Creativity Archives - Page 3 of 5

Creativity: It Isn’t All in Your Head

September 25, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

creative-brain

Creativity is the ability to see what already exists in a new light, to think of new ideas, and to make new things.

If whatever has been created (the new idea or object) is widely accepted (valued) in the field within which it was generated, it is called Big C creativity. Creative results that don’t meet both of those criteria are referred to as Little C creativity.

The fact that we can imagine something does not prove that it is possible. —Julian Baggini, The Ego Trick

Maybe your creative endeavors have—or will—generate widespread acceptance and approval; maybe not.

You don’t have to aim for Big C creativity, but if you aren’t engaging in Little C creativity, you’re unlikely to create anything big. And you might also be depriving yourself of a more enjoyable and satisfying life.

Even though personal creativity may not lead to fame and fortune, it can do something that from the individual’s point of view is even more important: make day-to-day experiences more vivid, more enjoyable more rewarding. When we live creatively, boredom is banished and every moment holds the promise of a fresh discovery. Whether or not these discoveries enrich the world beyond our personal lives, living creatively links us with the process of evolution. —Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

What Does It Take to Be Creative?

Are creative people different in some fundamental way from other people? Do they have exceptional intelligence? Are they more right-brained? Do they tend to be messy, unfocused, disorganized, and impractical? Are all creative people artistic? Highly talented in some particular area? Are they unconventional? Do they feel things more deeply? Do they have more vivid imaginations? Do they know how to think outside the box?

These questions are common, because we tend to think of people as being either creative or non-creative. End of story. But even the most diehard “non-creative” person will occasionally, sometimes accidentally, come up with a fresh insight. And even the most relentlessly “creative” person will run out of ideas from time to time. Regardless of personality, background, talent, or experience, just about anyone can get better at being creative because anyone can learn how the creative process works.

How Does the Creative Process Work?

Depending on who you ask, the creative process has anywhere from three to ten steps, maybe more. What it all boils down to is using the right part of the brain at the right time. In fact, the creative process isn’t significantly different from problem-solving—and a case can even be made that the way to approach art is as problem-solving.

Practicing problem solving in art projects gets the mind working, thinking and open to solutions not before considered. If the student can think about an “art problem” in new ways, then they not only build skills for the art room, but they train their minds to think in a problem-solving mode. —artist Valerie Mann, speaking at the University of Michigan School of Social Work

Find or identify a problem to solve and create an intention to solve it. This involves using both focused and unfocused attention. (What’s the difference between trying to solve a problem and trying to find a problem to solve?)
Immerse yourself in it. Grapple with it. Obtain the knowledge or information you need to have in order to solve it (focused attention/knowledge loading/System 2). Choreographer Twyla Tharp has a good exercise for this step. Write down 20 things you’ll need to know in order to be able to solve the problem.
Divert your attention. Step away from the problem to an unrelated activity (unfocused attention/System 1) to allow your unconscious to process the problem and arrive at a solution. You could turn to a repetitive task, take a walk, or listen to some music.
Fine tune and implement the solution.

Each experience with the creative process expands your mental model, which increases your creative possibilities. To get the greatest benefit, though, you need to take action (Step 4). We are embodied beings, and what we do has more of an effect on our mental model than what we think.

Counterintuitive Creativity Tips

Creativity involves both parts of the brain—the conscious and the unconscious. The trick, if there is one, is to know which type of thinking to use when. Sometimes you need to apply focused (System 2) attention, which is linear, logical, effortful, and slow. At other times you need unfocused (System 1) attention, which is associative, non-logical, runs in the background, and is fast. Attempting to sustain System 2 attention is counterproductive.

New ideas are not spun from thin air. Creativity involves synthesizing, remixing, and re-envisioning what already exists.

Routines and habits are not by their nature creativity killers. They can actually increase your creative thinking by freeing up System 2 attention. The only real creativity killers are tunnel vision and inflexibility.

Constraints can be beneficial to creativity as long as you know they’re there.

If you want a brain that can think more complex thoughts and solve more complex problems, get in the habit of learning new things. And move!

Physical activity is cognitive candy. Exercise stimulates one of the brain’s most powerful growth factors, BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor). According to Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey, “It keeps [existing] neurons young and healthy, and makes them more ready to connect with one another. It also encourages neurogenesis—the creation of new cells.” The cells most sensitive to this are in the hippocampus, inside the very regions deeply involved in human cognition. —John Medina, Brain Rules

As John Cleese says, Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating. In daily life, all over the world, we are faced with many problems, large and small. Why not operate on them creatively—and find some new ones to solve while we’re at it?

