DG80130 5y7z1h

Topic
Professional & Subtopic

Personal Development Thinking Skills
Creativity and Your Brain

Guidebook
Indre Viskontas
LEADERSHIP
President & CEO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PAUL SUIJK
Chief Financial Officer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BRUCE G. WILLIS
Chief Marketing Officer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CALE PRITCHETT
SVP, Marketing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . JOSEPH PECKL
SVP, Content Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . JASON SMIGEL
VP, Content Production . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . KEVIN BARNHILL
VP, Marketing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . EMILY COOPER
VP, Customer Engagement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . KONSTANTINE GELFOND
VP, Technology Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . MARK LEONARD
VP, Content Strategy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . KEVIN MANZEL
VP, General Counsel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . DEBRA STORMS
VP, People. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . AUDREY WILLIAMS
Sr. Director, Content Operations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . GAIL GLEESON
Director, Talent Acquisition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . WILLIAM SCHMIDT
Director, Creative. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . OCTAVIA VANNALL
PRODUCTION
Studio Operations Manager. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . JIM M. ALLEN
Video Production Director . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ROBERTO DE MORAES
Technical Engineering Manager. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SAL RODRIGUEZ
Quality Assurance Supervisor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . JAMIE MCCOMBER
Sr. Post-Production Manager. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PETER DWYER
Sr. Manager of Production. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . RIMA KHALEK
Executive Producer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . JAY TATE
Sr. Producer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . JAMES BLANDFORD
Post-Production Producer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . DEREK KNIGHT
Managing Content Developer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . RAHIMA ULLAH
Assistant Content Developer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . EZRA COOPER
Content Developer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ERNESTO YERMOLI
Sr. Image Rights Analyst . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . LISA PERSINGER ROBERTSON
Post-Production Manager . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . OWEN YOUNG
Editor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . KEVIN KOTWAS
Audio Engineer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CHRIS HOOTH
Camera Operators. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . LAKE MANNIKKO, VALERIE WELCH
Production Assistants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PAUL SHEEHAN, KELLY SNYDER
EDITORIAL & DESIGN SERVICES

Director. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . FARHAD HOSSAIN
Managing Writer/Editor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . JENNIFER ROSENBERG
Editorial Associates. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . MOLLY LEVY, MARGI WILHELM
Research Associate. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . L. VIOLA KOZAK
Editorial Assistant. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . WILLIAM DOMANSKI
Graphics Manager. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . JAMES NIDEL
Graphics Coordinator. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . KATE STEINBAUER
Graphic Designer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . TIM OLABI
Indre Viskontas
Indre Viskontas is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of
San Francisco, where she runs the Creative Brain Lab. She earned a PhD in
Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles. She
has published more than 50 original papers and chapters related to the neural
basis of memory and creativity. A passionate science communicator, she has
appeared on major TV and radio programs and hosts the popular science
podcast Inquiring Minds as well as the podcast Cadence: What Music Tells Us
about the Mind.
i
Table of Contents
About Indre Viskontas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i
1 The Creative Life Begins in the Brain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

2 Beyond the Right-Brain Creativity Myth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3 Creativity Is a Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
4 Evaluating the Creative Product . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
5 Who Is the Creative Person? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
6 The “Mad Genius” Myth of Mental Illness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
7 Finding Your Motivation for Creative Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
8 When Creatives Confront Depression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
9 Free Your Brain with Spontaneous Creativity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
10 Behind the Mystical Aha Moment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
11 Unlocking Your Imaginative Brain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
12 The Creative Path to Skill Mastery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
13 Getting Into the Creative Flow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
14 The Brain Science of Beauty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
15 Can Brain Degeneration Unleash Creativity? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
16 Beethoven, Dyslexia, and Creativity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
17 The Creative Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
18 Design Thinking Helps Structure Creativity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
19 Creativity Thrives on Difference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
20 Get More out of Group Creativity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
21 Overcome Creative Anxiety . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
22 Can Drugs Open Up the Creative Brain? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
23 Being Creative in a World Not Built for You . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
24 Using Technology as a Creative Aid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
ii
1
Table of Contents
THE CREATIVE
LIFE BEGINS IN
THE BRAIN
This course takes you on a

journey into the creating brain,
exploring what creativity is,
how it works, and how you can
develop it. Along the way, you’ll
meet highly creative people who
can teach you how to infuse
creativity into your own life.
And by diving into the nuts and
bolts of how the brain works,
we’ll see just how magical
creativity really is.
1
Views on Creativity
For many people, creativity is a uniquely human ability that defies
understanding—a type of magic, if you will, that is bestowed on
a lucky few, who then have the power to change the trajectory of
humankind. For others, it’s an awesome function present in each of us
that can be broken down into its constituent parts and cultivated under
the right circumstances.
Romanticizing creativity not only shuts out traditionally marginalized
groups but also ignores the growing body of evidence collected by
psychologists, neuroscientists,
computer scientists, and
philosophers who recognize that Creativity is not unique to
we need to allow creativity to
humans. It’s an evolved
build and flourish if we want
to survive as a species. And as trait with precursors
the scientific study of creativity among our ancestors
has matured, and as cutting- and other species. Even
edge neuroscience tools have
been applied to help researchers
a single-celled amoeba
understand its neural basis, there is is capable of creativity,
so much great information to sift changing its shape, and
through. devising novel solutions
Without a brain, we can’t be to its problems.
creative. And because the brain is
a biological organ, we will never
fully understand it unless we also
have some grasp of evolution. Natural selection, the key mechanism
behind evolution, requires variability. When natural selection has a
limited palette, species become more vulnerable to extinction because
they have fewer individuals who might survive a specific threat.
Variability and diversity of thought are at the very core of creativity—
and a big reason why humans have been so successful as a species. We
can find ways to thrive in many different environments, even going so
far as creating our own.
1 • The Creative Life Begins in the Brain 2

The Three P’s
The problem of understanding creativity can be broken down into the three
p’s: the process, the product, and the person. The creative process is defined
by the creative domain. Improvising on the piano and designing a new logo
require totally different sets of skills and strategies. They might share a few
core elements, but if we only focus on commonalities, we’ll have a very narrow
view of creativity.
The creative product, according to psychologists, has at least two main
features: novelty, or originality, and usefulness, or meaning. Of course, any
consensus among experts will only reflect the views of their time, and many
great innovators were overlooked in their lifetimes because their creations
were deemed useless or devoid of meaning.
Perhaps a more nefarious problem is that those who are deemed to be experts
tend to reflect the views and demographics of the dominant culture, which
can make them blind to the creativity of people from underrepresented
groups. Black people, indigenous people, and other people of color are too
often the victims of systemic racism in this regard, with even otherwise well-
meaning peers diminishing or disregarding their contributions to their fields.
Women, trans people, and those who identify as nonbinary also often have
a harder time convincing predominantly male opinion leaders of the value of
their work. Many organizations in various domains are finally recognizing
these inequalities and seeking to
make things right, but there is
a lot of work left to do. Of the Big 5 personality
This brings us to the final traits—extroversion,
and third p’s of creativity: the agreeableness, neuroticism,
person. Is there such a thing as
conscientiousness, and
a creative or uncreative person?
If so, what traits distinguish openness or intellect—
them? When it comes to only openness seems
personality traits, the only to consistently predict
consistent finding is that people
who are especially creative
creativity.
tend to be more open to new
experiences than others.

Genetics and Creativity
Clearly, the idea that all creatives are neurotic, extroverted, or disagreeable
does not stand up to scrutiny. Yet despite the evidence that creatives are a
diverse bunch, the belief that creativity is something you’re either born with or
not remains broadly popular. So, is there a genetic component to creativity? To
answer that question, it’s helpful to separate two things: creative skills specific
to certain domains, and traits like openness that apply across domains.
Creative people must develop a specific skill set to become eminent in their
domain. Pianists, for example, must learn to play the piano before they
can improvise well. And genetics can play a part in domain-specific skill
development: If particularly strong fine motor coordination is in some way
hereditary, it can make piano playing easier to learn and subsequently master.
Some traits that apply across creative domains can also be influenced by
genetics. For example, studies comparing identical twins, who share 100% of
their DNA, to fraternal twins, who share only 50%, have shown that about
50% of the variance in the key personality trait of openness is due to genes.

Another trait linked to creativity, divergent thinking, is measured giving
respondents a prompt—say, “How many uses can you think of for a brick?”—
and seeing how many ideas they can come up with in a short amount of
time. Though the evidence is sparse and a little mixed, studies suggest that
divergent thinking may be less heritable than a trait like general intelligence as
measured by IQ tests—though, to be fair, general intelligence is notoriously
hard to define.
So, the role genes play in creativity isn’t all that clear-cut. And there are, of
course, lots of environmental factors that also influence both gene expression
and the development of domain-specific skills, such as childhood nutrition,
access to opportunities, exposure to trauma, and so on.
The Four C’s

Besides the three p’s of process, product, and person, another popular way of
subdividing creativity involves what are known as the four c’s:
mini-c, or personally meaningful interpretations of actions and insights;
little-c, or everyday acts of creativity;
Pro-c, or professional creativity; and
Big-C, or creative genius.
Each of these represents a different stage along the path to creative eminence.
This model came about as researchers recognized that we can distinguish
little-c acts, like using a wine barrel as a flowerpot, from Big-C acts, like the
invention of the light bulb. Expanding on this idea, James Kaufman and
Ronald Beghetto came up with the other two categories of mini-c and Pro-c
to further subdivide the continuum of creativity. Mini-c refers to how we
interpret the world—whether we can find personal meaning, for example, in
our experiences and actions.
A person who might have a bigger propensity for creativity might be more
likely to take what they learned in math class and apply it to their musical
training, like recognizing sequences in notes that map onto mathematical
sequences. Pro-c is the stage at which a person is creative by profession: an
architect, or scientist, or musician.

By analyzing these four stages and how they influence one another,
researchers can study what kinds of mini-c training or approaches are likely
to foster lifelong creativity and distinguish what separates skilled creative
professionals from true creative eminences.
It’s also useful to separate artistic from scientific creativity. There are many
differences between the two, and one involves the relationship between
the person and the product. Whereas scientists use the scientific process to
find objective truths, artists use their subjective experience to illuminate
what’s universal. For this reason, assessing an artistic product relies on an
understanding of the artist in a way that assessing scientific innovation
does not.
This course will take a deep dive into what it really means to be creative,
using what science tells us about the brain as a guide. To begin, let’s clarify
some basics about how the brain is organized.
Areas of the Brain

The brain is divided into two main
areas, the front and the back, by You can think of the
a deep groove in the middle termed
front of your brain as
the central sulcus.
where you plan your
In the front area is the primary
actions and the back as
motor cortex, where voluntary
movements are initiated, and the where you sense your
prefrontal cortex, even further out environment. Both are
front, where complex decision- involved in creativity but
making takes place. The prefrontal
cortex, often called the central
at different stages and
executive, holds information in with different purposes.
mind for a while so you can analyze
it. When you’re ordering pizza
and need to remember all the toppings that everyone wants, that’s your
prefrontal cortex at work. This part of the brain also keeps impulses in check,
delaying gratification to reap greater rewards, and manages our emotions and
social interactions.

In the back of the brain, behind the central sulcus, is our somatosensory
cortex, which receives sensations from our body. Just behind that is the
association cortex, which pulls our senses together and integrates them.
The front of the brain is where we engage in the deliberate, rational thinking
necessary to define, analyze, and solve problems as well as edit and verify
whether what we’ve thought of is indeed creative and meets our goals. But
when we want to be spontaneous, to get out of a cognitive rut, to get lost in
our senses and let our minds happen upon new ideas, then it’s the back of our
brains that’s in charge. Generating ideas, or trusting our instincts, following
our feelings—these activities benefit when the back of the brain is released
from the stranglehold of the front.
Reading
Kaufman, J. C., and R. A. Beghetto. “Beyond Big and Little: The Four C
Model of Creativity.” Review of General Psychology 13, no. 1 (2009): 1-12.
Mann, Jon. “How Duchamp’s Urinal Changed Art Forever.” Artsy. May
9, 2017. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-duchamps-urinal-
changed-art-forever.

2
Table of Contents
BEYOND THE
RIGHT-BRAIN
CREATIVITY MYTH
W hen we’re being creative, it
can feel as if we are using our
brains on a completely different
level. Other times, creativity
seems impossible and feels like
work. It’s no wonder, then,
that so many people persist in
believing the myth that we have
one creative hemisphere and one
analytical or logical one. Even
among neuroscientists, it’s a hard
notion to dispel, so it’s worth
examining the left-brain/right-
brain dichotomy closely.
8
The Duality of Our Minds
In the 17th century, René Descartes outlined
an influential model of how the mind—or
consciousness—might be separate from the
body. Cartesian dualism, as this idea is now
called, is hard to overcome when we’re trying to
understand the biological basis of the mind.
After all, thinking, creating, and imagining
just seem so fundamentally different than the
utilitarian functions of our heart, lungs, or
other organs that facilitate sensory experiences.
Imagining things in the absence of sensory input
seems like the work of an entirely different kind
of organ, or even some nonbiological process.
To a certain extent, Cartesian dualism persists in the left-brain/right-brain
creativity myth. Up until relatively recently, the division of labor between the
two hemispheres was considered a distinctly human trait. Right-handedness
was thought to have evolved as early as 2.5 million years ago, as our ancestors
began using tools. Since the right hand is controlled by the left hemisphere,
the idea was that our left hemisphere is somehow superior and that’s why it
can also support language function.
But there’s another point of view, one that takes into account the finding that
many (if not most) vertebrate species also show lateralization—differences
in function between the left and right sides of the nervous system—and that
dates this division of labor back some 500 million years. Other primates
also show some propensity toward right-handedness and left-lateralized
communication.
And an intriguing theory put forth by Peter MacNeilage, Lesley Rogers, and
Giorgio Vallortigara suggests that the left hemisphere originally specialized in
patterned behavior—what we do under ordinary and familiar conditions—
while the right took on the unexpected, responding to what’s new in the
environment. This division might have first appeared in early vertebrates, but
it remains speculative.
2 • Beyond the Right-Brain Creativity Myth 9

Decussation
So, what does legitimate science tell us about the left and right sides of our
brains? Well, we know that the left side of the brain controls the body’s right
side, and vice versa. This mysterious crossing of fibers from one side to the
other is known as decussation, and its origins are hotly debated. But one
compelling theory is the somatic twist model, which takes us all the way
back almost to the primordial pond, when we were worms wriggling around
looking for food.
At some point in evolutionary history, animals with a spinal cord, known as
chordates and vertebrates, diverged from those without them. According to
the somatic twist model, the vertebrates’ spinal cord and brain became twisted
during this evolution—with the twist in our species occurring right around
where our brain stem emerges out of the spinal cord.
So, we know that sensory and motor information from our spinal cord crosses
to the opposite side of the brain. But what about other functions? Why would
the left and right hemispheres have different specializations? And what is the
evidence that they do?
Language and the Brain

French neurologist Paul Broca is credited with discovering that much of our
language function originates in the left side of the brain. Broca noted that
patients with damage to the left hemisphere—and to the left frontal lobe
specifically—lost the ability to speak. Some of his patients could understand
spoken and written words but couldn’t speak the words themselves. They also
all had lesions on a part of the left frontal lobe that we now call Broca’s area,
which is responsible for speech production.
Broca’s 1865 paper was hugely influential, opening the door to the search for
localized functions in the brain. But he was not without his flaws, including
bias, racism, and a rejection of the idea of evolution. And yet, despite
these serious faults, he was not wrong about the left hemisphere’s relative
specialization in language in the majority of people.

Scientists today believe that basic language functions like grammar,
vocabulary, and literal semantic meaning are localized mainly in the left
hemisphere in more than 90% of
right-handed people and in up to
70% of left-handed people. For
Prosody, which is more
the rest, these functions usually
occur in both hemispheres. often localized in the right
Only a small portion—perhaps hemisphere, supplies
15%—of brains seem to layers of meaning to
have right-lateralized basic
speech, and great art is
language functions.
characterized by many
Other aspects of language,
layers of meaning. A
like prosody (or the melody or
musicality of speech), are more talented Shakespearean
often localized in the right actor does more than just
hemisphere. You might think deliver lines accurately—
that prosody is less important
than grammar or vocabulary, they illuminate all the
but that’s probably not true. One nuance, poetry, and genius
aspect of prosody, tone (or the of the bard himself. So the
pitch patterns of speech), can idea that at least artistic
indicate a lot about the meaning
behind the words, depending on creativity might rely
the way we say it. Patients with more heavily on the right
damage to the right hemisphere hemisphere than the more
of their brains can fail to detect
literal has some basis in
sarcasm, which can significantly
impact their social interactions. neuroscience.
They might understand what is
said but not how or why it is said.
Epileptic and Split-Brain Patients

After Broca published his findings, the idea that the brain’s hemispheres serve
different functions went largely unexplored until the work of Roger Sperry
and Michael Gazzaniga in the 20th century.

