Weekly Roundup: The Brain's Secrets to Exceptional Creativity, Can AI make you More Creative, and What does the Brain do at Rest

This week let’s look at creativity and what AI can contribute to this - which is a lot, if you are not creative that is?

What Does Exceptional Creativity Look Like in the Brain?

There has been plenty of research into creative individuals and also brain scanning research but there are also a number of problems with this. For example, one problem is that creative people tend to be intelligent so if comparing to a norm population you may be measuring a facet of intelligence and not creativeness.

Ariana Anderson, an assistant research professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA aimed to fill in these gaps in creativity research and expand on it by comparing brains of highly creative people and matching them to controls of the same IQ. People who exhibit exceptional creativity are known as “Big C” types and thee can come in multiple professions.

Anderson recruited 21 Big C visual artists but also 21 big C scientists and 24 regular smart people which served as the control group.

They were asked to do various tasks while in a brain scanner related to creativity and idea generation.

What did the researchers find?

• More randomness at rest: the brains of Big C individuals showed more randomness in resting state at a global level whereas generally smart people wer more organised and structured. This seems to point to a state of creativity rather than creativity being an activity.

• More local clustering at rest: while big C brains were more random at rest they also showed higher clustering with blobs of efficient activity suggesting that it is randomness combined with local efficiency that can contribute to creativity.

• Less efficient and clustering during creativity tasks: this may sounds as a surprise that their brains were less efficient and locally organised during creativity tasks but it suggests that their brain are more exploratory or drawing from farther and different regions.

This supports what we already know but gives more solid evidence to this - exceptionally creative brains are more random and exploratory and less efficient and organised in general.

You may then wonder how on earth can I or others be more creative. Well there is also a lesson in this:

1. Focus is not the best way to be creative. So less focus.

2. Mind wandering i.e. daydreaming or doing nothing are times when creativity can happen. Particularly when combined with something active with a low cognitive load such as walking.

3. Relaxation will help creativity so lower stress if you need creativity.

Those who know me will know I have preached the above for years - there is a genuine benefit to a good bit of mind wandering (says he who is an expert at it). But I am sure you will still need to do some focused work!

There is worry that creativity is dropping with reports back in 2019 showing that creativity seems to have dropped in children - the pandemic could have accelerated this. It could be that there is too much focused and functional work and not enough play. Play is critical for many things but also healthy cognitive development.

But in the current age there is a new challenge to our brains: AI. With AI taking on roles of many creatives already with effective AI tools for art, music, and also writing (my articles are still good old brain and hand work in case you wondered!)

Can AI Makes You More Creative?

This was the question asked by Anil Doshi and Oliver Hauser of the University of Exeter - and particularly in the creative context of writing short stories.