Why Right-Brain Left-Brain Is Wrong-Headed

May 6, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

Conventional wisdom has it that some people are right-brained, meaning they tend to be creative, intuitive, and emotional, while others are left-brained, meaning they tend to be logical, analytical, and methodical. But once again conventional wisdom has vastly oversimplified and overstated the situation. (There’s a reason why conventional wisdom tends to function this way, but that’s another blog post.)

It’s true that the two hemispheres of the brain function differently. Much of what we know about the differences between the two hemispheres is the result of research conducted in the 1960s on patients with split brains. Normally the two hemispheres are in ongoing communication with each other via the bridge of fibers called the corpus callosum. But the corpus callosum was surgically severed in some epilepsy patients in a last-ditch attempt to relieve their symptoms.

Michael Gazzaniga, Roger Sperry, and two other researchers conducted the testing on these individuals that revealed some of the effects—many of them quite surprising—of cutting off communication between the hemispheres. Later on, Gazzaniga conducted additional research with Joseph LeDoux.

To me, the most interesting thing they discovered is what happens as a result of visual information no longer being passed from one hemisphere to another. Language is primarily a function of the left hemisphere. So although the right hemisphere could recognize an image not shown to the left hemisphere, it couldn’t communicate about it verbally. David Eagleman summarizes these experiments in his book Incognito. Remember that brain wiring is contralateral, which means that the right hemisphere processes information from the left visual field and controls the movements of the left hand—and vice versa for the left hemisphere.

In 1978, researchers Michael Gazzaniga and Joseph LeDoux flashed a picture of a chicken claw to the left hemisphere of a split-brain patient and a picture of a snowy winter scene to his right hemisphere. The patient was then asked to point at cards that represented what he had just seen. His right hand pointed to a card with a chicken, and his left hand pointed to a card with a snow shovel.

The experimenters asked him why he was pointing to the shovel. Recall that his left hemisphere (the one with the capacity for language), had information only about a chicken, and nothing else. But the left hemisphere, without missing a beat, fabricated a story: “Oh, that’s simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.”

When one part of the brain makes a choice, other parts can quickly invent a story to explain why. If you show the command “Walk” to the right hemisphere (the one without language), the patient will get up and start walking. If you stop him and ask why he’s leaving, his left hemisphere, cooking up an answer, will say something like “I was going to get a drink of water.”

The chicken/shovel experiment led Gazzaniga and LeDoux to conclude that the left hemisphere acts as an “interpreter,” watching the actions and behaviors of the body and assigning a coherent narrative to these events. And the left hemisphere works this way even in normal, intact brains.

One important thing to remember is that for people with intact brains, the two hemispheres remain in constant communication with each other. We are whole-brained people who use both parts of our brain all the time, including during the creative process and in the course of logical problem-solving.

Although this, too, is an oversimplification, it’s closer to the mark to say that if we did not have language or discernment, our creative ideas would be useless and possibly incoherent. And if we did not have emotion and imagination, we would have no context for decision making.

Not only is neither hemisphere “better” than the other, you may be surprised at the conclusion Gazzaniga has reached about which hemisphere is more “conscious” and which hemisphere is more literal.

After many years of fascinating research on the split brain, it appears that the inventing and interpreting left hemisphere has a conscious experience very different from that of the truthful, literal right brain. Although both hemispheres can be viewed as conscious, the left brain’s consciousness far surpasses that of the right. Which raises another set of questions that should keep us busy for the next 30 years or so.

I’m looking forward to the results of that additional research!

What’s the Link between Creativity and Mental Illness?

August 14, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

Do the words tortured and genius go hand-in-hand? If you’re highly creative does that mean you’re more susceptible to mental illness? Do you, in fact, need to have a mental illness in order to be creative?

The link between creativity and mental illness has been a subject of discussion and speculation at least since Aristotle suggested there was one. More recently, it has been the subject of much scientific study. The topic is in the limelight once again due to Robin Williams’ suicide.

This edition of Brain & Mind Roundup (#5) links to four articles by, or citing the work of, Nancy Andreasen and Shelly Cooper, two researchers who study creativity and who have published books on creativity and the brain.

Click on the titles to read the full articles.

Secrets of the Creative Brain

Nancy Andreasen (The Atlantic)

Andreasen is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who began exploring the anecdotal link between creativity and mental illness in the 1960s when she studied a group of writers from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She writes:

I have spent much of my career focusing on the neuroscience of mental illness, but in recent decades I’ve also focused on what we might call the science of genius, trying to discern what combination of elements tends to produce particularly creative brains. What, in short, is the essence of creativity? Over the course of my life, I’ve kept coming back to two more-specific questions: What differences in nature and nurture can explain why some people suffer from mental illness and some do not? And why are so many of the world’s most creative minds among the most afflicted?