Sperry worked at Caltech in the 1960s, where he met the neurosurgeon Joseph
Bogen, who worked on patients with epilepsy. Epileptic seizures usually
begin in one part of the brain and spread across it like wildfire. The longer
the seizures go unchecked, and the more frequent they are, the more damage
the brain sustains. That’s because too much activity can be toxic: Neurons
get saturated with an excitatory neurotransmitter called glutamate, and their
energy sources—the mitochondria—get overwhelmed and they collapse.
Eventually the cells die, either by suicide (apoptosis) or simple cell death
(necrosis). Though drugs can help many people avoid seizures, not all patients
benefit from them.
In the 1940s, a surgeon named William Van Wagenen pioneered a radical
new surgery to stop seizures from spreading from one hemisphere to the
other. This operation involved cutting the fiber tract of white matter that
joins the two hemispheres, called the corpus callosum. The doctor got
the idea for this surgery by observing a patient with tumors in this bridge
between the two hemispheres. The more the tumors grew, the fewer seizures
the patient had. Over time, this doctor found that the surgery he developed,
known as a corpus callosotomy, was able to reduce seizures even in patients
without tumors.
Corpus callosotomies were still considered
radical in the 1960s, when Joseph Bogen
asked Roger Sperry if he’d like to study
a patient on whom he was to perform the
procedure. In his own work, Sperry had
been performing a similar procedure on cats
and monkeys, finding that the hemispheres
would then behave independently. If one
hemisphere was taught to do something,
that information didn’t transfer to the
other hemisphere. Together with his then
graduate student, Michael Gazzaniga, Sperry
wondered whether a similar effect would be
seen in humans. And so began a decades-long collaboration, which eventually
netted Sperry the Nobel Prize and Gazzaniga the moniker “father of cognitive
neuroscience.”

Sperry’s hypothesis was correct: The brain hemispheres of human beings
with damage to their corpus callosum did act independently of each other.
When the bridge is intact, interhemispheric communication between
cells is constant and very fast. But when the bridge is damaged, that
communication is markedly reduced.
Even in patients whose corpus callosum is damaged—what we call split-
brain patients—you have to be very careful with your experimental setup
if you want to keep one hemisphere in the dark. This is because we have
so many ways of ensuring that both hemispheres receive information,
such as by turning our heads, shifting our gazes, listening with both ears,
and so on.
Interestingly, patients don’t report feeling as though they have two brains
acting independently. Their sense of consciousness or self-awareness feels
coherent. This is because our conscious experience doesn’t give us an
accurate sense of how our brains are working.
The left brain doesn’t know why the right brain does what it does because
the corpus callosum is severed. But it also doesn’t know that it doesn’t
know, and it retains the illusion of control—it believes that it is fully in
charge of the person. Therefore, it makes up a reason for an action that it
observes the body making.
This kind of self-delusion, however, is not unique to split-brain patients.
We fall prey to it all the time, including when we’re trying to figure
out where our best ideas come from. We need to understand that the
distribution of tasks across the hemispheres does not map neatly onto
what’s dominating our conscious thoughts.
Mapping Functions to the Brain?

While assigning the language function to the left hemisphere is fairly
straightforward, it’s been harder to find the common ground between the
types of functions that seem to rely more heavily on the right side. But
one way to think about it is to consider the kinds of associations that each
hemisphere makes.

The process of thinking is largely about linking different thoughts
together. Whereas the left side of our brain tends to make these kinds of
associations in a narrow or literal way, the right side seems better at finding
less-likely associations, discovering hidden layers of meaning, and seeing
the big picture over the details. So that’s why the right side might map onto
certain types of creativity—the novel ideas, the connections that no one
else saw, the deeper meaning or utility of things. Or, as the evolutionary
theory we discussed earlier suggests, the left hemisphere might be more
inclined towards well-established patterns, the forest for the trees,
putting a plan into action, while the right hemisphere makes sense of the
unexpected, the surprises, the emotional reactions.
But it’s not as though the left side of the brain isn’t involved in creativity.
Two of the four networks that underly intrinsic activity in the brain
are in the left hemisphere, including, in most people, the default mode
network, which controls daydreaming and other kinds of thinking linked
to creativity.
We used to think that when we’re not engaged in any kind of cognitive
task, that our brains are at rest. But that’s far from the truth. We use those
moments to think about our grocery lists, problems we’re trying to solve, or
even just about ourselves. And that mode of thinking engages the default
mode network: a set of connected regions across the brain, including the
medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus,
and the angular gyrus. It’s got different additional hubs for when we think
about ourselves or others, or when we remember our past or consider our
future. But it’s a big part of mind-wandering, which is an important part
of creativity.
Brain Development
One might argue that the human superpower is the adaptability of our
brains—we can adjust to virtually any environment on earth and even off
of it. We can learn any language, navigate any habitat, and bond to any
person. But we also develop lifelong habits, remember decades-old events,
and make long-lasting friendships. How can one brain be both adaptable
and reliable?

The answer is in development. We are born with lots of potential, and over
time our experiences sculpt our brains to thrive under the conditions in which
we grow. A child raised in a noisy urban environment will learn to tune out
noise so that they can focus. That child will thrive in a raucous city square,
focusing on what’s important for survival and ignoring the chaos.
A child raised on a quiet farm will learn to listen carefully. They might learn
to read and write more quickly, maybe become an exquisite musician, hearing
things that the rest of us don’t. But put that child in the middle of Manhattan
and they might get pickpocketed in a second, while their sensory system is
overloaded by all the irrelevant noise.
These examples help us understand how two different brains can end up
having two very different sensory experiences, with different strengths and
weaknesses. They also highlight how our early environment can shape our
brain development, leading to characteristics that will be with us for the rest
of our lives.
So, when we’re trying to
map functions onto the One thing that differentiates
brain, we need to keep in human babies from other
mind that while there are primates is that we’re
general principles and there
born pretty much useless.
are many similarities across
people, brains are also highly A baby’s brain triples in size
individualized, even when in the first year of life. The
the developmental trajectory benefits of this development
leads to a typical brain rather
outside of the womb must
than an atypical one, like
those of people on the autism outweigh the tremendous
spectrum. costs of being born so
So where does all this leave dependent on caregivers.
us when it comes to the left-
brain/right-brain myth about
creativity? It underscores the many different factors involved in being creative
and how different aspects of creativity will rely on different hemispheres,
different brain networks, and different ways of activating them.

Reading
Aberg, K. C., Doell, K. C., and S. Schwartz. “The ‘Creative Right
Brain’ Revisited: Individual Creativity and Associative Priming in the
Right Hemisphere Relate to Hemispheric Asymmetries in Reward Brain
Function.” Cerebral Cortex 27, no. 10 (2017): 4946-4959.
Dolcos, F., H. J. Rice, and R. Cabeza. “Hemispheric Asymmetry

and Aging: Right Hemisphere Decline or Asymmetry
Reduction.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 26, no. 7
(2002): 819-825.
Zedelius, C. M., and J. W. Schooler. “The Richness of Inner Experience:

Relating Styles of Daydreaming to Creative Processes.” Frontiers in
Psychology 6 (2016): 2063.

3
Table of Contents
CREATIVITY IS
A PROCESS
Creativity involves generating new
ideas or solutions to a problem.
We often think about the aha
moment as the key to creative
thinking. Because we don’t
have conscious access to most of
what our minds do, it can feel as
though the creative spark comes
from nowhere. Modern creativity
research acknowledges that, like
memory, the creative process
involves more than just a single
spark. This lecture explores the
different steps in this process and
how to model them.
17
Inspiration and Perspiration
In The War of Art, author Steven Pressfield lays out the biggest obstacle facing
creatives: resistance. Resistance is a general term for all the reasons why we
shy away from creative or otherwise difficult work. It’s the force that keeps us
from living the life we want to live; it’s elicited by any act that favors long-
term growth, health, or integrity over immediate gratification. And while we
might blame outside forces, it comes from within.
Thomas Edison,
Edison arguably the most prolific
innovator of all time, was quick to correct
anyone who claimed that his success
was attributable to his genius. In a 1910
biography, he is quoted as retorting, “Stuff!
I tell you genius is hard work, stick-to-
itiveness, and common sense.” Indeed,
probably Edison’s most famous quote,
originally published in a 1902 Scientific
American article, is now a well-known
epigram: “Genius is two percent inspiration
and ninety-eight percent perspiration.”
Of course, perspiration on its own is not
enough—you can try very hard and still
fail to be creative. In fact, sometimes trying
too hard gets in the way of generating new
ideas because you become fixated on a small
subset of thoughts.
Wallas Model
Graham Wallas, founder of the London School of Economics and author
of The Art of Thought, picked up on this problem and broke the creative
process down into steps back in 1926. These steps, which he based on his own
empirical studies and on the words of famous innovators and other creatives,
continue to influence models of creativity today.
3 • Creativity Is a Process 18
Step 1, preparation, involves gathering relevant information, honing any
necessary skills, defining the problem or goal, and entering the right frame
of mind, whatever that might be. This step is deliberate, effortful, and
conscious.
Step 2, incubation, occurs when
unconscious processing comes into play. Graham Wallas
This is a somewhat magical stage that we noted that, during
don’t know much about, though we do the incubation
know that certain circumstances seem
important at this juncture, both inside and step, consciously
outside of the brain. We want conditions engaging in
that allow the prefrontal cortex to take a unrelated mental
back seat rather than be the main driver of
tasks might be
our thoughts. The key feature of incubation
is that thinking is neither deliberate nor more effective
effortful, with the mind free to wander. than attempting to
Step 3, illumination, often comes stop all conscious
suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere. This thought entirely,
is the aha moment, where the solution or which is very
creative idea comes to consciousness clearly
difficult to do.
and well-defined. Wallas noted that we
can’t force illumination—we have to allow
it to happen.
Step 4, verification, is important but often overlooked. This is where we
tweak, test, and iterate the novel idea to ensure that it is the right solution.
This involves engaging in deliberate, effortful work.
The late psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who was credited with
popularizing the concept of creative flow, further divided this last stage into
two: evaluation and elaboration. He cautioned against interpreting these
stage models as neat depictions of the creative process and suggested that
elaboration—roughly equivalent to Wallas’s verification step—is actually
the most difficult part of the creative process, interrupted by periods of
incubation and punctuated by small epiphanies.
Dietrich Model of Creativity
To capture this split between conscious and unconscious stages, Arne Dietrich
proposes a different way of carving up the creative process. His model posits
four basic types of creativity based on their neurological origins. He divides
the functions of the brain between those that originate in the front,
specifically in the frontal lobe, and those that originate in the back, in the
temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes.
Dietrich’s four categories result from combining two modes of processing—
deliberate and spontaneous—with two categories of brain function: cognitive
and emotional. The categories are
y deliberate cognitive,
y deliberate emotional,
y spontaneous cognitive, and
y spontaneous emotional.
Deliberate Thinking
Creative acts in the deliberate cognitive group are instigated by the prefrontal
cortex (and especially the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is responsible
for working memory). The prefrontal cortex controls our ability to shift
between modes of thinking, inhibit inappropriate or maladaptive behaviors,
and organize behaviors over time, especially as we work towards a goal.
Deliberative cognitive creative thinking also pulls from the back of the brain—
specifically the temporal, parietal, and occipital cortices—when necessary. An
example of a deliberate cognitive creative act would be solving a puzzle.
During deliberate emotional creativity, the frontal cortex is directing the
show, but here, instead of pulling from neutral information stores, the frontal
attentional network searches affective or emotional memories. The brain
structures involved here are part of the limbic system, or our emotional and
motivational network, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which regulates
emotions, inhibits impulses, and is considered critical to maintaining our
personality (as opposed to our intellect). A pianist performing a written piece
would fall under this category.
Both categories, then, are based in the prefrontal cortex, but pull information
from different places: your semantic networks in the case of deliberate
cognitive creativity, and your emotional networks in the case of deliberate
emotional creativity.
Spontaneous Thinking
Spontaneous thinking isbased in the back of the brain, where thinking is
less deliberate. The aha moment of illumination when a scientist makes
a discovery falls under spontaneous cognitive thinking, and a jazz trumpeter
improvising falls under spontaneous emotional thinking. This area is
activated when the front of our brain tires of the effort required for deliberate
thinking and cedes control to other parts of our attentional system.
We can roughly divide our attentional system into two parts: top-down and
bottom-up. Top-down attentional regulation refers to when we consciously
direct our thoughts to some aspect of the internal or external environment.
Maintaining your focus on this lecture is an example. This kind of deliberate
attention is largely driven by the frontal cortex—the top of the brain, if you will.
But when an external stimulus—or sometimes an internal one, like a growling
stomach—pulls your attention away from whatever it is you were doing, we
call this a bottom-up interruption. Since much of your sensory processing
happens in the ventral, or belly, or bottom side of your brain, this makes
sense, anatomically speaking.
Top-down attentional control requires sustained concentration, but the brain
is almost always vigilant, and a strong enough stimulus can usually activate
the bottom-up system. There isn’t a consistent threshold for when some
stimulus engages the bottom-up system and our attention shifts. If you’re a bit
bored, the threshold is pretty low; but if you’re having a major breakthrough
and your thoughts are flying, your threshold is pretty high.
So, attention ebbs and flows, and the brain networks that support it reflect
this dynamism with waves of activation. When the top-down network is
fully under control, it can be downright hard to come up with any new
ideas or associations. But when it cedes control, more or less, to other brain
networks, then loosely associated thoughts can suddenly pop into mind. This
downregulation is part of the incubation process.
When these insights stem from signals
arising out of semantic networks, they When we take a walk,
fall into the spontaneous cognitive
category. But when they arise from enjoy a bath, or
emotional networks—in the case of even just sit under
spiritual epiphanies, for example, or a tree, we cede some
an intense need to express the way we
control of the top-
feel—they are considered spontaneous
emotional insights. Under these down network and
conditions, creatives (usually artists) allow untethered
then experience a rush of creation— ideas to float around
painting, dance, poetry, and so on.
in our working
When it comes to defining how brain memory. Much of
networks underlie the creative process,
models like Dietrich’s can be helpful.
the time, they’re
But creative work is messy, and we not that useful. But
lose some of its magic when we try to sometimes a solution
fit it neatly into boxes. Dietrich notes surfaces and we
that these categories aren’t airtight and
that most creative acts fall somewhere have an aha moment.
along a spectrum. For this reason, it This is what Dietrich
can be insightful to hear from eminent terms spontaneous
creatives and to extract patterns, if thinking.
we can, from their descriptions of
the process.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Between 1990 and 1995, Csikszentmihalyi and his students interviewed 91
eminent people, including 14 Nobel Prize winners, from a variety of creative
domains, trying to include equal numbers of men and women and people
from diverse cultural backgrounds. There were three conditions for selecting
candidates to interview: They had to have made a major contribution in their
domain; they had to be active either in that domain or a different one; and,
with few exceptions, they had to be at least 60 years old.
An interesting observation from this study is that more than half of the
natural scientists who were asked agreed to take part, but most artists, writers,
and musicians declined. While the final sample was fairly representative
of a wide variety of creatives, the researchers had to work harder to include
nonscientists. Women and men were equally likely to accept invitations to
join the study, though creative women were woefully underrepresented, and
instead the final gender ratio was 70-to-30 in favor of men.
Study Findings
When it comes to preparation, “One cannot be creative
the interviews revealed that without learning what
sometimes, though not often,
a creative discovery can seem to
others know, but then
come out of the blue. But in most one cannot be creative
cases, the individual has spent without becoming
a significant amount of time dissatisfied with that
thinking about a problem they
were solving or a project they knowledge and rejecting
were producing. Csikszentmihalyi it for a better way.”
notes three sources from
—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
which the problems or projects
generally arise:
Personal Experiences: Many respondents reported some note-taking or
jotting down of ideas and experiences. In the case of writers, this list then
becomes a source of content. Many scientists have a list of experiments
or questions they would like to tackle if they have the time. Visual artists
keep sketches or design ideas.
Known Problem in the Domain: Every domain has its set of pet
problems, and to make a contribution to solving one of these problems,
you need to thoroughly understand the domain.
Social Pressures: The context or the social environment of the domain is
another source of potential problems to solve. Colleagues, organizations,
the state of the world—these are all places where tension or inspiration
can trigger the creative process, whether it’s an attempt to contribute to
or redefine the field.
Once the puzzle or problem has captured the creative’s attention and they’ve
worked on it for a while, the incubation period can be fruitful. Idle time,
as Csikszentmihalyi calls it, seems to be respected by many if not all of his
interviewees. Allowing the remote associations to percolate up to consciousness
depends on putting our top-down attention in neutral.
Csikszentmihalyi lays out four conditions that are especially important during
the last stage of the creative process, the evaluation stage:
y The person must be paying attention to the creative work so that they can
notice the emergence of new ideas and so on—but they must also keep an
open mind.
y They must gauge whether the work is meeting their goals.
y They must check in with the domain to make sure that they are keeping
pace with the latest technology, information, and theories.
y They should interact with and listen to colleagues in their field, gathering
feedback and ensuring that their work will be accepted.
Csikszentmihalyi’s interviewees also underscored the fact that creative work
is never done—it’s not as though they were looking back at their careers,
satisfied with their accomplishments, and now enjoying a retirement. Instead,
they remained engaged in work. Creativity is most definitely a process—one
that can be learned, refined, improved, and almost never finished.
Reading
Csikszentmihalyi, M. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and
Invention. New York: Harper Collins Publishing, 1996.
Lubart, Todd. “Models of the Creative Process: Past, Present and Future,”
Creativity Research Journal 13, no. 3-4 (2001): 295–308.
Sadler-Smith, E. “Wallas’ Four-Stage Model of the Creative Process:

