Preview - Handbook of Your Brain in Business: 2. The High-Performing Brain 2.3 Your Creative Brain
Handbook of the Brain in Business
The High-Performing Brain
Your Creative Brain
Previous: Your Knowledgable Brain
We have now looked at the High-Performing Brain in general, the Predictive Brain, and the Knowledgeable Brain, all things that lead to highly functional abilities in all areas in life and business.
The above are aspects that impress, but another aspect can impress even more in the right circumstances: imagine sitting in a meeting with high powered executives and smart consultants and you are all blocked on a sticky problem. But then in a flash of insight a creative solution pops up in your head, almost complete as a functional idea, and you speak up outlining this creative solution that combines various aspects of the problem at hand, novel uses of the expertise in the room, and human psychology. Everyone looks at you in awe – amazing, you have nailed it. Tadddaaa your creative brain has found a creative solution.
That is not very realistic, creativity happens in many ways (rarely in the moment – I discuss below), and we also risk confusing innovation, which is more about how to operationalise and use existing knowledge and technologies. But, fact is, we do aspire to be creative, to have those insightful “aha moments”, to find solutions that no-one else seems to think of. We also admire and reward many of these individuals. I explore all of these below.
But back to one of our persistent questions: is creativity born or bred?
Indeed, can we even develop and improve creativity?
Let’s first look into the brains of highly creative individuals to see if this gives us any clues.
1. Into the creative brain
There have been multiple studies and brain scanning done on creative brains and aspects of creativity, but two a recent one jumps out as being insightful and giving a general explanation of what makes for particularly creative brains.
The first comes from Ariana Anderson, an assistant research professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA [1]. To explore the question of what makes creative brains she and her colleagues put exceptionally creative visual artists, and scientists, known as “Big C” types (selected by a panel of experts and objective criteria) – into brain scanners to try to see what was happening in their brains during creative tasks. But this research was interesting because they also recruited a “control” group of what were smart but less creative individuals. This is to distinguish between what is simply a smart brain or one that is creative. Creative people also tend to be smart so when measuring creative brains, we may actually be simply measuring influences on IQ.
And what did they find?
They found that, yes, creative people do use their brains differently and in an interesting way.
When the brain processes information and engages in tasks, the brain tends to send all signals through standard pathways, and these are connected through various “hubs” such as a region called the thalamus. When at rest creative people’s brains seem to operate differently: they connect regions of the brains without going through these hubs. Basically, they are more random at rest. This points to a state of creativity, simply having a creative brain, rather than an activity-based brain signature.
But this creative signature at rest was also more organised. How so you may say having just said that the signature is less organised? They found that the brains of high creatives had local hubs of efficiency, but the wide network was more random.
This suggest that alternative pathways to major regions start off creativity, but local efficiency allows these concepts to form coherently.
This is only at rest. What about when they were actually engaging their brain in creative tasks?
Well, the signature was also similar in some ways. When engaging in creative tasks their brains were less efficient and there was less local organisation and clustering. This suggests that their brains are more exploratory or drawing from farther and different regions.
So smart brains are more structured and efficient at rest and during tasks, whereas creative brain connect to different further regions in less structured ways but can be locally more efficient at rest. This does point to there being a “creative brain”.
But fear not, there may be some ways to influence this, over time at least. First let’s get back to another key question, before exploring other aspects of creativity, and something that various people have proposed over the years: does our education system stifle creativity and suffocate children’s natural genius?
2. Does Education Suffocate Genius?
Sir Ken Robinson is a key figure in reforming education and back in 2007 he gave a TED talk that over time has become one of the most viewed TED talks of all time. In this he cites work by NASA to prove his point that education systems are killing creativity. The story goes thus:
In 1992 NASA were looking to identify the most creative individuals and so Dr. George Land and Dr. Beth Jarman developed a test that was designed to identify the capacity for divergent thinking which is a key aspect of creativity [2].
A test of divergent thinking would, for example, ask you how many uses you could think of for a house brick.
Non-creative answers would be things like build a house or construct a wall. This is actually the function of a brick so not creative.
Slightly creative answers may be things like: use as a paper weight, use as a hammer, use as a murder instrument, use to plant seeds in the garden. These are slightly divergent answers using properties of the brick, heavy and square with holes, to find other uses. But still not really very creative. In this also lies one of the ways of improving on this task - focus on different properties of the object at hand and you can often generate more ideas than if randomly searching.
When this task is given to young children, however, they start to think really divergently. They may say something like you could have a ginormous brick floating in space and use it to park planets. Now that is divergent – they are not constrained by simple principles of size and gravity or rotation of planets.
So, when measured like this, young children score very high on the divergent thinking test. Indeed, if this were in adults they would be classed as “geniuses”.
This hence gives rise to Sir Ken Robinson thesis that children are “geniuses” and schools are killing creativity. The rationale is simply based on this test to measure divergent thinking (in adults), children rank as “geniuses” and the older they get i.e. the longer they are at school the lower this score gets. 98% of pre-schoolers rank as geniuses according to the NASA study [2], by grade school in the US only 30%, by high school only 12%, and as adults only 2%. So, schools kill creativity.
Nice idea, but correlation is not causation, and it is mostly wrong - but note that education systems could do a lot more to promote creativity, as can you.
Why do I say this is wrong? I don’t want to be a killjoy, but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Some of the world’s greatest minds came through standard schooling – think of Einstein – and in way more traditional and stricter ways than in most modern schooling in any industrialised nation. If it works for Einstein, why not for the average Joe?
Similarly, if we look to pre-industrial societies, those tribes that are commonly featured in research and popular books such as those by Jared Diamond, we would then expect highly creative adults. But no, though we may amaze at some individual features of their society, these have essentially remained frozen in time over centuries or millennia – hardly the sign of high creativity.
So why would children be considered “geniuses” - first you notice I use parenthesis because the word does not fit for children. I previously spoke about the predictive brain and how the predictive brain is a key feature of high-performing brains.
But you may notice a contradiction, if the brain is a prediction machine, as now is commonly proposed, then precisely this creativity will decrease over time as the brain becomes more predictive. According to predictive brain thesis the role of the brain is to predict the future - not be creative. Therefore, with time the brain will become more predictive and not creative. Basically, growing up kills creativity, not schools – or not only.
This doesn’t mean that schooling couldn’t promote more creativity (see below), the same applies to many jobs and professions also. The same also applies to all of us.
But let’s also look into the brain during divergent thinking – what is happening?
3. Divergent Thinking and the Brain
As an important aspect of creativity, brain patterns of divergent thinking have been researched. For example, Caroline Di Bernardi Luft of the Queen Mary University of London [3] found different brainwave patterns during creative thinking tasks in those who were more successful in these tasks.
First participants were asked to engage in divergent thinking tasks while having their brainwaves measured.