The Reality:  Geniuses are not born, they are made. The idea that genius is 10% inspiration and 90% perspirations seems accurate. People with virtuoso skills have worked extraordinarily hard to develop their abilities. Creative talent – even genius – is largely a product of hard work and targeted practice. 

The implication is that all of us have the potential for creative excellence. What holds us back? What can we do to work towards achieving our creative potential?

• Most extraordinary creative skills develop in a single domain.  A genius painter is not necessarily a genius musician or mathematician.

• Extraordinary creative skill (talent) is a result of focused work and dedicated, mindful practice.
• Dedicated practice puts consciously targeted skills under the control of unconscious processes that are activated automatically at appropriate times.
• Top performers focus on overcoming areas of weakness.
• The extraordinary talents, and devastating cognitive deficits of savants may offer clues to brain mechanisms that support virtuoso talents.

MINDRAMP’S Myths of Creativity: Creativity Demystified (available at www.mindramp.org/products.php) explores five prevalent myths and misunderstandings about creativity and innovation.

The Reality:  Both novelty and routine are important aspects of creativity. As William James, the father of American psychology said over a century ago, “The more of the details of daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their proper work.” [1]

• Behavior and action are grounded in the performance of reliable routines.
• The more automatic routines and habits we have under unconscious and automatic control, the more time and energy our conscious brain has to devote to creative thinking.
•  But, routines and habits can become outdated and non-functional as conditions change. New ideas and approaches are needed to address new situations and altered conditions.
•  New, creative behavioral approaches are only useful to the extent that they modify existing routines, or replace them and become new routines themselves.
• An innovative business approach only becomes useful and profitable when it is operationalized and can be reliably duplicated.

Creativity is a hot topic, as well it should be. The business world understands that the only way to remain competitive in a constantly expanding and changing global environment is to create nimble organizations that generate innovative products and services on a regular basis. The most valuable employees are those who can use their creative intelligence to drive innovation. It has been said that a Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) is the new MBA, recognizing that training in the arts often does a better job of nurturing creative thinkers than do classes in accounting and systems management.

Preparing students for today’s environment requires not only filling young people’s heads with facts and figures, but also giving them the skills needed to go beyond the information given. Tomorrow’s workforce must be able to imagine better worlds and figure out how to make them real. Creativity and innovation are today’s survival skills.

But, creativity is a mysterious entity.  We are rarely taught how to be creative. We have to figure it out for ourselves. The good news is that scientific research into creativity has experienced a resurgence in the past decade, especially with the rapid expansion of research on the brain that has been propelled by advances in neuroimaging technologies.  The bad news is that creativity is still little understood and myths and misunderstandings continue to be perpetuated in classrooms, labs, the media and the workplace.

In a recently completed work called Myths of Creativity: Creativity Demystified, I focus on 5 prominent myths, set the record straight (as I see it) and use the myths as entry points for discussion about key aspects of creativity and innovation. In this blog MYTHS OF CREATIVITY, MINDRAMP CONSULTING provides summaries of each myth in the hope of stimulating comment and discussion.  Creativity can be learned and enhanced, but only if we can get beyond common myths and misunderstandings and understand how the process really operates.

Derek Paravincini remembers every piece of music he has ever heard and can transpose  those tunes into any musical style. Stephen Wiltshire is taken on helicopter rides over Rome and Paris and renders exact, photorealistic drawings of the cities from memory.

Kim Peek, the model for Dustin Hoffman’s role in the movie “Rain Man,” could read two pages of a book at the same time, one with the right and one with the left eye, and remember ever word of text years later, eventually memorizing thousands of books. Daniel Tammet can figure out cube roots quicker than a computer and can recall pi to 22,514 digits.

We are amazed by these savants, and are envious of their powers. But, each of these super-performers also suffers debilities of varying degrees. Some, like Tammet are socially awkward and are unable to hold down a steady job. Others, like Peek and Paravincini and largely incapable of buttoning their own shirts or conducting normal activities of daily living.