More than Meets the Eye?” Creativity Research Journal 27, no. 4
(2015): 342–352.
4
Table of Contents
EVALUATING
THE CREATIVE
PRODUCT
When evaluating how creative a
product is, there are multiple factors
to consider, including how original
it is and whether it’s considered
meaningful or useful in its domain.
And since beauty or meaning is in
the eye of the beholder, the creative
product’s value is created by your
brain—or the brains of people buying
it. This lecture explores the factors
that impact value as well as the idea
that art cannot be separated from its
creator while scientific products can.
25
What Makes a Product Creative and Meaningful?
Probably the most contentious
question in the study of creativity is
what makes a product creative. We In 2007, violinist
might agree on the process, or at least Joshua Bell performed
that there is a process, and we might
for 43 minutes at a
agree on some of the personality traits
of creative people. But when we try to subway stop outside
define the creative product, skepticism Washington DC.
often appears. Is such a definition Wearing jeans and
broadly possible? Or is the valuation of
a baseball cap, he
creative products simply too subjective?
Is it just a matter of knowing it when played some of his
you see it? most challenging
Psychologists generally argue that pieces on his
a creative product has two features: Stradivarius violin,
it needs to be both novel, or original, worth about $3.5
and it also needs to be useful.
Originality is a given, but what they million. More than
mean by usefulness is usually where the 1,000 people passed
problem comes in. him by, and very few
Usefulness can be taken to mean stopped to listen. He
utility, value, appropriateness, or made a total of $32.17.
meaningfulness. A creative product
Just three days earlier,
has to be for something—it can’t just
be arbitrary. A child writing the name Bell had played to a
of their teddy bear in chalk in front of full house in Boston’s
their house may be novel, but it doesn’t Symphony Hall. For
have a lot of utility beyond the child’s
some gigs, he was
development. By contrast, when a
community comes together and paints paid more than $1,000
the words Black Lives Matter in the a minute.
middle of the street, the act can serve
as a catalyst for real change and holds
significant meaning.
4 • Evaluating the Creative Product 26

But the meaning of a product is subjective and domain-specific. Taping a
banana to the wall in a grocery store would be pretty meaningless and a little
absurd. Taping it to the wall of an art gallery during a famous art festival,
as the artist Maurizio Cattelan did, caused a sensation. To understand its
meaning, we need to delve into the backstory.
In 1917, Marcel Duchamp submitted a signed urinal to an international art
exhibit in New York. His piece, which he titled Fountain, was rejected by
those who ran the exhibit on the grounds
that it did not constitute art. For this
and other provocations, Duchamp is To many, Duchamp’s
considered by many in the art world to
Fountain represents
be just as revolutionary as Picasso or
Matisse. But whereas they furthered the the beginning of
development of painting, Duchamp was conceptual art. The
more interested in provoking the mind original is lost, but
than the eye. To this end, he turned to
presenting existing objects as works of
a replica sold at
art, which he termed readymades. In his auction for almost
view, anything could be considered art as $2 million in 1997.
long as an artist selects and positions it
as such.
We can now better appreciate the novelty and usefulness of the banana that
Cattelan duct-taped to a gallery wall during the 2019 Art Basel in Miami
festival. Cattelan called the piece Comedian, perhaps as a nod to the comedic
cliché of slippery banana peels. But of course, the concept is what you make
of it. Perhaps it’s a comment on what, exactly, you’re paying for when you buy
art: the physical piece itself or the idea behind it? It has made a significant
contribution to the way we think about contemporary art.
The Brain’s Response to Art

How an observer interprets a creative product affects their brain’s response to
it. And in many domains, such as visual art, music, and theater, interpreting
the meaning behind a work is up to the observer, making them an active
participant in the creative act.

We have an intuitive sense that the brain is neutral—that it would be
activated by a banana taped to a wall in the same way, regardless of who
taped it and why. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Our senses get
information from the environment (light bouncing off a banana, for example),
but our brains turn this impoverished information into perception and assign
it meaning.
Music is something that does not exist outside of a brain. The same sound can
be noise in one context and music in another. Sirens, bird songs, thumps—
even silence—can become music when our brains decide to interpret them that
way. So, too, with other forms of art: How we look determines what we see.
It is also important to note that our interpretation of a product can be
influenced by what we know about its creator. Bach, for example, is
considered by many to have been the greatest composer of all time. But what
if you heard a piece that you thought had been composed by Bach and later
learned that it was written by a computer program trained to mimic his style?
If virtually no human being is involved in the creation of a piece, can that
piece be said to be creative? Some argue that the computer programmer is the
creative in this case; others say Bach. But can we really say this if neither one
of them had control over the final product?

Theory-of-Mind Network
One study compared the brain activity of participants when listening to music
they thought was composed by a person versus music generated by a program.
When listeners were told a piece was written by a person, they tended to
engage their theory-of-mind network—the circuitry in the brain that enables
us to understand the intentions, beliefs, and feelings of others.
The theory-of-mind network is a set of brain regions that are active when we
engage in social tasks, especially when we’re evaluating what another person
is thinking or feeling. The network includes core regions such as the medial
prefrontal cortex, the precuneus, the bilateral temporal parietal junction, and
often the insula.
In the study, this core set of regions showed activation even if the piece had
been composed by a program but the listeners didn’t know that. If, on the
other hand, participants were told that a computer had generated the piece,
they listened more superficially, without seeking out added layers of meaning,
and this network was not in play.
This is why we ask experts in a domain to help us evaluate the relative
creativity of different products in that domain. Presumably, experts will
know the extent to which the contribution is valuable to the field, though of
course their assessments are an imperfect measure. The domain itself makes
a difference too. For example, creativity in scientific products should be easier
to evaluate than creativity in the arts, as they should be objectively useful
regardless of the individuals behind them.
Authenticity Boosts Value

One criterion people use to assess products in the art world is supposed
authenticity. Droves of people line up every day to glimpse the actual Mona
Lisa even though excellent replications are available just around the corner.
Why is the original product so much more valuable than a perfect replica?
And why pay millions for art when an almost-perfect fake is worth
virtually nothing? One possible explanation is that we imbue objects with
a sort of essence when they have special meaning for us. This sense of
value for personal items begins in early infancy, as any parent knows.

A child losing their favorite blanket can be inconsolable. If you present them
with a perfect replacement, they often won’t give it a second glance. They
need the original. But why?
We also add value to objects simply by choosing them over other objects, even
when they are identical. And any souvenir shop knows the power objects have
to help us remember happy times. You could order the same items online after
the trip, but they don’t seem as desirable then as they did in the store.
An argument can be made that
because artistic creativity is tied
to the artist, unlike scientific Scarlett Johansson
creativity, the originals have a closer once sold a used tissue
relationship to the artist than any from an appearance
copy possibly could. Through our
on The Tonight Show
interactions with original versions
of creative products, we get about as for more than $5,000
close as we can to the creative acts on eBay. In 2012, Elvis
that brought them into being. And Presley’s Bible sold for
that makes those originals feel more
valuable. $94,000 at auction. The
belief that objects take
George Newman and Paul Bloom
from Yale University conducted on some essence of
an experiment that examined how their creators or of the
people value duplicates of creative humans that interacted
products. The study revealed that
with them is known as
most people would consider a
duplicate painting by the original the law of contagion.
artist to be more valuable than a
duplicate created by an apprentice,
simply because the original artist made it. But when it came to duplicates of
car prototypes, the study found that most people would say a subcontractor’s
product is just as valuable as the original manufacturer’s product. Findings
from the study suggest that other factors impact value of duplicates, including
the level of effort used to produce the item, whether the duplicate was created
intentionally or accidentally, and whether the artist physically handled
the product.

Non-Fungible Tokens
In digital art, the artist does not literally move pixels around a screen—
they instruct a computer to execute the action for them. So digital artists
discovered a workaround to give their work more value: non-fungible tokens,
or NFTs. A fungible digital token is replaceable: Trade one dollar for another,
or one bitcoin for another, and you’d have the same thing—one dollar or
bitcoin.
You can make as many copies of digital art as you want, and they’ll all be
the same, but the NFT gives you ownership over that piece—copyright in
some cases. An NFT is a little like bitcoin in that it’s a unique entity on
a blockchain—the digital ledger that keeps track of that currency. Now you
have a piece of art that has only one NFT, or several—just like you can make
prints of physical art that are identical. But each print then gets tagged in the
blockchain.
One additional benefit of NFTs is that if someone sells it, the artist gets a cut.
If Monet sold a painting for $1 million, and then the buyer sold it to someone
else for $10 million, Monet didn’t get a cut. But in the case of NFTs, the artist
would. Nice hack, eh?
Reading
Gelman, S. A., and N. S. Davidson. “Young Children’s Preference for
Unique Owned Objects.” Cognition 155 (2016): 146–154.
Gerven, Dylan, Anne Land-Zandstra, and Welmoet Damsma.

“Authenticity Matters: Children Look beyond Appearances in Their
Appreciation of Museum Objects.” International Journal of Science
Education 8, no. 4 (2018): 325–339.

5
Table of Contents
WHO IS THE
CREATIVE
PERSON?
Many of us have this notion that

people are either creative or they
aren’t. This lecture examines
the evidence for the existence
of creative people as a distinct
group with unique attributes. It
explores three ways to potentially
identify especially creative
people: enduring personality
traits, genetic signature, and
cognitive or behavioral skills that
are common to creatives.
32
The Big 5 Personality Traits
Social psychologists have been chipping away at the problem of defining
personality for decades, and there still remains a significant consensus that
a theory refined in the 1990s is the best we’ve got: the Big 5.
Proponents of the theory suggest that this model provides a framework—a
set of dimensions, if you will—that can be used to organize the many
individual differences that characterize humankind, according to Lew
Goldberg, who is credited with dubbing them the Big 5.
These five dimensions are easy to remember if you use
the acronym OCEAN:
1. openness to new experiences (originally defined as intellect), ranging
from curious and inventive to consistent and cautious;
2. conscientiousness, or dependability, ranging from efficient and
organized to extravagant and careless;
3. extroversion (also called surgency), ranging from outgoing and
energetic to solitary and reserved;
4. agreeableness, ranging from friendly or compassionate to critical or
rational; and
5. neuroticism, or emotional stability, ranging from sensitive or nervous
to resilient or confident.
We often think of creatives as being neurotic, extravagant, and inventive or
curious. But if they want to build a successful career or manage people, they
also have to be resilient, confident, and conscientious—skills that we less
frequently associate with creative people, but that’s a mistake.
Big 5 Studies
Several studies have applied the five-factor model to creative people, and in
1998, Gregory Feist published a meta-analysis of these findings, contrasting
scientific creatives and their artistic counterparts.
5 • Who Is the Creative Person? 33

While some studies found that artists score higher on neuroticism than the
general population, others show that many successful creatives, especially
those identified as leaders, including artists, score higher on emotional
stability. It seems that the creative domain might be a factor in terms of how
personality traits map onto creativity. When it comes to conscientiousness,
for instance, creative scientists tend to be more efficient and organized than
the general population, while artists tend to be more extravagant and messy.
But the key term here is tend to—there are plenty of organized artists and
messy scientists.
Extroversion has also been found to be associated with creativity, specifically
when measured using divergent thinking tasks. It’s possible that this is
because extroverts are known to seek more stimulation, work harder to please
the experimenter, and are quicker to blurt out ideas. Or perhaps extroverts
are just better under the artificial laboratory conditions used to measure
divergent thinking.
Contrary to popular
belief, scientists
actually show a greater
range of personality
traits than artists
do. That’s probably
because some
scientific fields require
greater attention to
detail, rote tasks, and
rule-following than
others do.

Feist’s meta-analysis showed both artists and scientists were more likely to
score higher on the openness-to-new-experiences measures than nonartists
and nonscientists. And in line with this finding, most creativity researchers
consider openness and intellect to be at the core of the creative personality,
and they are generally thought to represent the same dimension.
According to the researcher Scott
Barry Kaufman and his colleagues,
intellect refers to reasoning, or People with high
cognitive engagement with abstract openness or intellect
and semantic information, while also tend to spend their
openness refers to imagination,
downtime making and
fantasy, aesthetics, perceptions, and
emotions. They found that openness creating as opposed
to experiences and extroversion to observing or
both independently predict creative participating—making
achievement in the arts, while
intellect predicts scientific creativity.
it more likely that they’ll
eventually come up with
Kaufman also used Daniel
Kahneman’s categorization of that genius idea.
thinking types to develop his
categories of cognitive requirements
for creativity.
Kahneman divides thinking into two systems:
y System 1 involves automatic, intuitive, unconscious cognition; we can
also call this type of thinking implicit.
y System 2 involves our thoughtful, deliberate, effortful, and conscious, or
explicit, thinking.
Kaufman then divides creative thinking into two types:
y Type 1 processes roughly rely on system 1. We can roughly map this
thinking onto the spontaneous form we’ve already discussed in lecture 3.
y Type 2 processes, like Kahneman’s system 2, require conscious direction
and control. We can also call this deliberate thinking.

In this model, artistic creativity is thought to contain proportionately more
type 1 processes, while scientific creativity is more influenced by type 2
thinking. This would explain why artistic creativity might be more correlated
with openness, and scientific creativity more with intellect.
Latent Inhibition
Interviews with eminent creatives have also shown that getting down to
the business of being creative often requires concerted effort and the ability
to overcome the urge to procrastinate. There’s some evidence that eminent
creatives are often a little obsessive about their work—they find it hard to stop
thinking about it.
The ability to bring attention to
ideas, perceptions, and stimuli that Creative people are
others ignore has long been thought often thought of as
of as a feature of the creative person.
distractible, especially
To understand this ability, we
must first understand the concept when they are not
of latent inhibition. This is a term actively engaged in their
psychologists use to describe a creative work. But it
cognitive process in which familiar
stimuli are ignored. You might learn might be more accurate
to ignore the sounds of sirens if you to say that creatives
live or work above a fire station, often see what others
for example. don’t—new ideas,
Some people are better able to ignore unique visions, novel
distractions than others. And there
interpretations, and
is some evidence that low latent
inhibition—that is, a tendency to so on.
be distracted by everyday stimuli,
rather than ignoring them—
coupled with high intellect or IQ is characteristic of many highly creative
people. Shelley Carson and her colleagues published a meta-analysis of a few
studies in 2003, showing that people who scored high on lifetime creative
achievement also showed low latent inhibition.

Neurological Studies
Neuroimaging studies designed to find the brain basis of personality-
trait influences on creativity have been mixed. Some studies have found
no reliable associations between brain volumes or structure in any area
and either openness or intellect. But there is one neuroimaging method
that has yielded some insights into the how the brains of creatives might
differ from those of people who are less creative in general. This method
is termed resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging, or resting-
state fMRI. When an fMRI scan is taken in the resting state, the person
whose brain is being examined is ostensibly doing nothing.
But our minds are never really doing nothing. They are very active—
daydreaming, wandering, thinking about our problems—all things that
are related to or underlie creativity. This kind of thinking is rooted in
the default mode network. Neuroimaging has shown us that the default
mode network is quite large, encompassing the medial prefrontal cortex,
the precuneus or posterior cingulate cortex, and the angular gyrus.
In 2014, Roger Beaty and colleagues compared default mode networks
in people who scored either high or low on a series of six divergent
thinking tasks. Those who scored highly on the tasks showed stronger
connections between their default mode network and a region of the
prefrontal cortex active during divergent thinking tasks. The takeaway
is that highly creative people might be better equipped to take advantage
of the brain at rest.
Boosting your mood can make you more creative if it boosts your
energy. But the angry, depressed creative stereotype also has some
merit, as anger and fear can also enhance idea generation. Carsten de
Dreu, Matthijs Baas, and Bernard Nijstad call these moods activating,
as they seem to give energy. In a series of experiments, they found that
deactivating moods like feeling sad, depressed, relaxed, and serene led to
less fluency of thought and fewer original ideas. The authors suggest that
positive moods enhance cognitive flexibility, while negative ones make
you more persistent.

