Think Smart: A Neuroscientist's Prescription for Improving Your Brain's Performance (20 page)

So if you want to cultivate creative associations, it helps to shift the activation patterns of your brain toward right hemisphere processing. In addition, creativity is enhanced by the “power down” states of rest, relaxation, sleep, and especially dream sleep. All of these power-down states have a common mechanism: they all initiate changes in the ratios of the brain’s neurotransmitter systems.

Other studies of the brains of creative people have emphasized the importance of the temporal lobes. R. E. Jung, a psychologist at the University of New Mexico, points to the association of creativity with specific degenerative diseases affecting the temporal and frontal lobes. Typically, an aged person who has never been particularly creative prior to the onset of fronto-temporal dementia may take up painting and after little or no instruction produce highly original paintings. So far no one has explained how brain disease, which reduces brain performance in general, can lead to an increase in creativity.

One theory claims that creative impulses exist in all of us but are weakened by custom and social rules of behavior—a variation of the claim dating back to French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau that formal schooling inhibits rather than stimulates creativity. Consistent with this view, the power of these restraining influences primarily from the frontal lobes is reduced in frontotemporal dementia. The result is an outpouring of creativity originating principally within the temporal lobes.

In order to test this hypothesis, Jung recruited students from his university and measured elements found to be important to the creative process. One such element is the ability to come up with a series of uncommon uses for a common object such as a brick (paperweight; displacer of water in a toilet tank to save water with each flush). This test was combined with free-figure drawings (the students were asked to come up with as many drawings as they could in a limited period of time) followed by a restrained-drawing exercise (limiting the drawings to only a few lines), with both exercises aimed at creating original drawings. All of these tests were then tallied to yield a composite creativity score.

Two areas showed greater activation on fMRI testing of the brains of students who ranked higher in creativity: the left temporal region (critical to the assessment of social concepts) and, to a lesser extent, the posterior cingulate (important in the identification of complex relationships).

As Jung admitted to me during a discussion, this work is only preliminary (as of late 2007). Over the next few years Jung plans additional research aimed at further refining our understanding of the relationship between creativity and the brain.

Despite the ongoing tentative nature of brain research on creativity, I believe a practical conclusion seems justified: creativity can be increased by divergent-thinking exercises.

In order to get a clearer idea about the relationship of creativity to divergent thinking (commonly referred to as thinking “outside the box”), I met with Temple Grandin at a brain conference in Tucson. The author of
Thinking in Pictures,
an account published in 1995 describing her life from the dual perspective of a scientist and an autistic person, Grandin now divides her time between serving as a professor in the Department of Animal Sciences at Colorado State University, where she specializes in livestock handling and behavior, and her second career as a much sought-after lecturer on Asperger’s syndrome. Grandin is famous among cattle breeders for her creative designs for humane livestock equipment, and famous among a larger public for her many articles and several books about what life is like for someone afflicted with autism. Earlier that day, before our meeting, I attended a lecture on creativity that she delivered to an audience composed principally of psychiatrists and neurologists.

Dressed in a western shirt and boots, dark trousers, and a string tie, Temple strode confidently across the stage while holding a single sheet of handwritten notes that she rarely referred to. She told the assemblage of neuropsychiatrists that people possess one of three “thinking patterns” or “specialist” brains.

“The first, and the most common in our culture, is the
verbal-language
brain. Typically, this includes writers, translators, and any other profession that doesn’t place much emphasis on visualization. As a rule, people with this brain specialization do poorly in mathematics. The second, the
music and math
brain, is self-explanatory. These folks are your musicians, your computer geeks, your math geniuses.” Temple includes herself in the third category: the brain specialized for
visual thinking.

Words are only a “second language” to Temple, who converts whatever is said to her into “full-color movies, complete with sound, which run like a VCR tape in my head.” Recalling a specific memory consists of replaying the experience “as if it were on a CD-ROM disc.” She then uses the images from her visual memory to help her solve design problems for cattle chutes, truck loading, and sorting facilities.

As an example of Grandin’s point about the primacy of images in the creative process, read the following paragraph, and after recalling as many details as you can, write a short narrative based on it:

“If the balloons popped, the sound wouldn’t be able to carry, since everything would be too far away from the correct floor. A closed window would also prevent the sound from carrying, since most buildings tend to be well insulated. Since the whole operation depends on a steady flow of electricity, a break in the middle of the wire would also cause problems. Of course, the fellow could shout, but the human voice is not loud enough to carry that far. An additional problem is that a string could break on the instrument. Then there could be no accompaniment to the message. It is clear that the best situation would involve less distance. Then there would be fewer potential problems. With face-to-face contact, the least number of things could go wrong.”

Most people are able to remember only about 20 percent of the information contained in that paragraph. That’s because even though each sentence makes perfect sense, the overall meaning of the paragraph remains obscure. What is being described? Without an answer to that question, creativity cannot be harnessed to produce an original narrative. Yet if you look for just an instant at the cartoon on page 185, the paragraph makes perfect sense and you will have little trouble fashioning a short narrative, in this case a scene from a classic love story.