The Relationship between Creativity and Mental Illness

At brainpickings, Maria Popova provides a beautiful and thoughtful presentation of Nancy Andreason’s book The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius. Popova says:

One of the most interesting chapters in the book deals with the correlation between creativity and mental illness, bringing scientific rigor to such classic anecdotal examples as those evidenced in Van Gogh’s letters or Sylvia Plath’s journals or Leo Tolstoy’s diary of depression or Virginia Woolf’s suicide note. Having long opposed the toxic “tortured genius” myth of creativity, I was instantly intrigued by Andreasen’s inquiry, the backdrop of which she paints elegantly:

Did mental illness facilitate [these creators’] unique abilities, whether it be to play a concerto or to perceive a novel mathematical relationship? Or did mental illness impair their creativity after its initial meteoric burst in their twenties? Or is the relationship more complex than a simple one of cause and effect, in either direction?

And this is where the monumental importance of her study shines: What Andreasen found wasn’t confirmation for the “tortured genius” myth — the idea that a great artist must have some dark, tragic pathology in order to create — but quite the opposite: these women and men had become successful writers not because of their tortuous mental health but despite it.

The Real Link Between Creativity and Mental Illness

Scott Barry Kaufman (SciAm)

Scott Barry Kaufman, Scientific Director of The Imagination Institute and a researcher in the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, investigates the measurement and development of imagination. He questions Andreason’s findings and looks deeper, writing:

The oft-cited studies by Kay Redfield Jamison, Nancy Andreasen, and Arnold Ludwig showing a link between mental illness and creativity have been criticized on the grounds that they involve small, highly specialized samples with weak and inconsistent methodologies and a strong dependence on subjective and anecdotal accounts.

Is there any germ of truth to the link between creativity and mental illness? The latest research suggests there is something to the link, but the truth is much more interesting.

It seems that the key to creative cognition is opening up the flood gates and letting in as much information as possible. Because you never know: sometimes the most bizarre associations can turn into the most productively creative ideas. Indeed, Shelley Carson and her colleagues found that the most eminent creative achievers among a sample of Harvard undergrads were seven times more likely to have reduced latent inhibition.

Latent inhibition is a filtering mechanism that we share with other animals, and it is tied to the neurotransmitter dopamine. A reduced latent inhibition allows us to treat something as novel, no matter how may times we’ve seen it before and tagged it as irrelevant. Prior research shows a link between reduced latent inhibition and schizophrenia.

Creativity and Psychopathology: A Shared Vulnerability Model

In this paper, Shelly Carson, Harvard researcher on creativity, psychopathology, and resilience, and author of The Creative Brain: Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity, and Innovation in Your Life, reviews “the empirical evidence for an elevated risk of three disorders in creative individuals: mood disorders, schizospectrum disorders, and alcoholism.”

While creativity is considered a positive personal trait, highly creative individuals have demonstrated elevated risk for certain forms of psychopathology. [In] this paper I argue that a model of shared vulnerability explains the relationship between creativity and psychopathology. This model, supported by recent findings from neuroscience and molecular genetics, suggests that biological determinants that confer risk for psychopathology interact with protective cognitive factors to enhance creative ideation.

Carson

Elements of shared vulnerability include cognitive disinhibition (which allows increased stimuli into conscious awareness), an attentional style that is driven by novelty-salience, and neural hyperconnectivity that may increase associations among disparate stimuli. These vulnerabilities interact with superior meta-cognitive protective factors, such as high IQ, working memory capacity, and cognitive flexibility, to produce an enlarged body of stimuli that is available in conscious awareness to be manipulated and combined to form novel and original ideas.

~ ~ ~

Reading and writing about this topic inevitably makes me think of my partner, who died nearly 10 years ago. He had a very high IQ, good working memory, and great cognitive flexibility, all of which seem to have mitigated the vulnerability factors, which were also present. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which wreaked some havoc in his early and mid-life before it was treated. At times, he was more than a little eccentric, with maybe a touch of mad genius about him. (Always interesting, that’s for sure!)

He was extremely creative, prolifically so, in a variety of areas–especially writing, art, and music–and he continued to be creative while he was on medication, which was very effective for him. So clearly his bipolar bent, if you will, didn’t cause him to be creative. But there was definitely a link there. Those areas of shared vulnerability were significantly moderated by medication, but also by his own awareness and self-monitoring. And maybe that’s something to take away from this, too. Self-awareness and self-monitoring are great tools for keeping us grounded even in the midst of our wildest flights of imagination.

U Is for Unconscious

July 31, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 3 Comments

Three things we don’t like, all beginning with u: uncertainty, unsolved problems, and urgency. Combine the three and we’re likely to encounter another u word: uncomfortable. Actually, uncomfortable is putting it mildly. Our discomfort with the triumvirate of uncertainty, unsolved problems, and urgency is so strong we will go to great, sometimes absurd, lengths to avoid experiencing or even acknowledging it.