A person with more energy,
positive or negative, might
ultimately be more creative,
since creativity is a process
that requires effort.
Genetic Studies
What would suggest some sort of hardwiring is a genetic component to
creativity? Some mental illnesses associated with creativity—schizophrenia
and bipolar disorder in particular—have a genetic basis, so the possibility
of a link between genes and creative output is not out of the question. For
the most part, however, the search for a common genetic pattern in creative
individuals has thus far proved elusive. Divergent thinking seems to be
less heritable than other measures, like the Big 5 personality traits. But
the problem is likely that we haven’t been able to collect and analyze data
sets large enough to reveal any meaningful patterns, since both genes and
creativity are variable.
There is one set of genes worth highlighting here. Three genes that affect
dopamine, a major neurotransmitter in the brain, have been labeled novelty-
seeking genes. Two of them code for dopamine receptors 2 and 4 (out of
the five dopamine receptors in the brain), and the third is the dopamine
transporter gene SLC6A3.
You might know that dopamine is involved in your reward pathways, so that’s
why seeking out new things might be rewarding. You can imagine that people
who tend to seek out new things or experiences might ultimately be more

creative than those who don’t. But the genetic variation in these genes seems
to only predict a tiny fraction of the variance in creativity. At this point, it’s
difficult to point to a genetic profile or to certain genes that might make one
person more creative than another, or even define a typical creative person in
terms of how they might map onto the five dimensions of personality.
So, let’s put the idea that creatives are a type to bed—except perhaps to say
that being open to new experiences sets you up for creative work, and while
you might not be able to change your personality, you can change your
behavior. Stuck in a rut? Plagued by a creative block? Go do something you’ve
never done before.
Reading
Barbot, B., M. Tan, and E. Grigorenko. “The Genetics of Creativity:
The Generative and Receptive Sides of the Creativity Equation.” In
Neuroscience of Creativity, edited by O. Vartanian, A. S. Bristol, and J. C.
Kaufman, 71–93. MIT Press: 2013.
Beaty, R. E., M. Benedek, R. W. Wilkins, E. Jauk, A. Fink, P. J. Silvia,

D. A. Hodges, K. Koschutnig, and A. C. Neubauer. “Creativity and the
Default Network: A Functional Connectivity Analysis of the Creative
Brain at Rest.” Neuropsychologia 64 (2014): 92–98.
Kaufman, S. B., L. C. Quilty, R. G. Grazioplene, J. B. Hirsh, J. R. Gray,

J. B. Peterson, and C. G. DeYoung, C. “Openness to Experience and
Intellect Differentially Predict Creative Achievement in the Arts and
Sciences.” Journal of Personality 84, no. 2 (2016): 248–258.
Power, R. A., S. Steinberg, G. Bjornsdottir, C. A. Rietveld, A.

Abdellaoui, M. M. Nivard, M. Johannesson, et al. “Polygenic Risk Scores
for Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder Predict Creativity.” Nature
Neuroscience 18, no. 7 (2015): 953–955.
Shin, J., and A. M. Grant. “When Putting Work Off Pays Off:
The Curvilinear Relationship Between Procrastination and
Creativity.” Academy of Management Journal 64, no. 3 (2020).

6
Table of Contents
THE “MAD GENIUS”

MYTH OF MENTAL
ILLNESS
While it may seem like a clear
link exists between mental illness
and creativity, it’s important to
analyze the data objectively and
remember that a person’s creative
success depends on a number of
factors within and beyond their
control. This lecture looks at
various studies that have explored
connections between mental illness
and creativity and considers the
dangers of perpetuating this myth
and romanticizing mental illness.
40
The Sylvia Plath Effect
In 2001, psychologist and creativity researcher James Kaufman published
a paper in which he coined the term the Sylvia Plath effect, using it to describe
the fact that many female poets have died young. In his paper, he found
that female poets were more likely to show signs of mental illness than other
writers, including male poets, and more than well-known women in other
artistic fields. He replicated this finding and found consistent theoretical
evidence in several follow-up papers.
The term Sylvia Plath effect found its way into major news outlets, and it
seemed to feed the idea that mental illness was almost a desirable trait, for
creative women at least. Kaufman began to regret his earlier comments to
those media outlets and even wrote articles that took issue with his own early
work, worrying that young women who idolize people like Sylvia Plath might
follow in their footsteps.
Romanticizing bipolar disorder or depression or schizophrenia as necessary
or key factors in creativity has dangerous consequences. Seeing suicide as the
noble act of a struggling artist is potentially deadly.
It’s dangerous
to romanticize
mental illness
and assume that
the upside of it is
creativity or that
people who have
a mental illness
should not be
treated, lest the
treatment dampen
their genius.
6 • The “Mad Genius” Myth of Mental Illness 41

The vast majority of the creative work produced by creative people who also
happen to have mental health issues occurs not when they are in the midst
of a psychotic episode or a deep depression, but when they feel better—when
the treatments, whether they be pharmacological, behavioral, cognitive, or
whatever, are helping. So, let’s not fall into the trap of elevating mental illness
as the great driver of genius or creativity, but rather consider its influence
objectively by analyzing data.
Nancy Andreasen’s Research

When studying the link between mental illness and creativity, one approach
is to compare creativity in people with and without a mental illness. This
approach generally involves one or more commonly used creativity tests, like
divergent thinking tasks or a Remote Associates Test. Psychologists generally
refer to this approach as measuring little-c creativity—the everyday functions
that are a part of the creative process.
One of the most prolific researchers in this field, Nancy Andreasen,
unabashedly prefers a different approach, which she calls the duck test: If it
walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck. This approach
focuses on Big-C creativity by studying eminent creatives—living or dead—to
find out whether and to what extent they had mental illness.
Andreasen began her research on this issue in the 1970s. Bertrand Russell,
Albert Einstein, James Joyce—these were all eminent creatives who she knew
either showed symptoms of mental illness themselves or had close family
members who had the diagnosis. It’s important to note that much of this early
work was white-biased.
Andreasen also recruited writers from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a celebrated
program whose graduates have won Pulitzer Prizes and have become US
poets laureate. She compared the writers to a control group with matching
IQ, education, and age profiles, but who worked in “less creative” fields like
accounting, administration, and social work.
Almost immediately, Andreasen rejected her hypothesis that the link between
mental illness and creativity was driven by schizophrenia or a predisposition
towards psychosis. Among creative writers, for example, she found that the
most prevalent mental health issue was mood disturbance: 80% of her writers

confessed to having had a depressive or manic episode, while only 30% of
people in her control group reported similar issues. Several studies since have
replicated Andreasen’s findings that depression and bipolar disorder are found
more commonly among artists and other eminent creatives than in the general
population.
Later, Andreasen did some seminal work in neuroimaging, helping to map
out the network involved in the kind of ideation that can lead to creativity.
She referred to mind-wandering of this sort as random episodic silent thought,
or REST—a precursor of resting-state connectivity work or default mode
network discussed in other lectures.
Schizotypy
Other studies have found that people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia are
not any more likely than the general population to choose creative professions.
Studies also find that these individuals perform less well on tests that measure
convergent thinking, which isn’t too surprising since a feature of the illness is
disorganized thinking. One survey of 65,000 patients by Simon Kyaga and
his colleagues, however, did find a higher incidence of artistic occupations
among people diagnosed with schizophrenia in comparison to the general
population.
Given the significant impairments in thinking and difficulty with daily
living that people diagnosed with schizophrenia often show, it’s not surprising
that they don’t score well on traditional creativity tests or aren’t universally
successful in creative domains. But the idea that a predisposition towards
schizophrenia—or subsyndromal psychosis, also called schizotypy—might be
beneficial when it comes to creativity does make some sense.
Schizotypy is a term used to describe a cluster of traits or experiences that
lean toward the more psychotic end of the spectrum. These traits include a
greater tendency to have unusual cognitive or perceptual experiences, such
as superstitious beliefs or hallucinations. People scoring high on schizotypy
might also show introverted anhedonia—they’re less likely to find social
interactions pleasurable, perhaps because they prefer the company of their
own minds. And they are often nonconforming, prone to mood swings and
defying social conventions.

Considering this cluster of traits,
it becomes fairly easy to see why Many people with
people who are predisposed towards
schizotypy might choose creative schizophrenia learn to
professions or even be more successful distinguish the voices
creatives. Several studies have also in their heads from
found a positive correlation between
external ones, but it
measures of schizotypy and scores on
various tests of creativity, including takes practice. At first,
the Remote Associates Test, divergent those voices sound
thinking tests, and scales designed to just as real as real
assess overall creative behavior in life.
ones. Affected people
We often refer to psychosis as a break describe them as
with reality—which assumes or at
sounding like voices on
least implies that there is a clear
difference between what is real and a radio.
what is not. But if someone were
to scan your brain while you were
having an auditory hallucination—the most common kind of hallucination in
people with schizophrenia—your auditory cortex would appear active. Your
brain would look very similar to one in which an external sound wave was
causing the perception of a voice.
Visual hallucinations can have a similar effect on the brain. As optical
illusions show us, what we perceive isn’t actually a true representation
of what’s physically real or even possible. Your brain makes all kinds of
interpretations, shortcuts, interpolations, and assumptions. Seeing is not just
believing—it’s creating.
Bipolar Disorder Studies

Some researchers have argued that during manic episodes, people with bipolar
disorder might find more energy to be creative than people with major
depressive disorder. To evaluate this theory, Sheri Johnson and her colleagues
conducted two studies: one of 22 people with a bipolar disorder diagnosis who
self-identified as highly creative, and one of 221 undergraduates.

For both studies, participants filled out the same questionnaire measuring
lifetime creative achievement and ambition. In the study of undergraduates,
participants also filled out an assessment of the risk of mania and two
creativity tests.
The study of people with bipolar disorder who self-identified as creative
showed that they displayed more ambition than people with bipolar disorder
in general. The researchers also found that higher ambition scores correlated
with greater lifetime creative achievement.
In the study of undergraduates, the researchers also found that an elevated
risk for mania correlated with greater ambition and creativity, and that
ambition is directly and positively correlated with creativity.
Additional studies show that people with
a family history of schizophrenia seem to
be slightly more likely than the general In studies by
population to be creative, and that first-degree Sheri Johnson
relatives of people with bipolar disorder also
and colleagues,
show a higher likelihood of choosing creative
professions. ambition played
an important
But the picture remains murky. Studies that
find a strong relationship between mental role in creativity.
illness and creativity usually only study a
relatively small number of eminent creatives,
and large-scale studies of a broader creative population do not generally find
much of a relationship. It is also worth noting that living alongside someone
with mental illness can lead to a lot of reflective thought, which itself can lead
to greater creativity.
Creativity-Induced Mental Illness?

What if, rather than mental illness leading to creativity, creativity leads to
mental illness? Can working in a creative profession actually push you into
depression, mania, or even a break with reality? If schizotypy is a spectrum,
and creative people are more likely to seek out new experiences, then is it
possible that even psychosis can be induced?

As the saying goes, if you work at the cutting edge, you’re likely to bleed a little.
Experiencing rejection, ridicule, and self-doubt can be stressful and depressing.
Persisting in the face of these challenges can cause psychic pain, and some of
us have better coping skills than others. Some turn to alcohol or other drugs to
self-medicate. Even meditation practices can become a kind of obsession.
This isn’t to say that you can think your way into mental illness—there are
a lot of factors to consider. But trauma can trigger psychosis, depression, and
other symptoms. Choosing to break norms, persevere in the face of obstacles,
endure being shunned by peers, and continue to believe that your ideas
are valid even when everyone else questions them—these experiences can
approximate some conditions of mental illness.
Maybe it’s time to take a hard look at why we find the mad genius myth so
appealing. Is it because it gives those of us who aren’t eminent creatives some
solace? We can explain our own mediocrity by telling ourselves it’s because
geniuses are mentally ill. And in turn, we can write off their pain by pointing
to their success. This view is not only damaging to eminent creatives, who
are often asked to continue to produce at inhuman levels and denied the help
they need, but also to people in creative professions in general.

So the myth is problematic in several directions. There is no strong evidence
that mental illness predicts creativity, nor is there evidence that high
intelligence is sufficient either. Instead, a person’s creative success depends
on a number of factors, both within and outside of their control, and while
extreme intelligence and/or a bout with a mind-altering mental illness might
influence a person’s work or subject matter, creativity also involves getting the
job done.
Reading
Andreasen, Nancy. “Secrets of the Creative Brain.” The Atlantic, July/
August 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/07/
secrets-of-the-creative-brain/372299/.
Johnson, S. L., G. Murray, S. Hou, P. J. Staudenmaier, M. A. Freeman,

and E. E. Michalak. “Creativity Is Linked to Ambition across the Bipolar
Spectrum.” Journal of Affective Disorders 178 (2015): 160–164.
Lee, Christine, and David Therriault. “The Cognitive Underpinnings

of Creative Thought: A Latent Variable Analysis Exploring the Roles
of Intelligence and Working Memory in Three Creative Thinking
Processes.” Intelligence 41, no. 5 (2013): 306–320.

7
Table of Contents
FINDING YOUR
MOTIVATION FOR
CREATIVE WORK
The human brain’s reward system
is a powerful and complex tool
that shapes many of our actions
and experiences, from finding
food to solving puzzles. Theories
about motivation have evolved
as researchers have identified
different types of rewards that
drive us. This lesson dives into
the neuroscience of motivation
to explain how rewards work
and why some situations boost
creativity and others diminish it.
48
Early Theories of Motivation
In the 1950s, James Olds and Peter Milner implanted rats with electrodes
and taught them that if they pressed a lever, they would get a little jolt of
electricity in a specific part of the brain. The rats seemed very motivated to
press that lever—they would keep pressing to exhaustion, eschewing food,
water, and even a willing mate.
Olds and Milner used this work to demonstrate how powerful drug addiction
in humans can be. This brain region, called the septal area, is known as a key
part of the reward pathway—the network of brain cells pushing us to act
and underlying what we experience as pleasure. But despite the availability of
drugs that act on this pathway, and even the technology to implant our own
self-stimulating electrodes, most humans don’t become addicts or sit around
at home jolting the septal region.
The scientists don’t know if the rats actually felt pleasure, or if they were just
motivated to keep pressing the lever. But when researchers ask humans, they
find that often the pleasure is not the end goal. Building up anticipation,
working towards a goal—that’s satisfying in its own right.
In the 1940s, the reigning theory of motivation centered on drive reduction—
that is, the act of reducing our biological needs for food, water, sex, and so
on. The longer we go without those things, the more motivated we are to seek
them out.
But by the 1950s, researchers were pointing out incongruous observations:
Many animals, but especially mammals, explore their surroundings or show
the animal equivalent of curiosity. What biological drive is motivating that
behavior? What’s more, animals don’t seem to satiate on curiosity—in fact,
these exploratory behaviors increase rather than decrease in motivation.
In the 1950s, Harry Harlow conducted a series of tests on monkeys who
worked on a puzzle hundreds of times over the course of two weeks without
any extrinsic or external rewards. When the puzzles were baited with raisins,
the monkeys seemed to work harder at first, but also lost interest more quickly.
There was a maximum of four monkeys in each of the studies, so the findings
are fairly weak. Additional studies since then suggest that the animals get
distracted from their exploration by the presence of food. But without the
food, the puzzle becomes its own reward.
7 • Finding Your Motivation for Creative Work 49

The Reward System
Harlow coined the term intrinsic motivation
to describe the internal drive we have to The reward system
seek out novelty, to explore, to learn, and is one of natural
to understand. Sometimes we call this the
search for meaning. Under its influence,
selection’s most
we do things simply because doing them powerful tools:
is rewarding in and of itself, not because By rewarding
we’re going to get some additional reward
behaviors that
or avoid some kind of punishment. And
we don’t seem to satiate on these activities give an individual
the same way we do when we eat, drink, a better chance
or have sex. Studies show that when we to survive and
are intrinsically motivated, learning,
performance, creativity, and mood are all reproduce, genes
enhanced in a way that they aren’t when we that underlie
actively pursue extrinsic rewards. this system are
There are three general ways that the reward selected for over
system can shape our actions or experiences: the course of
y by inducing wanting, or a craving for a evolution.
reward, which encourages behavior that
gets us closer to receiving that reward;
y by teaching us what helps and what hurts—associating actions or stimuli
with positive or negative consequences, thereby enhancing learning; and
y by inducing a positive experience—giving us the sensation of pleasure,
joy, euphoria, an experience that we like.
Roughly mapping onto these three ways are the major brain networks that
support them:
y the midbrain, where structures that make or modulate neurotransmitters
involved in reward are located;
y the limbic system, which regulates our motivated behaviors and long-
term memory; and
y the prefrontal cortex, which guides our decisions, enabling us to
pursue goals.

Primary and Secondary Rewards
Primary rewards serve either to maintain homeostasis—keeping the body’s
physical or chemical conditions steady—or for reproduction. Although eating
behavior is more complicated than this model suggests, the idea is that we
crave food when our bodies are low on glucose or other nutrients, we crave
heat when we’re cold, water when dehydrated, and so on. Nurturing our
offspring also triggers this primary reward system. It’s such a strong drive that
caregivers regularly sacrifice other pleasures to engage in behaviors that serve
to ensure their offspring thrive.
Secondary rewards are not intrinsically rewarding but rather predict access
to primary rewards. Extrinsic things like money, fame, and accolades are
rewarding because we assume they will decrease aversive states like stress or
hunger and increase pleasure in the form of better food, sex, shelter, and so on.
These two categories of rewards help explain why we have different neural
pathways for wanting (craving, appetitive, approach behaviors) and liking
(consummatory or taking behaviors). There are actually many sites in the
brain that support self-stimulation; we call them pleasure centers or hedonic
hot spots.
Other Reward Pathways

There are other relevant pathways in our larger reward system. In the midbrain,
we have mesolimbic and mesocortical pathways. The limbic regions make up
the border between subcortical and cortical structures. The mesolimbic branch
supports motivational behaviors for seeking primary rewards like food and
sex, while the mesocortical branch sends its projections to the prefrontal cortex
and supports cognitive functions like learning that predict rewards. You might
make the effort to go to your favorite restaurant when you’re hungry, thanks
to your mesolimbic pathway. When you see the menu and crave your preferred
dish, that’s thanks to the mesocortical pathway.
But eating too much can make us feel sick—and that’s a powerful lesson as
well. There’s an anti-reward circuit built into our brains, too—a brake on
motivational drives—which we feel acutely when our initial pleasure turns
to pain.

Neurochemicals That Fuel Rewards
Increased levels of dopamine in the reward system are associated with feeling
good, thinking flexibly, persisting, and continuing to explore. Interestingly,
the positive feelings that make us want more of whatever we assume is causing
them—what we call appetitive wanting—are related to dopamine activity,
while the pleasure of being satisfied itself—consummatory liking—is more
closely tied to opioid neurotransmitters.
Other neurotransmitters are also involved, including glutamate and GABA,

which are the primary excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters in the
brain. They work in a delicate balance: too much glutamate and you can go
into seizure activity, too much GABA and you’ll be in a coma.
We need to be careful when we assign responsibility for the entire reward
pathway to a single neurotransmitter. And though a drive to meet
biological needs can explain a lot, it still doesn’t tell us why we are also
motivated to seek out new experiences, to explore our surroundings—
essentially, to be curious.

Self-Determination Theory
The self-determination theory, which builds on decades of work by Edward
Deci and Richard Ryan, proposes that humans have three basic psychological
needs that can influence our health and sense of well-being:
y Competence allows us to control outcomes and feel as though we have
mastered a skill or task.
y Autonomy reflects the desire to be a causal agent in our lives with free
will over what we do.
y Relatedness describes our desire to feel connected to others, to interact
with them, and to care for and be cared about.
This framework helps explain why some external rewards can decrease the
desire to explore and ultimately kill creativity. If we’re engaging in a particular
behavior because we have to rather than because we want to, that behavior
becomes less rewarding. And if we feel disconnected from others, or that we
aren’t cared for, or that we’re incompetent, we lose intrinsic motivation.
As with our drive for food, there is a sweet spot when meeting the
psychological need to explore. If we’re surrounded by too much newness, we
can feel anxious. If there’s nothing new, we feel bored. It’s when we hit the
right balance of newness that we can
begin to understand and incorporate it
into our existing knowledge, leaving us Encouragement and
feeling rewarded and driving us to seek
out more newness. choices increase
intrinsic motivation,
To better understand this process, let’s
take a deeper dive into one specific part while deadlines and
of the reward system—the dopaminergic criticism decrease it.
pathways.
Dopaminergic Pathways
Dopaminergic neurons are located in the midbrain, where they regulate how
much dopamine is in the pathways and the reward system in general. When
these neurons increase their activity, dopamine floods the system. Some neurons

operate in a tonic mode, firing at a steady
baseline rate, which seems to increase You can dampen a
exploratory behavior. Others operate in a
phasic mode, firing in short bursts when child’s motivation to
something interesting is happening. sort the laundry or
Phasic neurons can further be divided into tidy their room by
two types. Value-coding neurons fire when paying them to do
we get an unexpected reward. Conversely, it. Sometimes that
they inhibit their activity when we get an
can even happen
unexpected punishment. As their name
implies, these neurons code the value of to adults who try to
new things as either positive/rewarding turn a hobby into
stimuli or negative/aversive ones. a profession.
Salience-coding phasic neurons fire
regardless of the valence of the stimuli—
good or bad, they still respond. If the stimulus is meaningful—if it provides
some new information—then these neurons ensure that we pay attention.
Several neuroimaging studies show an increase in activity in the dopaminergic
pathway when our curiosity is piqued, compared with when we’re bored.
Studies have also shown that when a task feels more forced—that is, less
autonomous or self-motivated—activity in this system decreases.
Salience Network
In addition to salience-coding neurons, there is a salience network in the
brain that includes parts of the midbrain as well as the anterior insula and
anterior cingulate cortex. The anterior cingulate cortex, or ACC, is at the
front of the brain, wrapped around the corpus callosum—the fiber tract that
joins the two hemispheres.
The top or dorsal part of the ACC is connected to the prefrontal cortex
and regions above it, and it’s involved in making decisions, detecting errors,
appraising our social status. The bottom or ventral part is more tightly
connected to the limbic regions, like the amygdala and hippocampus—part of
the process of constructing our emotions, gauging the salience or value of our
actions. You can think of the ACC as guiding our efforts.

Then there’s the insula, where our awareness both of our bodies (how we feel)
and our minds (what we’re thinking) is a major function. The anterior insula
is part of the network that constructs complicated feelings like love, disgust,
inequity, and empathy.
Together, these regions support the mobilization of attention and working
memory to facilitate goal-directed behavior. So if the midbrain regions detect
and evaluate significant stimuli, the anterior insula and cingulate cortex can
integrate this information with what’s coming in from the senses and help
plan actions accordingly.
External Rewards and Creativity

Teresa Amabile has been studying the effects of external context on creative
behavior since the 1970s, and her work provides ample evidence that there’s
a positive correlation between autonomy and creativity—when a person’s
autonomy is diminished, creativity suffers, and creativity increases when the
sense of autonomy increases.
Not all external rewards are creativity killers. Timing matters, and what it is
that is being rewarded matters, too. If a reward is unexpected—say, a person
wins a prize for their art after they had completed it—that experience can be
motivating and make them even more creative the next time around.
In 2012, Kris Byron and Shalini Khazanchi published a meta-analysis of
studies that investigated the effects of external rewards on creativity and came
to the following conclusions.
First, rewards boost creativity when people think they are being rewarded for
creativity rather than routine task performance. This kind of task preserves
the person’s sense of autonomy. Second, and also in line with the preservation
of autonomy, when participants are given more choice, creativity-contingent
rewards boost their creative performance more. Third, and supporting the
importance of competence, rewards help enhance creativity when they are
tied to specific, positive feedback, giving the participants information on
what, exactly, they are doing right. Finally, when rewards and feedback lead to
negative emotions—think criticism, disappointment—creativity suffers.

Anxiety, a lack of control, perceived incompetence—these are all ways in
which external environments, the context in which we are asked to create, can
get in our way. If you’re having a hard time overcoming resistance, take a look
at what’s motivating you and how you might kick-start that inner drive to
create once again.
Reading
Byron, K., and S. Khazanchi. “Rewards and Creative Performance: A
Meta-Analytic Test of Theoretically Derived Hypotheses.” Psychological
Bulletin 138, no. 4 (2012): 809.
Di Domenico, S. I., and R. M. Ryan. “The Emerging Neuroscience

of Intrinsic Motivation: A New Frontier in Self-Determination
Research.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 11 (2017): 145.
Harlow, H. “Learning and Satiation of Response in Intrinsically

Motivated Complex Puzzle Performance by Monkeys.” Journal of
Comparative and Physiological Psychology 43, no. 4 (1950): 289–294.

8
Table of Contents
WHEN CREATIVES
CONFRONT
DEPRESSION
Creativity is hard to study because
of the myriad ways that it is defined
and the messy nature of the creative
process. To get a full picture of its
complexity and find meaningful
patterns, sometimes it’s helpful to
consider case studies of eminent
creatives. This lesson looks at the lives
of poet Sylvia Plath, painter Georgia
O’Keeffe, and dancer Martha
Graham, all of whom suffered from
depression and left an indelible mark
on their chosen domain.
57
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath was born in Boston in 1932 and studied at Smith College in
Massachusetts and at Newnham College in Cambridge, England. Her
father was an entomologist who published a book about bees and died of
complications following an
amputation related to diabetes
when Plath was eight. Electroconvulsive Therapy
Interestingly, Mihaly The theory behind ECT is
Csikszentmihalyi found that that by causing seizures,
many of the eminent creatives
he studied had either lost their it triggers the brain’s
fathers early in life or had absent natural repair system.
or detached fathers. Of course, Since the seizures are
the impact of an absent father
carefully controlled, unlike
or the death of a parent depends
very much on the relationship in people with epilepsy,
that parent had with their child. the damage is limited.
Csikszentmihalyi reports that After several sessions,
some creatives felt the loss deeply
patients can show a
while others found it freeing,
releasing them from an oppressive dramatic reduction in
authority figure. And when it symptoms, especially
comes to Plath’s relationship with those who have tried
her father, it seems that she wasn’t
exactly a daddy’s girl. everything else.
She published her first poem at

the age of eight in the Boston Herald ’s children’s section. Her father continued
to influence her poetry right up until her suicide in 1963. In 1962, she
published her famous poem “Daddy.” It’s an angry, accusatory poem in which
she likens her father to both a Nazi and a vampire.
We know that by her early twenties, Plath was exhibiting signs of
depression. Her first documented suicide attempt came in 1953, following
electroconvulsive therapy for depression. While it sounds as though ECT
didn’t help Plath, the way it is administered has changed a lot since the 1950s,
and it remains one of the more effective treatments for severe depression.
8 • When Creatives Confront Depression 58

After the suicide attempt, she spent another six months in hospital and
eventually emerged feeling better and able to return to college. She met poet
Ted Hughes while studying at Cambridge, and they married a few months
later. They returned to Boston, where she struggled to find time to write while
also teaching. A year later, she resumed treatment for her depression.
Her marriage was rocky: Her second pregnancy ended in miscarriage in
1961, and she wrote that Hughes had beaten her two days earlier. A few
months later, she completed her novel, The Bell Jar, which chronicles
the main character’s descent into depression and is considered semi-
autobiographical.
The following year, Hughes began keeping bees, which may have triggered
Plath’s memories of her entomologist father. It was around that time that she
was in a car accident, one that she confessed was a suicide attempt. A month
after the accident, she discovered that Hughes was having an affair, and the
couple separated shortly after.
Their separation marks the start of what scholars call her most creative
period: She wrote many of the poems for which she is best known, including
“Daddy,” and published The Bell Jar. By this point, she was living in England
with her two small children, and the winter was cold and long. She was alone
with the children, who were often sick, in an apartment without a phone. Her
depression returned with a vengeance.
Whereas she had previously been able to write despite the depression, she
could no longer function at the same level. Her physician prescribed a
monoamine oxidase inhibitor, or MAOI, the first pharmacological treatment
for depression, which had recently been discovered.
But it takes weeks for this drug to be effective. Depression is not simply
a chemical imbalance, as many believe, but an intricate balance between
neurotransmitters, anatomy, and the brain’s repair system. MAOIs are now
known to increase the risk of suicide shortly after a person begins taking
them, especially in younger patients, in part because as they begin to be
effective, a person who has been feeling apathetic might now begin to feel
more energetic—enough so to make a suicide attempt successful.

Such was the case with Plath. A few days after starting the medication,
Plath sealed up the kitchen with tape and towels, presumably to protect her
children, and died of carbon monoxide poisoning after placing her head in the
oven and turning on the gas. She was 30 years old.
What can we learn from Plath’s experience? If we consider Sylvia Plath’s
childhood, we can observe several markers that likely influenced the
development of her creativity: She was exposed to many different types of
extracurricular activities, such as playing the viola and basketball; engaging in
scouting and summer camp activities; and dancing, painting, and sailing.
And she was clearly interested in
writing and poetry from a young
age. Plath’s writing was also very The Sylvia Plath effect,
personal. She gave of herself during a term coined by James
the writing process and invested Kaufman, refers to the
time and emotion in her work. fact that female poets in
When she received rejection letters,
or when The Bell Jar was tepidly particular are at higher
received, her depression worsened. risk than other writers or
Wayne Mraz and Mark Runco creatives for taking their
published a paper in 1994 showing own lives.
that suicidal thoughts were
common in people with inadequate
flexibility—that is, a laserlike focus on pain and an inability to consider
any alternatives other than suicide. You’d think that all creative people
would exhibit the opposite—that flexibility of thinking is a requirement for
creativity—but it can actually be very domain-specific.
People can be flexible in terms of how they approach their work but inflexible
in other ways, such as how they dress or how they handle their emotions. In
fact, some obsessive qualities are also common in creatives—by persisting and
immersing themselves in their work, they get more done.
Plath quit her teaching jobs because they took too much time and energy
away from her writing. Just before she took her life, her book was floundering
and her newest poems were being rejected by her usual publishers, likely
because of how creative they were. They would end up solidifying her status
as a legendary poet, but not quickly enough to save her from herself.

Creative work, especially the artistic kind, can generate psychic pain. And
so, when it comes to Sylvia Plath, the evidence points to her writing as
contributing to her depression, rather than the other way around.
Georgia O’Keeffe
Like Sylvia Plath, Georgia O’Keeffe also lost a
parent at a relatively young age—her mother
died just before she turned 30, and her father
died just two years later. After her mother’s
death, O’Keeffe was overwhelmed, exhausted,
and unable to work for six weeks. She’d
experienced a similar reaction at the age of 18,
when she had a bout with typhoid fever that left
her exhausted and depleted.
As is common, O’Keeffe’s physical illnesses
coincided with depression, and she eventually
became aware of this pattern. Her strategy
was to steel herself against it and to work hard
to keep her physical and mental health from
interfering with her work. But there was only so
much that she could do out of sheer will alone,
and in her mid-forties she was finally hospitalized for depression, in 1933,
following months of self-described illness.
It’s possible that this depressive episode was catalyzed by the technical failure
of a project for the Radio City Music Hall. Some people blame her husband’s
infidelity. Regardless of the trigger, her depression had a profound effect on
her creativity: She stopped painting for a year. This pattern of intense work
followed by exhaustion and depression became typical throughout O’Keeffe’s
life and speaks to the direction of cause and effect. For her, it seems that
depression followed bursts of creativity, rather than the other way around.
Later, when she had a major show or exhibition on the horizon, O’Keeffe
would often fall physically ill and then retreat into depression. Her physical
illnesses were diverse and she experienced a lot of anxiety, tension, and
nervousness.

Much of O’Keeffe’s legacy is tied to paintings that she produced in the
Southwest, a part of America very different from New York, where she
spent most of the first half of her
life. As new experiences are often
catalysts for creativity, and a new
environment can pull one out of a After recurring cycles of
rut, it shouldn’t be surprising that intense work followed by
O’Keeffe had to leave the East illness and depression,
Coast to do her best work. But the
Georgia O’Keeffe began
Southwest also seemed to cure many
of her ailments. to note that for her to
be productive in art, she
Even during her lifetime, journalists
romanticized O’Keeffe’s illnesses, needed to take care of
suggesting that suffering was a her body.
critical component in her creative
process. But the timeline, her
letters, and the accounts of her inner
circle suggest otherwise—that she thrived creatively in spite of her illness
and that her depression returned after periods of intense work, when she had
exhausted herself or had to pay a price for the loneliness that accompanied her
art-making.
Martha Graham
Martha Graham was born in Pennsylvania in 1894 to a strict Presbyterian
family. Suffice it to say that they did not encourage dancing. When she was
15, she attended her first dance performance, shortly after the family had
moved to California, and she soon began to take lessons. After finishing
her training, she rejected the idea that dance was purely entertainment and
instead saw it as a raw form of human expression. She is widely considered the
most influential dancer and choreographer of the 20th century, if not ever,
having invented American modern dance.
In 1926, when Graham was 32, she established her first dance studio in a small
space on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Her career and life were one and
the same. Her obsession would trigger rages and she would often shout at her
dancers, but she also had an unwavering work ethic and devotion to the art.

And when her ability to use her body to express her choreography finally left
her at age 75, she plunged into a two-year-long illness and depression, barely
leaving her bed. She began to abuse alcohol and attempted suicide. She was
hospitalized.
But in her late seventies, she rose
out of bed and worked for almost
two more decades, building her When a person gives
school and putting the final touches all of their energy,
on her legacy. She choreographed psychic and physical,
her last work just a year before she
died at the age of 96. Then, when
to a creative act, it’s
she stopped dancing, Graham lost not surprising that
her will to live. depression follows.
So, what can we conclude from the This is especially true
stories of these three remarkable, if society rejects that
creative women? Certainly the creative act or the
evidence that depression and
anxiety enhanced or spurred their ability to express oneself
creativity is woefully lacking. creatively is taken away.
In fact, the opposite seems to
be true and in line with larger
studies of people with mood disorders and less eminent creatives. Creativity
happens despite the illness, and when the illness becomes especially severe,
creativity stops.
Reading
Root-Bernstein, M., and R. Root-Bernstein. “Martha Graham, Dance,
and the Polymathic Imagination: A Case for Multiple Intelligences
or Universal Thinking Tools?” Journal of Dance Education 3, no. 1
(2003): 16–27.
Udall, S. R. “Georgia O’Keeffe and Emily Carr: Health, Nature and the
Creative Process.” Woman’s Art Journal 27, no. 1 (2006): 17–25.

9
Table of Contents
FREE YOUR
BRAIN WITH
SPONTANEOUS
CREATIVITY
Functional neuroimaging techniques
have made it possible to watch the
brain in action. But creativity is hard
to predict. When, exactly, is someone
going to have that stroke of insight? By
scanning the brains of musicians and
comedians during the creative act of
improvising, researchers have learned
which areas of the brain are activated—
and which areas are deactivated—during
spontaneous creation. The findings have
implications that could reach far beyond
music and comedy.
64
Improvising with Music
Charles Limb chose to be a hearing specialist because of his fascination with
music. An ear surgeon and a jazz saxophonist, he’s also one of the pioneers of
using brain scans to study the creative process of musical improvisation. In
2008, he and a colleague conducted an experiment: Limb composed a new
jazz piece, rigged a piano that could be played in a scanner, and recruited
some professional jazz pianists. He asked them to perform four tasks in
the machine:
First, they played a regular scale to subtract out brain activity simply involved
in playing the piano.
Second, they improvised on a scale—a task that is somewhat creative but not
that realistic, given that in concert, jazz musicians have to riff on a melody
with a specific rhythm and coordinate with a crew.
Third, they played Limb’s piece just as he had written it, having memorized it
in advance.
Fourth, they improvised on the fly—the real condition of interest—using
Limb’s composition as a starting point.
Letting Go of the Inner Critic

The first thing that surprised the researchers was just how good the
improvisations were. What was going on in the brain under these different
conditions? During the improvisation, compared with memorized playing,
Limb observed more activity in an area toward the front of the brain
called the medial prefrontal cortex. This region is also implicated in
autobiographical remembering and in emotional regulation. It might be
involved in how we express who we are, so it makes sense that it would be
more active when a musician is improvising than when they’re interpreting
what someone else wrote.
But what really surprised them was that other parts of the frontal lobe were
deactivated during improvisation but not during straight playing. Regions
affected included part of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the lateral
orbitofrontal cortex, which we know are important for monitoring, evaluating,
and correcting our thoughts and actions when we’re pursuing a goal.
9 • Free Your Brain with Spontaneous Creativity 65

You can think of the dorsolateral
prefrontal cortex as your inner critic— Patients with focal
that voice in your head that tells you
what you’re doing is right or wrong. brain degeneration
or damage to regions
Musicians work very hard to suppress
that voice when performing—after all, associated with
it’s immediately obvious to the audience their “inner critic”
when a musician is thinking about how sometimes start to
they’re doing and not present in the
exhibit highly creative
moment. The fact that these regions
were quieted down when improvising behaviors—suddenly
makes intuitive sense. turning to painting or
Neuroscientists and musicians call the sculpture to express
effect of this deactivation letting go—it themselves, when
feels as though the person is freed up they had shown little
to just play. Of course, letting go is
not possible if you need to concentrate
or no interest in
on what notes to play or where your those activities prior
fingers go. So, to let go, people need to to the damage.
be trained enough to be able to produce
the physical expression of what they
have in mind.
But even the way the musician lets go requires training—perhaps not a formal
musical education, but certainly a lot of deliberate practice. That doesn’t mean
doing the same thing over and over again. It requires a fair amount of inner
critic, which means activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. And different
genres also have different spoken and unspoken rules about improvisation
that the musician needs to know and keep in mind when playing.
So, the brain of a novice will show different activity than that of an expert,
and the genre, instrument, and so on will also leave its mark. Improvisation
also requires some level of feedback, as musicians adjust and expand on the
ideas coming from the rest of the ensemble or the audience or whatever else
they are responding to in the moment.

Other Music Studies
In a study published a year before Charles Limb and Allen Braun’s 2008
paper on jazz pianists, Sara Bengtsson and colleagues conducted a similar
experiment. Instead of comparing the improvisation condition with a task that
involved playing from a memorized melodic sequence (Limb’s composition),
participants were asked to play melodies that they had previously improvised
in the scanner. Essentially, they were asked to remember and replay their
improvisations.
Then, when they improvised, they had to modify new eight-bar melodies
and ensure these weren’t the same as the ones they had previously recalled.
That’s a much harder task and arguably less like improvising live in front of
an audience.
The authors found that under these conditions, participants’ dorsolateral
prefrontal cortices were activated—the same region that was deactivated in
Limb’s study—along with other regions. That makes sense, as these musicians
had to monitor, correct, and inhibit their improvisational impulses, not
simply let go.
Then, in 2012, Siyuan Liu and colleagues replicated the Limb and Braun
study but with vocal improvisation rather than piano. They asked freestyle
rap artists to either recite lyrics from a prerecorded audio sample or create
their own, and, like Limb and Braun, the researchers saw both deactivation
of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and activation of medial prefrontal cortex
during the improvisations.
This medial prefrontal region, along with a few other regions that both sets
of authors saw activated during improvisation, are part of the default mode
network. They are the connected regions that are active when we let our
minds wander. This type of thinking is often self-referential—we think about
ourselves. The activation of regions within this network during improvisation
suggested to Limb that it might be tied to self-expression.
In another study, Aaron Berkowitz and Daniel Ansari compared brain
activation maps during improvisation between musicians and non-musicians,
and they found roughly similar patterns. However, musicians effectively
deactivated a region called the right temporoparietal junction, or the rTPJ.
This region is a key player in analyzing actions that we produced ourselves.

Jazz musicians often
describe improvisation
as a kind of out-of-
body experience. This
sensation might occur
if they deactivate a
particular region of the
brain while playing.
Damaging it, even temporarily, can cause an out-of-body experience. It’s

possible that experienced musicians learn to turn it down when improvising so
that they can more effectively remain in the moment.
What about comparing pianists who are equally skilled but have different
amounts of experience improvising? Ana Luísa Pinho and her colleagues
found that the more experienced the pianist, the less activation was seen in the
dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and other regions when they were improvising.
But these experts also showed greater connectivity between prefrontal regions
and premotor cortex. According to the researchers, these results support
the idea that executive control networks—or the inner critic—are more
effectively quieted down by expert improvisers. The increased connectivity
might suggest that the experts could pull specific actions more easily from
memory on demand.

Group versus Solo Improvisation
Charles Limb, along with Gabriel Donnay and other collaborators, set out to
see what, if anything, changes when players are improvising in a group versus
on their own. They used the same piano from the earlier study, and this time
Limb was an active participant. While the pianists were in the scanner, he was
listening in the control room, and together they “traded fours,” where each
musician plays four bars, then listens to the response, like a conversation.
The researchers found that improvising, when compared to playing a melody
from memory, activated a network of regions, including the dorsolateral
prefrontal cortex, on both sides of the brain. At the same time, a part of the
brain called the angular gyrus was found to be deactivated. In this case,
collaborative improvisation required greater monitoring of one’s performance.
This study also found that musical conversations activated parts of the
language network involved in syntax but deactivated parts involved in
semantics, like the angular gyrus. When we’re conversing with words, we use
both regions—one to choose the right words and one to put them together
according to our grammatical rules. In musical conversations, we might still
have rules to follow, but we don’t look for specific words. We express meaning
without language.
Improvising with Language

To study improvisation with language, Limb put improvisational comedians
into the scanner. Preliminary results show distinct patterns of activation
and deactivation in the brain when the comedians are reciting a pre-written,
memorized monologue versus playing improv games—so, similar to what
happens with musicians, only with a different set of affected networks.
Clearly, some domain specificity comes into play when we’re trying to map
the brain basis of spontaneous creativity.
When you think about it, the main difference between composition and
improvisation is time. For some people, the time constraints of improvising
cause them to freeze up—it can kill creativity by triggering anxiety. But
if anxiety stems from not knowing the outcome, training in or having
experience with improvisation should help.

Value beyond Music and Comedy
Improv comedy troupes have mastered the art of improvisational training—so
much so that they are often invited into corporate offices to train staff in the
art. There are a few versions of the rules, but
we can distill them down to the following:
Next time you’re
1. emphasize “yes, and,”
in an argument,
2. listen,
try responding
3. trust your instincts, and with “yes, and,”
4. support your fellow performers. which fills the
First, you want to say yes to what you hear— room with
that is, affirm and accept it—and then build energy, instead
on it to move the action forward. It’s the
of “no, but,”
opposite of “no, but.”
which sucks the
Second, you need to listen. This is where
the bottom-up information can come in and
energy out.
where the ideas usually are. Listening to what’s
happening can help you out of a rut.
Third, if you think you might have a new idea, trust your instincts! This is
where the inner critic gets silenced. Don’t worry if it’s right or wrong; take a risk.
Fourth, support your fellow performers. If they’ve fallen, lift them up.
The key to getting better at improvising is to practice improvising, keeping
these rules in mind. You can probably see, then, how companies might value
improv training as a way of building better team synergy and more effective
group work.
Another example of improv’s value comes from a collaboration between the
Lookingglass Theatre Company in Chicago and a clinic serving patients with
Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s disease is devastating for the patient and for
those who love them. Interacting or talking to your loved one can be very hard.
People often make the mistake of correcting the patient, saying “no, but,” which
can cause the patient to feel confused and clam up, rather than “yes, and,”
which keeps the conversation going.

The improv sessions between the improv troupe, called the Memory Ensemble,
and the Alzheimer’s patients were found to yield feelings of success, optimism,
hope, normalcy, and confidence; a reduction of stigma; and a sense of
connection and empowerment among the participants with dementia.
The Creative Capacity Building Program

Manish Saggar tracked the effects of improvisation training on brain function
in a collaboration with the famed Stanford d.school (d standing for “design”).
The school’s Creative Gym program is a highly popular class that teaches the
principles of design thinking. The course is immersive and teaches improvisation
and other skills related to creativity. It was adapted for the study into an
abbreviated version called the Creative Capacity Building Program, or CCBP.
To assess the effects of the CCBP on brain activity, the researchers chose
for their control condition a Language Capacity Building Program, where
participants learned basic Mandarin vocabulary, character writing, and
common phrases through hands-on exercises. The researchers randomly
assigned participants to take one of the training programs. Each participant
was assessed before and after taking the program, using both behavioral tasks
and brain imaging.
Participants in the creativity training program performed only slightly better
at the behavioral task (playing the game Pictionary) afterward than did those
in the active control group. But the authors saw pretty significant differences
in terms of brain function: The CCBP participants had reduced activity in
a network of brain regions discussed in this lesson—namely, the dorsolateral
prefrontal cortex, the supplementary motor area, and the anterior cingulate
cortex—after training compared to their baseline beforehand.
Meanwhile, the LCBP participants showed the opposite pattern—they had
increased activity in this network after language training. The researchers also
saw increased connectivity, which is different than activity, between regions in
this network after training in the CCBP group, compared with the language
training group.
Activity generally means more neuronal firing, while connectivity means that
the neurons are more in sync, or communicative with each other. Greater
connectivity can accompany decreased activity. These results are in line with
previous findings that improvisational training improves brain connectivity,
leading to greater efficiency in brain function—fine-tuning, akin to what
happens as you automate a skill.

So, it seems that the truncated version of the training program might not
be as effective as a longer version, at least measured by Pictionary. But the
trainees did get slightly better, and they also showed brain changes that are
similar to what we see when experts improvise, compared with novices.
Different improvisational training techniques are more or less effective,
but the fact that we can see brain changes suggests that experts do think
differently on the fly, and that thinking differently can be taught—it’s not
just something you’re born with.
Reading
Beaty, R. E. “The Neuroscience of Musical Improvisation.” Neuroscience
& Biobehavioral Reviews 51 (2015): 108–117.
Donnay, G. F., S. K. Rankin, M. Lopez-Gonzalez, P. Jiradejvong, and

C. J. Limb. “Neural Substrates of Interactive Musical Improvisation:
An fMRI Study of ‘Trading Fours’ in Jazz.” PLoS One 9, no. 2
(2014): e88665.
Limb, C. J., and A. R. Braun. “Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical

Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation.” PLoS One 3, no. 2
(2008): e1679.
Pinho, A. L., Ö. de Manzano, P. Fransson, H. Eriksson, and F. Ullén.

“Connecting to Create: Expertise in Musical Improvisation Is Associated
with Increased Functional Connectivity between Premotor and
Prefrontal Areas.” Journal of Neuroscience 34, no. 18 (2014): 6156–6163.
Saggar, M., E. M. Quintin, N. T. Bott, E. Kienitz, Y. H. Chien, D.

W. Hong, N. Liu, et al. “Changes in Brain Activation Associated
with Spontaneous Improvization and Figural Creativity after Design-
Thinking-Based Training: A Longitudinal fMRI Study.” Cerebral Cortex
27, no. 7 (2017): 3542–3552.

10
Table of Contents
BEHIND THE
MYSTICAL AHA
MOMENT
Alongside improvisation, sudden

insight is largely considered the core
of creativity. But studying how and
when those aha moments happen
poses a challenge for neuroscientists.
This lesson explores the methods they
have used to collect data on insights as
well as what researchers have learned
so far about the conditions that might
lead to insight, where it occurs in the
brain, and whether it’s possible to
make insights more likely to occur.
73
What Is Insight?
Stories about aha moments abound and are fun to hear: the Ukrainian kid
who couldn’t afford to call his dad, so he created WhatsApp; the woman who
cut the legs of her pantyhose and launched Spanx; the guy who rented out his
air mattress to make a little extra cash and then founded Airbnb. Of course,
what these stories often don’t mention are all the struggles, iterations, and
failed ideas that many of these inventors faced before hitting the jackpot.
Insights can come in many forms,
but what they have in common
is that they are sudden and often An important part of
provide a solution to a problem. sudden insight is that it
They generally come after an often provides a solution
incubation period, during which to a problem. Without a
unconscious processes in the brain
seem to be working on the problem, problem, we generally
and once a solution presents itself, it don’t incubate—that is,
pops into consciousness abruptly. we don’t just think about
This combination of incubation random things.
and insight presents a problem
for neuroscientists who want to
understand how the brain works. How do you define when the brain activity
is most relevant? If using a narrow definition, you would look for a sudden
solution to a problem that was preceded by a period of incubation—or by a
time when the solution wasn’t obvious to you—and that is accompanied or
followed by a positive emotion: Aha!
Another way of defining insight is to focus on what it isn’t. For example,
insight is separate from analytical thinking, the methodical working-through
of a problem. There’s no sudden, surprising realization.
Right and Left Hemispheres

Early theories suggested that the right hemisphere is the seat of insight, while
the left is where analytical thinking happens. This theorizing perpetuated the
myth that the right hemisphere is the free-spirited creative, while the left is
the bean-counting workhorse.
10 • Behind the Mystical Aha Moment 74

One argument in favor of this idea is that, in most people, the right
hemisphere tends to see the forest for the trees, while the left hemisphere pays
more attention to details. Consider, for example, these visual patterns proposed
by David Navon in 1977. The right hemisphere will see the larger letter, while
the left hemisphere will focus on the smaller letter embedded within.
When asked to recreate images like the incongruent one shown here, patients
with brain damage to the right hemisphere will draw only the smaller letters,
while patients with left hemisphere damage will do the opposite. By contrast,
when we ask a healthy person to focus on the larger letter or shape, we see
more right-hemisphere activation, but more left-hemisphere activity when
they’re asked to focus on the smaller letters or shapes.
This pattern is seen in visual stimuli, but a similar finding has also been
reported when it comes to language or semantic processing. The right
hemisphere tends to weakly activate remotely associated concepts, while the
left more strongly activates a finely tuned or closer-knit semantic network.
This relative preference for fine versus coarse coding in the left and right
hemispheres lends a mechanistic explanation for why insight might be more of
a right-hemisphere function.
Take the word fire truck, for example:
Left Hemisphere Right Hemisphere

(strong associations) (larger network of weakly related terms)
red cats in trees
extinguisher toy drives
boots Fourth of July barbecues
ladder hot sauce
siren
As we’ve learned more and more about the brain, neuroscientists have
shifted away from localizing cognitive functions to specific brain regions—
especially if they are complex, like creative thinking—and toward a more
comprehensive description that incorporates different levels of analysis, from
the morphology of individual neurons to the synchronized activity across
networks of brain regions.

When it comes to insight, the neuroanatomy of the right hemisphere does
seem to lend itself to discovering patterns and novel associations, as key
neurons receive inputs from a larger swath of cells than their counterparts in
the left hemisphere.
Pyramidal Cells
The brain has folds and grooves because that structure allows for a larger
surface area. And this surface area is called the cerebral cortex—cortex
for “bark,” as it’s a thin layer of cells that make up the outer covering of
the brain.
This layer is organized into columns of cells, with neurons called pyramidal
cells (named for their shape) doing most of the computational work. These
cells are the quintessential neurons: bushy dendrites receiving information
from other cells. Pyramidal neurons in the right hemisphere make more
connections—have more synapses—than those in the left. And they also
have longer projections, allowing them to send information further away. You
can think of pyramidal cells in the left hemisphere as being more compact;
information stays close to home, allowing them to code finer details.
If insight relies on finding non-obvious patterns or connections, then a bird’s-
eye view would be preferable. The morphology or shape of pyramidal cells
and their connections in the right hemisphere are better suited for this type of
thinking than the more-detail-oriented cells in
the left hemisphere.
Neurologist Marcus Raichle had his own aha
moment that occurred while walking to meet
colleagues with whom he had written a paper
that had just been rejected from a publication.
The paper was about what’s happening in
the brain when nothing is supposed to be
happening, and Raichle’s insight was that this
is the default mode network—evidence that
the brain is working very hard even when we’re
supposedly not.