What is savantism? It is defined as a neurological condition frequently associated with childhood autism that couples profound disabilities with incredible virtuosity that is usually confined to five areas: music, art, mathematics, calendar calculation and  mechanical/spatial skills, and sometimes includes extraordinary memory recall.

Alan Snyder from the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney in Australia, an expert on savantism argues “that savant skills are latent in us all.” If so, can those of us with so-called “normal brains” learn to access those skills, without suffering the consequences of the associated debilities? Consider this outline of a working hypothesis on why savants are capable of achieving their “super-power” abilities.  It suggest that we can, indeed, ramp up our own creative abilities by emulating savant practices.

Savants achieve their superior skills in one or more following ways:

• Privileged access to low-level processing – Alan Snyder suggests that savants have a unique ability to access “lower level, less-processed information, before it is packaged into holistic concepts and meaningful labels.”  With normal processing, the lower-level computations take place outside of conscious awareness. Consciousness receives only an “executive summary,” without all of the boring details. Savants, however, are much more aware of all the details. Rather than just seeing a horse, for example, artistic savants see lines and shadows and edges that, when combined, indicate we are looking at a horse.  It is access to these fundamental elements that makes artistic savants better draftsmen, musicians and mathematicians. The rest of us are distracted by the higher-level concepts and are blind to the details that make drawings, music and mathematics come to life.
• Hyper-focus — Savants appear to achieve a Zen-like ability to function entirely “in the moment” and a laser-like focus of all their attention and, therefore, all of their cognitive energy on one single activity. Savants are able to limit, or eliminate, distractions by putting all their attention on a single topic. (In fact, they may have no choice if other cognitive functions are compromised.) Hyper-focus, therefore, has two aspects: 1) the emotional commitment to the topic is intense and highly motivated; and, 2) there are no distractions so the attention is concentrated and sustained.
• Heightened Sensory Acuity — The privileged access to low-level sensory elements, coupled with hyper-focus, may provide savants with a heightened ability to discern subtle variations in sensory data, variations that are “invisible” to the normal eye or ear. Trained musicians for example, are able to hear variations in pitch and timbre that are missed by the naive listener. It seems plausible the savant brain automatically processes more sensory information than do normal minds.
• Obsessive Practice — Savants have limited abilities and limited interests and, as is common with autism, engage in obsessive-compulsive behaviors. If the obsessive behavior centers around a creative activity, the hours and hours of listening and practice could result in amplified skill levels. Early theories about savantism, in fact, focused on this idea as the primary source of extraordinary accomplishment. But, practice alone does not make perfect. Practice that corrects mistakes and strengthens areas of weakness does lead to improvement. Heightened sensory acuity and awareness of low-level elements may make mistakes obvious and unpleasant and help savants practice not only obsessively, but well.
• Prodigious Memory — Some savants, like Kim Peek with 12,000 books in mind certainly have extraordinary memories. Memory has three main parts: encoding, consolidating and then retrieving. Unless a memory is encoded in the first place, there is no possibility that it will be consolidated or recalled later.  Encoding is critical. The external event must make an impression on the brain. Because of “hyper-focus,” “heightened sensory acuity” and an obsessive interest in the subject, the encoding process of savants is probably super-charged.  The encoding of music, or text, or arithmetic relationships is probably super strong.  With obsessive practice, this magnified encoding is also strongly consolidated, leading to a heightened ability for recall.
• Disinhibition – Savants, and some people with dementias and injuries, seem to have gained (to echo Snyder) “privileged access” to normally inhibited cognitive processes. The left hemisphere, for example, is generally considered the dominant hemisphere, largely because of the specific language functions that are localized there.  The executive parts of the brain, as another example, tend to act as a censor on certain more primitive behaviors that emanate from the brain stem and limbic systems.  Inhibition of dominant areas caused by debility or injury can have the effect of disinhibiting other areas that have been spared, and at times can unleash new-found creative and artistic sensibilities.
• Equipartitioning — Neuroscientist Alan Snyder suggests that savants possess a heightened ability to partition sensory information into equal parts.  We all possess this ability to some degree.  If two friends chip in to by a foot-long sandwich, they both will know immediately if the sandwich is cut in equal parts. The friend who gets the shorter piece will feel cheated.  Whatever can be divided half can further be divided into quarters and eights and so on. Savants may be able to take the “so on” part to extraordinary lengths.  Music is partitioned into quarter notes, eighth notes, dotted sixteenth notes. As Snyder says, “. . . integer arithmetic is simply the ability to separate groups into an equal number of element – that is to equipartition.” Because of the unique processing described in the points above, savants may be able to hear, see and feel divisions of objects, space and time that are invisible to the rest of us.