That’s…unfortunate. For at least two reasons.

First, in our haste to return to the illusory state of certainty, we tend to do things like jump to conclusions, accept the first answer or explanation that comes to mind (consistent with our preexisting beliefs), make a mess by acting prematurely, or immobilize ourselves in endless rounds of rumination. Rumination feels like problem-solving but it’s the opposite.

Second, by refusing to let ourselves experience—and appreciate—the discomfort that accompanies uncertainty, unsolved problems, and urgency, we deny ourselves another experience: the pure joy of the aha! moment when a solution presents itself. It may take a while, but suddenly what was murky and inchoate becomes bright and clear. The path ahead becomes obvious. I say the solution “presents itself” because although we tend to take credit for coming up with the brilliant idea or flash of insight, the part of our brain we identify with had little to do with it. It’s the unconscious that figured it out and then clued us in.

One of the reasons waiting it out while the unconscious does its thing makes us squirm is that we have no control over the process. It isn’t going to occur by the force of our will or on our timetable. When we try to make it happen we usually just end up getting in our own way and muddling the process.

Something that’s helped me develop an appreciation for—if not a wholehearted embrace of—uncertainty and the other u states is recognizing the times when I’m unclear or don’t have enough information. No matter how desperately I might want to act, if I’m not sure which action to take, I wait until the next thing to do becomes apparent.

That still makes me uncomfortable, and certainly no one would describe me as a patient person. But I’ve had enough of these experiences that I’ve come to expect an answer or a solution to show up. A pattern will be seen. Dots will be connected. I’ve learned to trust the unconscious part of my brain in these situations even though I can’t observe what it’s doing.

I’m learning to give credit where credit is due. After all, the hamster with the rudder (the conscious part of my brain) would go nowhere at all without the hamster on the wheel (the unconscious part of my brain).

It isn’t easy, but rather than trying to get back to comfortable and certain as quickly as possible, we can develop a tolerance for the discomfort. We can even learn to appreciate the uncertainty, the knottiness of an unsolved problem, and the urgency of the situation. Whatever is on the other side of our current distress is unimaginable to us now, but it could be amazing—even awesome. Why take the chance of missing out on something awesome just to avoid feeling a little uncomfortable?

The Fruits of a Lesser Discontent

April 17, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

I don’t mean to imply that all great ideas or outcomes—or at least all of my ideas or outcomes—arise from states of discontent. Some have been the result of a logical progression of thought or activity. Others have come from Aha! moments when my unconscious connected some previously unconnected or unrecognized dots.

But just as a moment of deep existential discontent started me on the path of creating Farther to Go!, a moment of lesser discontent led to the creation of the What Do You Want? course. And weather played a role that time, too.

One overcast and unusually cool early fall day, I rebelled against immersing myself in the tasks I needed to complete. Imagine me mentally stamping my foot and scowling. This isn’t a particularly common occurrence, but it’s definitely more likely to happen on gray days than on sunny ones. In this instance, I decided to make myself a cup of coffee to generate some motivation or at least a small burst of energy.

While I was waiting for the water to boil, I asked myself, out of the blue, what I wanted to do instead of all the boring and tedious stuff. What did I really want to do? If I could do anything. And then it happened! I found myself answering a different question instead, an easier one: What do I want to do that’s practical?

By then I was familiar with the brain’s tendency to substitute an easier question for a hard one and to answer the easier question. But I had never before been aware of it as it happened, and I was kind of stunned. Why couldn’t I answer the original question? What made it too hard to answer? I should know what I want, right?

Well, maybe. Later that day, I decided to try to find out. I set myself the task of asking and answering the question “What do I really want?” every day for 30 days. Not just once, but multiple times, using 5×8 index cards. I ended up with nearly 500 answers, including several surprises. Obviously I hadn’t known everything I wanted.

Afterward, I put the individual items into general categories. That was even more illuminating. But the final step was what made the process priceless. I realized that all the items on my list fit under the umbrella of one or more of what I came to call Big Picture Wants. As I wrote out the words and phrases—in my case 12—of my own Big Picture Wants I knew I was on to something huge. I had been able to identify everything I wanted to have in my life.

Now that I’ve done this, I can’t imagine not being clear about what those things are. How can I set goals, make decisions or choices, or work on habits and intentions without knowing how they fit into the bigger picture? How can anyone?

When discontent strikes, we can try to make it go away quickly, or we can use it as motivation to dig deeper and examine our assumptions. If I were given a choice between being discontent and being complacent, I’d choose being discontent every time.