Relatedly, John Kounios and his colleagues found that people who solve more
insight problems have a different neural signature at rest compared to more
analytical thinkers. Using an electroencephalogram, or EEG, they found that
more right-hemisphere activity at rest is predictive of better performance on
insight problem-solving tasks.
These findings are in line with the idea that pyramidal cells in the right
hemisphere are more suited to integrate information across more cells and
larger regions of the brain than those in the left hemisphere.
Gamma- and Alpha-Band Activity

Mark Jung-Beeman and colleagues observed a burst of EEG activity over the
right temporal lobe when participants solve problems with insight rather than
analytical thinking.
It’s worth taking a little detour here
to explain what a burst of activity
as measured by EEG might mean.
It’s an illusion that we
EEG measures electrical activity
across populations of cells, mostly perceive something
pyramidal cells, which can be the moment we sense
divided up into bands. These bands it. The sensation
represent synchronized firing—we
see that neurons fire in a certain
has to be converted
rhythm, and this rhythm syncs up to the language
neuronal activity. of the brain, then
We can listen to this using EEG and interpreted, and then
pull out which groups of cells are in we get the conscious
sync and what rhythm they are playing. perception—though
During insight problem-solving, the
burst of EEG activity in the right it feels like it happens
temporal lobe was in the gamma band, all at once.
the highest frequency range—over 32
Hz, or beats per second.

Gamma-band activity is often associated with cross-modal sensory
integration—like recognizing objects by both their sound and appearance—and
it’s been proposed as a mechanism for binding information from different senses
and modalities as we become conscious of the perception, when we actually see
the image.
A strange mystery in neuroscience is how consciousness emerges as a coherent
experience, even though the brain processes visual and auditory information at
different times. Synchronized gamma-band activity is likely part of the answer.
Since gamma-band activity is likely involved in integrating information across
different parts of the brain, researchers weren’t surprised to see it occur just
as participants were having aha moments. But what was unexpected was that
they also saw a burst of alpha-band activity—synchronous firing in the range
of 8 to 15 Hz—in the right occipital cortex just before the insight came about.
Alpha-band activity is associated with inhibition. It seems that just before
participants saw the solution, neurons in the visual cortex quieted down—a
process called sensory gating—as some sensory information is turned down to
reduce interference.
But moving even further back in time than that helps us understand another
feature of insight: how our mental state can predispose us to approach
problem-solving by letting our minds either passively incubate or actively
analyze.
Analytical Thinking versus Incubation

Using EEG and fMRI, neuroscientists have found different patterns of brain
activation when a person is engaged in analytical thinking, compared with
when the solution arrives as a sudden insight. When attention is directed
outward, sensory areas like the visual cortex are activated, and when this activity
is coupled with deactivation of a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate
cortex, then analytical thinking is more likely to be dominating the brain.
The anterior cingulate is involved in several different functions, including
monitoring other brain regions for conflicting actions or information. When
deactivated, the idea is that the mind is following one specific strategy or train
of thought.

If you’re looking for
insight, try letting
your mind wander,
shifting your
attention, following
tangents—the kind
of advice we ignore
when trying hard
to solve a problem
but that seems
important for
creative solutions.
In the incubation period before an insight-based solution comes to mind,

the anterior cingulate is more active and attention is directed inward,
with less activity in primary sensory regions. Under these conditions, the
anterior cingulate is more likely to detect conflicting solutions or ideas, weak
associations, and so on—the less dominant path.
Knowing these brain signatures, maybe we can use them to tip our thinking
patterns in one direction or another.
There might also be personality or individual differences to consider.
When researchers classified people as low- or high-insight based on their
performance on anagram problem-solving tasks, they found that high-insight
individuals showed greater right-hemisphere activity during rest, as measured
by EEG, than those classified as low-insight. They also showed more diffuse
activation across the visual cortex, even if their eyes were closed.
But it’s not just how you’re thinking that determines how likely you are to
have an aha moment. If you’re in a positive mood, you’re more likely to be
insightful. That might be because negative emotions tend to lead to narrow
thinking, a focus on what’s causing us emotional pain, closing our minds.

And, of course, it’s a positive feedback loop in both cases—positive mood
makes insight more likely, and insight feels good, boosting our mood. And
the opposite—negative moods make it harder for us to see things another
way, which fouls our mood further.
Brain Stimulation
The neuroimaging methods discussed so far are correlational—we’re
observing what’s happening in the brain. What can we learn from stimulating
the brain directly?
Transcranial direct current stimulation, or tDCS, is a noninvasive and
reversible way of doing just that. Two electrodes, usually attached to a head
strap or encased in a headset, are connected to a battery pack. Experimenters
can control the duration and intensity of the stimulation remotely. Then,
a small electric current is applied to a specific part of the scalp.

The current isn’t strong enough to cause neurons to fire, but it can scramble
or enhance signals that are already being sent. One of the first uses of tDCS
was to enhance creativity. But when it comes to insight, there’s some evidence
that applying stimulation that boosts the signal in the right hemisphere,
along with an inhibition or quieting-down of the left frontotemporal cortex,
enhances solution rates for insight problems. These findings are all in line
with our discussion thus far, and a model of insight in the brain is emerging
across these different methods.
As neuroscientists, we get bogged down sometimes by the constraints of the
tools we have to understand the brain—definitions, control conditions or
groups, confounding variables. It’s important to, once in a while, remind
ourselves why creativity is worth studying—all the greatest inventions,
discoveries, and works of art have been brought into being by creative work.
Before he sits down to write, Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art, says
the same prayer: the Invocation of the Muse, from Homer’s Odyssey, translated
by T. E. Lawrence. So, while we map out the cognitive and neural conditions
that support insight, let’s not forget the muse herself—whatever form she
might take today.
Reading
Kounios, J., and M. Beeman. “The Aha! Moment: The Cognitive
Neuroscience of Insight.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 18,
no. 4 (2009): 210–216.
———. “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Insight.” Annual Review of

Psychology 65 (2014): 71–93.

11
Table of Contents
UNLOCKING YOUR
IMAGINATIVE
BRAIN
The human imagination is
fascinating. From the mind’s eye,
fantastical places and characters are
born. But is it also the key to our
survival as a species? Our ability
to predict possible futures relies
heavily on our ability to remember
the past. This lecture explains that
relationship and what researchers
have learned about imagination by
studying areas of the brain such as
the hippocampus and the default
mode network.
82
The Ability to Imagine
One could argue that the brain’s job is, essentially, to predict the future.
We find patterns so that we can see them coming. We remember our past so
that we can use that information to generate a model of the future. We are
rewarded—or punished—by our brains, with the future in mind, so that we
can learn how to optimize our ability to live one more day.
Our ability to imagine—to conjure something out of nothing—is magical.
Just watch any Pixar movie and you’ll see rich, detailed environments created
by the writers and animators. Some people, however, including the former
president of Pixar and award-winning animators, have no visual imagination.
They have aphantasia: an inability to generate visual mental images.
Aphantasia isn’t a disorder or a
deficit—though it can come on
suddenly after a brain injury or Aphantasia—an inability
stroke—but rather a difference,
much like synesthesia, in which
to generate visual
two or more senses are crossed. images—affects an
Many synesthetes, for example, estimated 2% to 3% of
see letters and numbers in color. the population, while
Survey studies estimate the
prevalence of synesthesia at about hyperphantasia—having
3% to 5% of the population. an extremely vivid
At the other end of the imagination—is more
spectrum from aphantasia is common. Phantasia
hyperphantasia—an extremely is the Greek word for
vivid imagination. Hyperphantasia
“imagination.”
is actually somewhat more
common than aphantasia, and
people who have it report that
when they read novels or listen to podcasts, they can sometimes conjure
up images that are physically distressing. People with hyperphantasia may
be more likely to choose artistic professions, while those with aphantasia
may be more likely to have scientific or mathematical careers. Those with
hyperphantasia are also more likely to also be synesthetes.
11 • Unlocking Your Imaginative Brain 83

Memory’s Role in Imagination
People with aphantasia tend to have higher rates of prosopagnosia—a reduced
ability to recognize familiar faces—and sometimes they also have trouble
with autobiographical memory. That makes sense, as one major component
of autobiographical memory is episodic remembering, or the re-creation of an
event in our mind’s eye. This is the type of remembering that also seems to be
critical for our ability to imagine possible futures.
From an evolutionary perspective, remembering the past has less utility
than imagining the future—which might help to explain the changeable
nature of our memories. We’re actually not that good at remembering details
of past events with accuracy. Each time we remember, we reconstruct the
memory—literally reactivating the brain to respond as it did during the event
in question—and change its trace. This is how certain aspects of a memory
become exaggerated, distorted, or even fabricated completely, often outside of
our conscious awareness.
We think we are remembering what actually happened, when really what
we’re doing is reimagining the event—influenced by our current mood,
mental state, and context. Researchers know that remembering the past in
this way is central for imagining the future, because patients with amnesia—
who can’t remember the past—also have trouble predicting or even conceiving
of the future.
Amnesia and the Case of NN

Endel Tulving, a pioneering memory researcher, described the case of NN,
a young man who was in a traffic accident that injured his brain, resulting
in profound amnesia. A few years after the accident, NN couldn’t remember
personal events either before or since the injury. He also failed several memory
recall tests.
And yet his intellect was intact—he could define words like tangible and
evasive and draw an outline of the Statue of Liberty. He could explain what
consciousness was and had no trouble with the concept of time. But his
awareness of subjective time seemed to be decimated. He couldn’t recall what he
did before the current moment, nor the day before, or any other time before that.

When asked to describe his state of mind when thinking about these things,
NN’s response was “Blank, I guess.” “Blank” is also how people with
aphantasia describe their mind’s eye.
We know that when the parts of the brain that support this type of episodic
reimagining of past experiences are damaged, the ability to insert yourself into
imaginings of future events is also affected. Using neuroimaging techniques,
we also see that the network of brain regions activated during remembering
overlaps with the network that is active when we’re thinking about the future.
One of these brain regions is the hippocampus.
The Hippocampus
The hippocampus has a number of interesting anatomical quirks. Among
these is the fact that its cells are highly excitable. They’re always ready for
action. That way, when you experience something worth remembering,
they can create a memory trace for you, enabling you to remember it in
the future.
Generally speaking, cells here
create associations by binding
together different elements
of a memory—the sights,
smells, and sounds of a special
place, for example. When
you remember, or imagine,
the hippocampus re-creates a
mental state, literally activating
parts of the brain that were
active during the initial
experience or that would be
active in a future one. Research
with epileptic patients showed
that cells change their firing
patterns in specific ways, depending on whether the patient was experiencing,
learning, remembering, or imagining. The hippocampus also stores concepts,
such as specific famous people or your relatives and close friends.

It’s also critical for navigating through
an environment. Consider London’s
The hippocampus
famed taxi drivers, for example. To
get a license, they have to memorize contributes to the
thousands of landmarks and endure a imagination through
grueling test that requires almost two the scene construction
years of intensive study. Studies have
process and by
shown that these drivers have larger
hippocampi after training than they combining elements
did beforehand. The training literally from different sensory
enlarges their hippocampi. modalities, as well as
Two functions of the hippocampus pulling content from
discussed here so far—forming and memory.
retrieving new long-term memories
and helping us navigate through
space—have dominated the research
on this area of the brain. At face value, they seem to be very different. But
in fact, they are connected by something that is critical to the process of
imagination: constructing a scene.
The scene construction theory of hippocampal function proposes that this
region participates in the building of an imaginary scene—one with spatial
and temporal frames—that acts as a scaffold upon which we can hang details
of past or future events.
When patients with hippocampal damage try to remember a past event
or imagine a future one, they have trouble generating this scaffolding
scene. Researchers Sinead Mullally and Eleanor Maguire write that “the
hippocampus is continually constructing scenes, extrapolating beyond the
boundaries of our current field of view.” And this extrapolation is the first
step in imagination.
Of course, imagination spans all five senses—and more. But the majority of
the work that neuroscientists have done in terms of understanding its brain
basis has focused on visual mental imagery. That’s in part because visual
images are more easily distinguished from language-based thought, and
researchers know how the visual system is mapped in the brain to a high level
of detail.

There are a few more regions in the imagination network. Forming or
manipulating mental images seems to rely heavily on the frontal lobes, which
also appear to coordinate activity in sensory regions. The frontal lobes play a
role in organizing these images, while the visual cortex generates their actual
content. Another network of connected regions—the default mode network—
overlaps with both imagination and mind-wandering, or the directed and
undirected ways in which we simulate real or fictional worlds.
Minds at “Rest”
To study what happens in the brain when patients are remembering versus
when they’re not, researchers compared activity during a memory task to what
happened during a condition called rest.
It turns out that rest is not what it seems. When you’re lying in an fMRI
scanner and the experimenter tells you to rest, you don’t simply clear your
mind into a blank slate—you think about things. Your mind wanders. And
the brain regions supporting this mind-wandering, the ones that make up
the default network, are consistent across people. Though, default is a bit of a
misnomer.
We all engage in mind-wandering, but research shows that too much of it
can be problematic. Some recent studies link excessive mind-wandering to
negative moods, and it can also decrease productivity, preventing people from
accomplishing their goals, or at least doing tasks well.
Researchers also know that mind-wandering is critical in creative professions.
Often, when we let our minds wander, we engage in what’s known as episodic
future simulation—we try to predict what’s to come. This is obviously very
useful. We all know that it’s important to take breaks when working, especially
if creativity is involved. But can mind-wandering also make us more creative?
In 2012, Benjamin Baird and his colleagues published the results of an
experiment designed to test just that. Results suggest that what we do during
those breaks is important. It seems that the optimal incubation activity is
something that can be mildly distracting, like taking a walk or doing an easy
puzzle. We can also enhance creativity by just being alone with our thoughts,
and we can diminish it by doing something that tires us out.

The bottom line seems to be that as long as we’re not bored, tired, or in a
negative state of mind, letting our minds wander can set us up to solve many
of our problems and even come up with more creative solutions. Without us
even being conscious of it happening, our imagination takes advantage of
our seemingly bottomless memory store and enables us to try out multiple
solutions in our minds. And it’s so powerful that it just might be the reason
we have such complex brains. What better tool to predict the future and
ensure our survival in it than imagination?
Reading
Baird, B., J. Smallwood, M. D. Mrazek, J. W. Kam, M. S. Franklin, and
J. W. Schooler. “Inspired by Distraction: Mind Wandering Facilitates
Creative Incubation.” Psychological Science 23, no. 10 (2012): 1117–1122.
Christoff, K., Z. C. Irving, K. C. Fox, R. N. Spreng, and J. R. Andrews-

Hanna. “Mind-Wandering as Spontaneous Thought: A Dynamic
Framework.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 17, no. 11 (2016): 718–731.
Mooneyham, B. W., J. W. Schooler. “The Costs and Benefits of Mind-

Wandering: A Review.” Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology/
Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale 67, no. 1 (2013): 11–18.
Pearson, J. “The Human Imagination: The Cognitive Neuroscience

of Visual Mental Imagery.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 20,
no. 10 (2019): 624–634.