Snyder suggests that savant skills are latent within all of us. This hypothesis, begins to detail the types of skills that savants exploit to achieve their super talents, and tends to confirm Synder’s suggestion. None of these skills are beyond the reach of any “normal” mind. We all employ these skills to some extent already. Could super-power talents be within our reach if we could effectively harness and exploit these savant skills? At very least, it seems plausible that by improving our skill levels in each of the areas outlined above, we could begin to tap the potential of our inner savant.

REFERENCES:

Snyder, Allan (2009) Explaining and inducing savant skills: privileged access to lower level, less-processed information. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Vol 364, No. 1522, 1399-1405.

Treffert, Darold A., & Christensen, D. D. (2005) Inside the Mind of A Savant. Scientific American. December.

Kaufman, Scott Barry. (2010) Conversations on Creativity with Allan Snyder. Psychologytoday.com. January 13.

Johnson, Richard. (2008) A Genius explains. The Guardian, February 11.

Fox, Douglas S. (2002) The Inner Savant. Discover. February, 42-49.

Monica Lopez-Gonzalez and Charles Limb, both of Johns Hopkins University, authored a recent article entitled “Musical Creativity and the Brain” that appears in the online journal Cerebrum, from the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives,

These two researchers are among a small group of scientists who are using brain imaging to study the neural underpinnings of artistic creativity. Limb, and his colleague Allan Braun, put keyboard players in an fMRI and look at what parts of the brain are activated when participants “either freely improvised to the auditory accompaniment of a prerecorded jazz quartet or reproduced memorized jazz sequences.”

Lopez-Gonzalez has added to the research on improvisation by trying to “identify the neural substrates underlying the spontaneous generation of rhyming sequences in hip-hop performances.” Lopez-Gonzalez had professional freestyle rappers perform to rhythmic accompaniment “as they either spontaneously improvised lyrics or recited a pre-memorized novel rap.”

Two conclusions can be taken from the research: 1) music performance engages multiple parts of the brain, and 2) improvisational music activates different parts of the brain than is activated by reading from a score or rapping from a pre-memorized script.

The first point is important for discussions of brain health and cognitive fitness, which are improved when the brain is stimulated and exercised.  Mental stimulation is more effective when multiple parts of the brain (neural/glial cell networks) are fully are engaged. Just as with physical exercise, mental exercise needs to take a cross-training approach, engaging as many different, connected brain areas as possible.  The work by Limb and Lopez-Gonzales contributes to a growing body of research that shows that music production and music appreciation engage large distributed areas of the brain.  It is fair to assume, therefore, that making and listening to music are activities that are likely to promote the health and vitality of our brains.

The second point is relevant to brain health as well, and also tells us something about the nature of creativity and how we might be able to improve our creative efforts.  As both Limb and Lopez-Gonzales demonstrated, both types of performance (improvisation on the one hand, and strict adherence to a written score on the other) use multiple parts of the brain, but they use different parts.  To get the best brain workout, therefore, performers should integrate both approaches in order to engage a full range of interconnected brain processing networks.

Further, it is important to note that improvisation requires not only the activation of different cognitive processing networks, but also the quieting or inhibition of other brain regions that support reading from a score. In other words, creativity involves a recognition of which cognitive functions need to be engaged and which need to be inhibited in order to best support the type of performance one is practicing or performing.  When a jazz combo is playing together and reading their charts they need to engage one network of brain functions. But, then when the individual musicians break out for their improvised solos, the improviser needs to turn down the chart-reading brain areas and turn on the improvising brain areas.  This metacognitive activity – thinking about thinking – is high-level exercise for the brain.