Artists, inventors, and scientific innovators speak often of an image that inspired them. Einstein arrived at his theory of relativity by imagining how the movement of a person in one train would appear to an observer located in a second train running parallel to the first. On pages 175-76 we described Kekulé’s discovery of the chemical benzene, which evolved from his memory of a gold ring fashioned in the form of the alchemical symbol for the unity and variability of matter—two intertwined snakes biting their own tails. In each instance, a vivid image provided the material for creativity by temporarily counteracting the inhibiting effect language exerts on our capacity for visual thinking.

In modular design, whether in the writing of a novel or in the direction of a movie, the creator uses flashbacks and other narrative devices rather than telling the story from beginning to end in a strictly linear manner. “Modular design is an attractive way to show relationships between events or people or motifs or themes which are not generated by sequences of cause and effect and so are somehow atemporal, perhaps even timeless,” says novelist Madison Smartt Bell.

How to shift one’s mental balance from a chronological to a modular design? Novelists such as William Gibson (
Spook Country; Pattern Recognition
) and Michael Ondaatje (
The English Patient; Anil’s Ghost
) and filmmakers including Christopher Nolan (
Insomnia; The Prestige; Memento
) do it all the time. Instead of working from a narrative progressing from past to present to future, these artists imitate the method of the mosaicist who assembles fragments of glass and tile to form what can be seen, at a greater distance, as a coherent form. This
modular design
method frees the writer or filmmaker from the limitations of
linear design,
which concentrates on the overall movement of the narrative from its start to its finish.

All of us use modular design on a regular basis. For instance, if I ask for your opinion about someone you have known for a long time, your answer won’t be based on reviewing in your mind an imaginary video arranged according to a linear chronology of your experiences with that person over the years. Instead, you’ll base your answer on fragmentary, short vivid images—jump shots, in cinematographic terms—that link your impressions, observations, and experiences with that person. Your final “sense,” your conclusion about that person, will depend on how you arrange and rearrange these fragmentary observations and equally fragmentary facts. In order to do this, you fashion a “modular narrative design,” where, as Madison Smartt Bell describes it, “narrative elements are balanced in symmetry as shapes are balanced in a symmetrical geometric figure, or as weights are balanced on a scale.”

One way that I use modular design as a creativity tool is to quickly and uncritically write down on a large sheet of drawing paper everything that occurs to me about a specific person or event. I then shift these separate observations around in random order and see what structure emerges. If I’m near a computer, I prefer to use the innovative program Inspiration: The Visual Thinking Tool, which helps me to perceive hidden relationships that evade casual inspection and often spur creative ideas.

Recent research suggests four practical steps that can be taken to increase creativity.

1. Focus on the problem for as long as you need to understand it.

2. Mentally put into words your implicit assumptions. Write a summary of your understanding of the problem.

3. Make certain that you understand what you must do to reach a resolution.

4. Ask yourself, “In what other ways can I envision this problem?”

When the answer still isn’t forthcoming, put it out of your mind, and cultivate one of the power-down states of rest, relaxation, sleep, and, especially, dream sleep.

If you take these steps you will be applying the four main characteristics of divergent thinking first identified in the 1950s by psychologist Joy Paul Guilford:
fluency,
rapidly producing multiple possible solutions to a problem;
elaboration,
thinking through the details of an idea;
flexibility,
entertaining multiple approaches to the problem simultaneously; and
originality,
coming up with ideas that don’t occur to most other people.

Here is a puzzle that exemplifies creative thinking. I learned about it from puzzle developer Dave Youngs; it can be solved only by engaging in divergent thinking.

Six drinking glasses are arranged in a row. The first three are filled with water; the next three are empty. How would you get the full and empty glasses to alternate by moving only one glass? You can work at this by imagining the arrangement of the glasses in your mind or by actually setting out the glasses. Trust me, it’s possible to alternate the full and empty glasses by moving only one of them, but in order to do this you have to think divergently.

This is the reasoning process used by one person who solved the puzzle: “Perhaps I could eliminate one glass altogether [he tries that]. . . . That doesn’t do it. . . . Maybe I could move one glass and then moving it back to its original position . . . but that wouldn’t work, either, unless the one glass could be moved. . . . Aha!”

The correct solution to this puzzle requires the solver to overcome two limiting assumptions. First, that the word
moving
necessarily implies rearranging the glasses. Second, that moving one of the glasses must be carried out only in the horizontal plane. Buying into either of these assumptions prevents a successful solution to the puzzle: the alternating lineup of the glasses cannot be achieved by simply sliding on the flat surface of the table one of the glasses to another position. But by
vertically
lifting glass two and empting its contents into glass five, and then moving it back to its original position the alternating arrangement of full and empty glasses is achieved.

Notice that the correct solution involves all four of the steps I suggested, along with Joy Paul Guilford’s four characteristics of divergent thinking. Most important was step four: Ask yourself, “In what other ways can I envision this problem?” (Corresponding to Guilford’s
originality:
coming up with ideas that don’t occur to most people.)

Here is another puzzle that I doubt you will solve easily unless you have encountered it before. It cannot be solved without a decisive revision of one very specific limiting assumption: