Creative people are prevented from earning money by the structure of their brain; it does not respond to money. The Creative Brain How creativity is studied
What makes creative people different from the rest? In 1960, psychologist and creativity researcher Frank H. Barron decided to find out. Barron conducted a series of experiments on some of the famous thinkers of his generation in an attempt to isolate the unique spark of creative genius.
Barron invited a group of creative figures, including writers Truman Capote, William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Connor, along with leading architects, scientists, entrepreneurs and mathematicians, to spend several days on the Berkeley campus of the University of California. Participants spent time getting to know each other under the supervision of researchers and taking tests about their lives and work, including ones that looked for signs of mental illness and indicators of creative thinking.
Barron found that, contrary to popular belief, intelligence and education play only a modest role in creative thinking. IQ alone cannot explain the creative spark.
Instead, the study showed that creativity has a range of intellectual, emotional, motivational and moral characteristics. It turns out that people of all creative professions have common traits: openness to their inner life; preference for complexity and ambiguity; unusually high tolerance for frustration and disturbances; the ability to extract order from chaos; independence; unusualness; willingness to take risks.
Describing this hodgepodge of traits, Barron wrote that the creative genius is “both more primitive and more cultured, more destructive and more constructive, sometimes crazy, and yet categorically more intelligent than the average person.”
This new way of thinking of the creative genius has created some interesting and confusing contradictions. In a subsequent study of creative writers, Barron and Donald MacKinnon found that the average writer was in the top ten of the total population of psychopaths. But surprisingly, they also found that creative writers had extremely high levels of psychological health.
Why? Creative people seem to be more thoughtful. This led to an increase in self-awareness, including becoming more familiar with the darker and more uncomfortable parts of myself. Perhaps because they deal with the full spectrum of life: both darkness and light, the writers scored highly on some of the characteristics that our society tends to associate with mental illness. On the contrary, this same tendency was able to force them to be more grounded and conscious. By confronting the world openly and boldly, creative people seemed to have found an unusual synthesis between healthy and “pathological” behavior.
Such contradictions may be precisely what gives some people the intense inner drive to create.
Today, most psychologists agree that creativity is multifaceted in nature. And even on a neurological level.
Unlike the “right brain” myth, creativity is not attracted to a region of the brain or even one hemisphere of the brain. Instead, the creative process relies on all brain. It is a dynamic interaction between many different areas of the brain, emotions, and our unconscious and conscious processing systems.
The brain's default network, or as we call it the “imagination network,” is especially important for creativity. The imagination network, first identified by neurologist Marcus Raichle in 2001, spans many regions on the medial (inner) surface of the brain in the frontal, parietal and temporal lobes.
We exploit about half of our mental capacity through this network. It is most active when we are engaged in what researchers call “self-cognition”: daydreaming, ruminating, or otherwise allowing our minds to wander.
The functions of the imagination network form the core of human experience. Its three main components are personal self-awareness, mental modeling, and forward thinking. It allows us to construct meaning from our experiences, remember the past, think about the future, imagine others' perspectives and alternative scenarios, understand stories, think about mental and emotional states - both our own and others. The creative and social processes associated with this brain network are also critical to the experience of compassion, as well as the ability to understand oneself and construct a linear sense of self.
But the network of imagination does not work alone. It is involved in a complex connection with the parts of the brain responsible for our attention and working memory. These departments help us focus our imagination, blocking out external distractions and allowing us to tune into our inner experience.
Perhaps this is why creative people are like that. In both their creative and brain processes, they bring seemingly contradictory elements along with unusual and unexpected ways of solving problems.
Based on materials from QzCom
Academician Natalya Petrovna Bekhtereva began work in this direction.
“There is no generally accepted definition of creativity; each researcher gives his own,” Maria Starchenko, a candidate of psychological sciences from a group studying the neurophysiology of thinking and consciousness, tells correspondents. “Most people agree that creativity is a process when a person produces something new, can abandon stereotypical patterns in solving problems, gives birth to original ideas and quickly resolves problem situations.”
One approach to studying creative activity is to record and analyze the electrical activity of the brain - an electroencephalogram. It is mainly used by foreign researchers to solve this problem. But scientists at the Institute of the Human Brain of the Russian Academy of Sciences also study creativity using positron emission tomography (PET).
Creativity with electrodes on the head or in a tomograph
“In the experiment, we give subjects a test and a control task,” says Maria Starchenko. - The test task is creative. For example, words are presented on a monitor, from which the subject must compose a story. Moreover, these are words from different semantic groups that are not related to each other in meaning. In the control task, the subject must compose a story from words that are related in meaning, or reconstruct the text by changing the order of the words.”
An example of words for a creative task: “begin, glass, want, roof, mountain, be silent, book, leave, sea, night, open, cow, throw, notice, disappear, mushroom.” An example of words for a control task: “school, understand, task, study, lesson, answer, receive, write, assessment, ask, class, answer, question, solve, teacher, listen.”
In an experiment to study nonverbal creativity, the subject receives other tasks. Creative - draw an original picture from given geometric shapes. The test is to simply draw geometric shapes in any order.
The creative brain works faster...
The electroencephalogram, which is recorded from the subject during the experiment, is subsequently analyzed. The analysis shows differences in the electrical activity of different areas of the brain when performing creative and non-creative tasks. Scientists are interested in how the rhythms of different frequencies are strengthened or weakened, as well as how activity in one or another frequency of brain regions remote from each other is synchronized.
The largest number of results indicate a connection with creative activity of fast electrical activity of the cerebral cortex. This refers to the beta rhythm, especially the beta 2 rhythm with a frequency of 18-30 Hz, and the gamma rhythm (more than 30 Hz). That is, when performing a creative task (as opposed to a non-creative one), fast activity increases in most areas of the brain.
The extent to which neural ensembles of brain regions remote from each other can be involved in joint creative activity can be judged by analyzing the synchronization of electrical activity in these areas. In experiments with a creative task, spatial synchronization in the anterior areas of the cortex increased within each hemisphere and between hemispheres. But the synchronization of the front areas with the back ones, on the contrary, was weakened. It is possible that this weakened the excessive control of the creative process by the frontal lobes.
And demands more blood
The second method, positron emission tomography (PET), is based on the fact that the scanner detects gamma radiation produced by the positron beta decay of a short-lived radioisotope. In tissues, a positron reacts with an electron to form gamma rays. In fact, this method monitors the speed of local cerebral blood flow.
Before the study, water labeled with the radioactive oxygen isotope 15O is injected into the patient’s blood. A PET scanner tracks the movement of an isotope in the blood through the brain and thus estimates the speed of local cerebral blood flow. “Brain cells involved in a particular activity consume more oxygen and nutrients, so blood flow in this area increases,” explains Maria Starchenko. “By comparing the image of the brain involved in creative activity with the image of the brain during a control task, we obtain information about which areas of the brain are responsible for the creative process.”
The whole brain is involved in creative activity to one degree or another. But scientists were able to identify zones that seem to be more involved in this than others. These are two fields in the parieto-occipital part.
The question arises as to how different brain function is between more and less creative individuals. But so far Russian scientists have not explored this area. At this stage, they are interested in mechanisms and patterns that are common to everyone. Comparing them among highly creative and low-creative individuals is the task they set for the future.
For a long time it was believed that creativity was a gift, and insights appeared as if by magic. But recent neuroscience research has shown that we can all become creative. It is enough to direct your brain in the right direction and exercise a little.
A creative approach is needed not only by artists, poets and musicians. It works in every area: helping you solve problems, resolve conflicts, impress colleagues and enjoy a fuller life. Neuroscientist Estanislao Bachrach, in his book The Flexible Mind, explains where ideas come from and how to train the brain to think creatively.