Engagement in creative activities that mix learned activities with improvisational routines provide an excellent workout for brains of all ages.

Get your mind ready for a new term that seems to be gaining some currency – “connectome.”  When I first encountered the word, I understood that it was about connections in the brain but for some reason I encoded the word as “connect to me.” But the final emphasis is on “tome” as in “home” not “to me,” so the word sounds like (and is meant to evoke the sense of) the genome. The term suggests that the power of the brain is not to be found in its component parts, but in the way that these component parts are connected.

The term was first coined by Olaf Sporns (U. of Indiana) in a 2005 paper entitled “The Human Connectome: A Structural Description of the Human Brain.” For Sporns, the connectome refers to a mapping of connections between regions of the brain. Sporns called for research that would provide a “comprehensive structural description of the network of elements and connections forming the human brain.” And, he proposed to call this dataset the “human connectome.”

Sporn argued that the mapping of regional connections would significantly “increase our understanding of how functional brain states emerge from their underlying structural substrate.” In 2010, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched the $30 million Human Connectome Project to map these regional connections.

Sebastian Seung, a young MIT professor and researcher feels that we need to go one step farther, mapping not only regions of the brain, but also mapping each and every neuronal connection.  We have a hundred billion neurons in the brain, and a thousand times more connections, so Seung’s goal is daunting, but he thinks it is possible in the future. He discusses his ideas in his first book called “Connectome.”

I spoke with Seung at a book reading at Washington DC’s well-known independent book store, Politics and Prose.  Seung is a Professor of Computational Neuroscience and Physics at MIT and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.  He is handsome, witty, prodigiously smart and in his a spiffy jacket, jeans and shiny gold sneakers, displays an unassuming charm.   Candidly, this young thinker looks much too young to have achieved such status, but is his ideas have already reached TED audiences and his book will certainly continue to intrigue others.

Sueng and his MIT colleagues are currently developing techniques that he hopes will eventually map all of the neuronal connections in the brain. Seung showed slides of a labor intensive technique he developed that colorizes thin slices of brain tissue and then pieces them together, one slice at a time, to construct the locations of neurons and their connection points, the synapses.  For additional background I suggest a few minutes viewing that TED video online called “Sebastian Seung: I am My Connectome.”  And, also check out a “citizen science” project put together by Seung, called Eyewire, (http://eyewire.org/) where you can help map the neuronal structure of the human retina.

I asked Seung if we will ever be able to map neuronal connections in a living brain.  He said the hope is to use ever more powerful neuroimaging machines to chart neuronal connections in living, active brains. The current technology, he explained, does not get anywhere near the resolution that is needed but improvements to the technology are in the works.

I had been curious whether glial cells might play a role in the connectome research.  Glial cells make up an estimated 80% or so of the brain and they were once thought to be little more than structural helpers for the neurons. But recent research by Douglas Fields (see his book, The Other Brain) and others clearly demonstrates that glial cells communicate with each other and also communicate with neurons. They play a much more important role in brain processing than had previously been imagined.  When I inquired about a the role of glial cells in the human connectome, Sueng said that while his current book focuses exclusively on neuronal connections, glial cells would clearly need to be factored into the understanding of the connectome.

Sueng likes to say that “you are your connectome,” meaning that our personal identity is encoded in the pattern of connections between neurons. These basic patterns are initially established by our inherited genes, but are constantly being modified by experience and interaction with the environment.  Seung summarizes the types of change that are possible by offering “four R’s:”

Reweighting means changes in the strengths of synapses.

Reconnection is the creation and elimination of synapses.

Rewiring is the creation and elimination of neural branches.

Regeneration is the creation and elimination of neurons.

To understand how the brain produces feelings of love and compassion, for example, or why one brain is more creative than another, we will need to understand how the active connections in the brain animate the various functional areas. It will be fascinating to monitor the progress of The Human Connectome Project as well as the pioneering work of Sebastian Seung and his colleagues at MIT.