Neural Lanterns
Let’s imagine for a moment: we are on the top floor of a skyscraper, with the city at night stretched out in front of us. There are lights in the windows here and there. Cars scurry along the streets, illuminating the way with their headlights, and lanterns flicker along the roads. Our brain is like a city in the dark, in which individual avenues, streets and houses are always illuminated. “Lanterns” are neural connections. Some “streets” (nerve pathways) are illuminated throughout. This is the data we know and proven ways to solve problems.
Creativity lives where it is dark - on unbeaten paths, where unusual ideas and solutions await the traveler. If we need unconventional forms or ideas, if we crave inspiration or revelation, we will have to make an effort and light new “lanterns”. In other words, to form new neural micronetworks.
How ideas are born
Creativity is fueled by ideas, and ideas are born in the brain.
Imagine that your brain has many boxes. Every incident from life is stored in one of them. Sometimes boxes begin to open and close in a chaotic manner, and memories are connected at random. The more relaxed we are, the more often they open and close and the more memories get mixed up. When this happens, we have more ideas than at other times. This is individual for everyone: for some - in the shower, for others - while jogging, playing sports, driving a car, on the subway or bus, while playing or swinging your daughter on a swing in the park. These are moments of mental clarity.
To make ideas come more often, relax your brain.
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When the brain is relaxed, we have more thoughts. They may be ordinary, familiar, or seemingly unimportant, but sometimes ideas seep into their ranks that we call creative. The more ideas there are, the more likely it is that one of them will be non-standard.
In other words, ideas are a random combination of concepts, experiences, examples, thoughts and stories that are sorted into mental memory boxes. We are not inventing anything new. The novelty is in how we combine the known. Suddenly these combinations of concepts collide and we “see” an idea. It dawned on us. The higher the level of mental clarity, the greater the opportunity for discovery. The less extraneous noise in our heads, the calmer we become, enjoying what we love, the more insights appear.
The power of the environment
Innovative companies understand how important it is to create a creative atmosphere. They house their employees in bright, spacious, pleasant premises.
In a calm environment, when there is no need to put out the fires of everyday life, people become more inventive. In the Argentina national team, Lionel Messi is the same person with the same brain as in Barcelona. But in Barcelona he is more productive: he can carry out 10-15 attacks per match, two or three of which end in goals. At the same time, in the national team he manages to carry out two or three attacks per game, therefore, there is less chance that they will be non-standard and lead to a goal. How he uses his skills and creativity depends very much on the environment, the atmosphere in training, the team and how he feels. Creativity is not some magic light bulb that can be turned on anywhere, it is closely related to the environment. It requires a stimulating environment.
The research team was led by Dr. Roberto Goya-Maldonado, who heads the Department of Neurobiology and Imaging in the Laboratory of Psychiatry at the University Medical Center Göttingen. Scientists observed groups of people in creative and non-creative professions, recording activity in the parts of the brain that produce dopamine—the chemical that produces the rush of excitement often associated with sex, drugs, and gambling—when they were rewarded with money.
It is worth noting that the sample size of the study is quite small. Twenty-four people participated in the experiment, twelve of whom work in the field of art: actors, artists, sculptors, musicians, photographers. The second group included: an insurance agent, a dentist, a business administrator, an engineer, and representatives of other non-creative professions.
Each participant wore a set of glasses that showed a series of squares of different colors. When a green square appeared, they could select it with a button and receive money (up to $30). They were also asked to choose other colors, but without any monetary reward.
While the subjects took the test, the researchers scanned their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). They found that creative people showed significantly less activation in the ventral striatum, part of the brain's reward system, when they chose the green money squares compared to non-artists.
Brain scans examine the dopaminergic reward system of artists and non-artists in a new study, “Reward System Reactivity in Artists When Accepting and Rejecting Monetary Rewards,” in the Creativity Research Journal.
In a second test, the researchers found that creative people showed greater activation in another part of the brain associated with dopamine (the prefrontal cortex) when they were told to give up the green squares. In other words, creative people's brains respond positively to process rather than material results, and they work better when they know they won't get paid.
Overall, our results suggest the existence of distinct neural features in the dopaminergic reward system of artists who are less likely to respond to monetary rewards, the researchers write.
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