12
Table of Contents
THE CREATIVE
PATH TO SKILL
MASTERY
Most people know that peak
performance in any domain requires
a lot of practice. But there’s also this
notion that talent is innate, that
performers are born gifted. Talent
is, more often than not, the result of
practice, and with the right approach
and the right motivation, we can all
enjoy the experience of developing
skills that once may have seemed
impossible. This lesson explores
what it takes to go from amateur to
professional and what happens in your
brain as you improve your skills.
89
Developing Efficiency
You’ve probably heard that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an
expert in almost any domain. This idea—based on the work of the late expert
on expertise Anders Ericsson, among others—was popularized by Malcolm
Gladwell in his 2008 book Outliers: The Story of Success.
Ericsson criticized the weight this rule places on quantity of hours rather
than quality of practice. In response to the misinterpretations of his work, he
cowrote the book Peak with Robert Pool. He was the first to say that what’s
most important isn’t the number of hours you put in, but what you put in
those hours.
Playing a musical instrument or performing music can be taxing—especially
if you’re a novice or amateur. It demands your full concentration, and you
must engage many different brain networks—those involved in processing
sound, emotions, movement, ideas. But as you practice, you become
more efficient.
Professional musicians have learned to use only what’s necessary, and
researchers see this economy of mental resources in the brain scans.
Whereas amateurs recruit wide swathes of their brains when they’re playing,
professionals activate specific networks that have been deliberately sculpted by
years of practice to be as efficient as possible.
And it’s not just their brains; they also fine-tune the rest of their bodies
when learning to play an instrument. When they’re just starting out, they’re
focusing on one body part
at time, using all kinds
of muscles that aren’t “It’s not the hours you put in,
necessary, but they don’t it’s what you put in the hours.”
know that yet. Over time,
they work with teachers —Anders Eriksson
and coaches to eliminate
unnecessary actions. That
way, they don’t tire out as easily or injure muscles with overuse, and they
become more precise. The same is true in sports as well. A good golf swing
includes a bit of heft; a great golf swing is all elegance and lightness.
12 • The Creative Path to Skill Mastery 90

This level of efficiency leaves the rest of your mental and physical resources
available for other things, like choosing how to express certain ideas or
emotions in music or pivoting or adjusting to the circumstances in the
moment if you’re an athlete.
Efficiency allows professional gymnast Simone Biles to execute complex
moves like a two-and-a-half twisting vault. But during the 2020 Olympics
(held in Japan in 2021 because of the pandemic), she got the “twisties”—in
a sense, she lost track of where she was in space and became consciously
aware of just how complicated her vault was. That’s a terrifying experience,
because one misstep—or mistwist—can lead to grave injury or even death.
For some skills, you need to practice them until you don’t need to think about
them, and then you need to prevent yourself from thinking about how truly
hard that is.
So how does a performer or athlete automate the actions they need to take to
perform as though they’re second nature? Of course, every skill is different,
but there are some general principles that are useful to understand. First, let’s
consider how we think.
Fast versus Slow Thinking

We have at least two distinct modes of thinking that are worth exploring here.
In Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow, he describes system 1 as
what happens below the surface of consciousness—fast, automatic, inflexible
thinking. You can’t easily change your mind in system 1. Skill learning is
largely the domain of system 1, and it’s inflexible in the sense that you need to
repeatedly retrain a muscle sequence in order to be able to rely on it. System 2
is reflection that is slow, deliberate, thoughtful, and flexible.
These two systems are distinct but not completely independent—system 2
draws on system 1 for information and is greatly impacted by its work. And
this concept of systems is both psychologically and neuroanatomically based.
Researchers see different brain networks that underlie the two systems, but
they are specific to the tasks at hand, so they can’t just say globally that
network A is system 1 and network B is system 2.

When you rely on intuition, you’re leaning on system 1. And when you
recognize patterns or allow your unconscious biases to affect your decision-
making, you’re allowing system 2 to be influenced by system 1. Ultimately,
the goal is for system 1 to take over the functions that start out as system 2—
to automate tasks that required more conscious effort as you hone your ability
to execute them. And this transference of work from system 2 to system 1
happens in stages.
Stages of Skill Development

When you’re learning a new skill, you start out in the cognitive stage, where
you need to consciously think about what you’re doing. Imagine learning to
ski. After you’ve put on those heavy boots and clipped them into your skis—
probably falling over a few times—you then have to navigate the chairlift.
Assuming you’ve managed all that, you are now at the top of a hill.
If you’re lucky, you have an instructor nearby to tell you how to get down
the slope in one piece. As you get some momentum, you panic, putting your
hands in the air and leaning
back. Because you’re not actively
thinking about them, you cross
your skis and fall down. You try
Across different skills and
again. Each time, your instructor even different species,
gives you one thing to focus on. learning follows a power
You need to consciously focus on law—gains are rapid at
each of the instructions to be able
to do them. You’re taxing system first, but then taper off
2, and you’re clumsy and slow. and plateau. You reach
Over time, you get to the second a critical point in skill
stage, where you can put two or development: mastery. The
more actions together. Maybe question becomes whether
you can shift your weight while
to stop there or keep
also turning the ski. But you’re
still having to concentrate on not trying to improve.
crossing your skis or watching
your speed.

Eventually, you begin to automate the skill, entering the third stage. All
those actions that used to require so much concentration now seem to
happen automatically. They have become the domain of system 1. Now you
can reserve your system-2 thinking for planning your route down the slope.
But what happens when learning stops or slows—when you hit a wall, so
to speak? Many of us feel proud when we realize that things we once found
hard to do now come to us with ease. This is our comfort zone. But to
punch through that plateau and experience the next rapid learning gain,
we can’t just do more of the same. It’s almost as though we need to start all
over again.
This is the hard part of learning: Just when you think you’ve done the hard
work and can enjoy your newly developed skill, you realize that to get to
the next level, you need to rethink how you’re training. This is the place
where most people give up or rest easy. And this is why most amateurs don’t
turn pro.
Types of Practice
Naïve Practice: When first learning a new skill set, most people engage in
this type of practice. If you want to learn how to sing, you might try some
vocalizing in the shower, read a book about singing, take a few lessons, and
practice some exercises until they begin to feel easy. Then maybe you settle
into this comfort zone and hit a plateau. If there are things you can’t do—
say, float a high note, you might think it’s just beyond your ability. At this
point, that may be true—but that doesn’t mean further and better practice
wouldn’t get you there.
Purposeful Practice: One step up from naïve practice, this is where you
realize that you need to put forth more concerted effort to really hone your
skills. You might decide to put in more hours, commit to daily practice, and
read a few more books. You establish some well-defined goals to guide your
practice. You use feedback to evaluate your performance. And you frequently
leave your comfort zone as you attempt to master the skills you think you
need. This is the type of practice that a lot of amateurs engage in when
attempting to turn pro.

Proto-Deliberate Practice: In addition to all the features of purposeful
practice, which can take you only so far, the expertise of a good teacher is
added to the mix. Then you seek to find out what this expert does differently
that makes them so successful. Sometimes they can tell you themselves,
though oftentimes they can’t because those skills have long since entered
system 1 and the discrete steps they take to execute them are no longer
available to them consciously.
Doing and teaching are different skill sets, and not all experts will know how
to effectively teach. But if you can figure out what it is they do that sets them
apart from others in the domain, then maybe you can develop a training
program that allows you to do that too. The optimal course is to find a
legitimate expert teacher (but not necessarily a performer) who has evaluated
their training techniques and knows what’s most effective.
Deliberate Practice: With a trainer in place, you are now ready for true
deliberative practice. Ericsson laid out the seven essential elements to this
stage of skill development.
When a chess
grandmaster looks
at a chessboard
during a game, they
see groupings and
strategies rather than
individual pieces.
They literally see the
board differently than
amateurs do. Similarly,
professional musicians
hear chords, themes,
and variations rather
than individual notes.

First, you develop skills that others have figured out by using training or
practice regimens that have been proven to be successful.
Second, you consistently move out of
your comfort zone. Practice should be
uncomfortable and hard. You work at Most child prodigies
the things you can’t yet do, rather than
don’t perform at the
just repeating the things you can.
same heights when
Third, you set well-defined learning
they reach adulthood,
goals. These aren’t performance
goals, like winning a competition, because they don’t
which is out of your hands, but are know how to engage
things like hitting a specific running in deliberate practice
time or tempo in a musical piece
without errors.
yet. Instead, they
reach a peak and
Fourth, when practicing, you engage
your full attention—you are deep in burn out.
system 2. If you can do the exercises
without thinking about them, you’re
just basking in your comfort zone.
Fifth, you use feedback to evaluate whether you’re reaching your goals—the
more immediate the feedback, the better—and then you modify your practice
accordingly.
The sixth and seventh elements are the most important. First, you build on
your preexisting skill set to punch through to a new plateau. And finally, you
change your mental representation of the skill—you change the way your
brain works. Things that previously felt impossible now feel effortless. This
is the most nebulous and perhaps least well-understood part of deliberate
practice, but it’s what separates the pros from the amateurs.
Practice should be hard but rewarding, and the right kind of motivation has
a lot to do with how effective it is. Successful practice is about mastering
specific skills, not building your self-worth. When we can see effort as the
path to mastery, we can see the beauty in perseverance and work.

Reading
Epstein, David. Range. Macmillan, 2019.
———. The Sports Gene. The Penguin Group, 2013.
Ericsson, Anders, and Robert Pool. Peak. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Publishing Company, 2016.
Pressfield, Steven. The War of Art. Black Irish Entertainment LLC, 2002.
———. Turning Pro. Black Irish Entertainment LLC, 2012.

13
Table of Contents
GETTING INTO THE

CREATIVE FLOW
Many people who choose creative

careers sacrifice money, comforts,
and even friends and family in order
to do their work. Why? One reason
may be that, once in a while, they’re
rewarded with the state of flow. So,
what exactly is flow, and are people
who experience it more likely to
have creative streaks? This lesson
explains what it means to be in a
state of flow and presents several
theories regarding what’s happening
in the brain during those moments.
97
Elements of Flow
The term flow was popularized by Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi, who first described the
concept while studying people who did things
that they enjoyed without external rewards like Once you’re in
money or fame. Instead, they did it because it flow, you don’t
was fun. Whether he was talking to athletes, need to find
artists, mystics, scientists, or anyone else,
Csikszentmihalyi found that the words they
the motivation
used to describe enjoyment were very similar. to keep doing
From this work, he extracted nine main the work—in
elements that help us understand what flow fact, you find it
entails:
hard to stop.
1. Goals are clear. You know what you’re
setting out to do. The final outcome
might be uncertain, but what needs to be
done is not.
2. Feedback is immediate. You know how well you are doing what you’re
doing as you do it. The rock climber can see their progress and where
they need to go next. The composer can tell if what they’re writing is
any good.
3. Abilities are matched to challenges. You are neither frustrated
by insurmountable difficulties nor bored by a task that’s too easy.
The sweet spot is somewhere in between—where you can meet the
challenges before you but also feel accomplished doing so.
4. Action and awareness are merged. You are singularly focused on what
you’re doing.
5. Distractions don’t come into play. It’s not hard to keep focus; the only
thing that’s relevant is the here and now.
6. Failure is not a concern. You know what you have to do, and you know
you have the skills to do it.
13 • Getting Into the Creative Flow 98

7. Self-consciousness disappears. You might feel as though you are one
with the universe—the self disappears for a moment. And when flow is
over, it might feel like the universe has expanded—as Csikszentmihalyi
put it, we emerge from flow with a stronger self-concept. We know
we’ve succeeded in doing something hard.
8. Time becomes distorted. It might feel like the world has stopped
turning, or you’re not evaluating it in the moment.
9. What we are doing is enjoyable. More than that—we feel it is an
optimal human experience. There’s nothing like it. It can feel like an
addictive drug.
Csikszentmihalyi referred to work during the state of flow as autotelic,
meaning an end in and of itself. This is work worth doing for its own sake. It’s
tempting to keep going until you’ve exhausted yourself and poured out every
last drop from your cup of creativity.
But Ernest Hemingway has some advice for
you: Leave something in the cup. In 1935,
he was asked by a reporter from Esquire
magazine when the best time was to stop
writing for the day.
The best way is always to stop when you
are going good and when you know what
will happen next. If you do that every
day when you are writing a novel you
will never be stuck. … Don’t think about
[your work] or worry about it until you
start to write the next day. That way your
subconscious will work on it all the time.
But if you think about it consciously or
worry about it you will kill it and your
brain will be tired before you start.
Such great advice! And so in line with what researchers know about the
creative brain—that worrying will prevent you from getting into a state of
flow, and not thinking explicitly about it will incubate your creativity. So let’s
look at what’s actually happening in the brain when a person is in flow.

The Brain in Flow
In 2004, Arne Dietrich published his transient hypofrontality hypothesis.
The idea is that when the prefrontal cortex is downregulated—when it’s not
driving the cognitive bus, so to speak—the mind can transition from explicit
to implicit thinking: from effortful, conscious, deliberate thoughts to thoughts
that percolate subconsciously without your inner critic getting in the way.
After all, a lot of our self-referential thinking occupies the prefrontal cortex
and its connected friends, the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula, since
that’s where strategies and goals are formed. This is also part of the network
that monitors our behavior—and our thoughts—to ensure that we’re moving
toward our goals rather than giving in to our primary impulses.
The transient hypofrontality hypothesis suggests that our prefrontal cortex is
less active during states of flow, as we’re not consciously monitoring everything
we do—instead, we’re letting the skills we’ve automated through training
take over.
Though Dietrich’s hypothesis is intriguing and sounds logical, the evidence is
mixed. Neuroimaging studies of the brain during flow can show more activity
in the frontal lobes than it predicts—though some studies do show reduced
activation.
An alternative theory for what happens during flow, proposed by Rene Weber
and Ron Tamborini, is known as the synchronization theory. It suggests that
when neurons synchronize their activity, they bring together information
across domains and senses to coordinate actions and communicate with each
other effectively.
The theory holds that this synchronization is what underlies the merging
of action and awareness, creating that singular focus that lets us meet the
challenge before us. And the evidence evaluating this theory, while still
relatively preliminary, is pointing in a promising direction.
These theories are a good start, but researchers are still working on figuring
out the exact neural underpinnings of the flow states. And it’s important to
bear in mind that brain activity will differ across domains, though there’s also
significant overlap.

The Reward of Discovery
Flow states can happen in many different domains: sports, arts, science—
virtually anything that involves challenges, skill development, and the process
of discovery. At the same time, different activities can be enjoyable for some
people and excruciating for others. So, flow is not about what the person is
doing, but about the effect that doing that thing has on the person.
So, why would natural selection favor the kinds of behaviors that can lead
to flow? Assuming that flow is an evolutionary adaptation—and that’s a big
assumption—why might an organism benefit from the process of discovery
in general? After all, wouldn’t it be safer to stay put, instead of exploring an
environment potentially laden with death traps?
Rewarding adventure—or the process of discovery—makes sense from an
evolutionary perspective if it helps us adapt to unforeseen circumstances. For
a species like ours, which benefits from being able to survive in almost any
environment, discovering new things is a gift.
Enjoying flow and

being happy are
not one and the
same. Happiness
might follow flow,
but it can also
be distracting
and, therefore,
antithetical to flow.

Hot Hand Theory
Flow is autotelic: rewarding in and of itself. This means that once you
experience it, you want more of it. And it turns out that flow is self-
perpetuating: Creative work happens in streaks. When one project is successful,
the ones that follow are more likely to be as well. In other words, there really is
such a thing as the hot hand. But where there’s a hot hand, you’ll often find the
gambler’s fallacy, too—and it’s helpful to know how to tease these apart.
The hot hand is a phrase originating in basketball to describe a player in the
zone—in a state of flow—who seemingly can’t miss. Players, coaches, refs,
and fans will all attest that sometimes a player just gets hot. But is the player
really upping their game, or is the hot hand an illusion, perpetuated by the
actions around them?
In 1985, Thomas Gilovich, Amos Tversky, and Robert Vallone published
a famous study that addressed this question, and the finding was
counterintuitive. The hot hand was a simple cognitive bias, the researchers
explained, after comparing the likelihood of a landed shot after a hit with
what happened after a miss, accounting for each shooter’s personal average.
We discern patterns even when they’re not there, and there is no difference in
a player’s shooting percentage with and without the hot hand. That is, over
many trials, a player was not more likely to make their next shot after having
scored during the last few attempts than if they had missed.
For decades, psychologists congratulated each other on their ability to be
neutral—to look at the data and conclude that there’s nothing out of the
ordinary when a player hits a few baskets in a row, since they will just as likely
miss a series next time.
But in 2018, Joshua Miller and Adam Sanjurjo reanalyzed the original data
set and found that the three researchers had made an inaccurate assumption.
They had assumed the expected rate of hits after a streak was the same as the
expected rate when there is no streak. But after a streak, the expected hit rate
drops—there’s a regression to the mean. You’re less likely to get another hit as
your hit rate returns to your average shooting percentage.

Flow is self-
perpetuating.
Athletes who
believe they
have a hot
hand may feel
empowered to
take bigger risks
that then lead to
greater rewards.
Assuming, then, that the expected hit rate is lower after a streak than after
misses, it turns out that the hot hand does exist: A player who’s just made
a few shots in a row is more likely to make the next one, though the effect is
tiny—1.2% improvement after one out of the last four shots goes in, 2.4% if
two of the last four go in.
Still, the belief that your hand is hot can change how you play, giving you
more courage, allowing you to take bigger risks, and potentially getting
a bigger payoff. And boy, is it fun.
It is when we rely too much on the hot hand that the gambler’s fallacy comes
in. If Steph Curry makes three shots in a row, and you’re going to bet on
whether he’ll make the next one, you’re likely to bet yes. But if you’re playing
roulette, and the last three times the wheel landed on red, you are likely to bet
black—and to feel confident doing so. And there is no hot hand in roulette.
If Steph believes he’ll make that next swish, he’s slightly more likely to make
it than if he doesn’t. But you have no control over the roulette wheel, and you
can’t beat simple probabilities. A coin that has turned up heads the last 10
times in a row still has a 50% chance of being tails on the next flip.

There can be downsides to flow. Sometimes a person’s short-term goals that
get them into the flow state can be at odds with longer-term goals. There are
plenty of stories of creative people who choose their work over everything else,
and we need those people in society if we are to solve the complex problems
facing us today. But too often, artists, performers, and other creatives get
into flow, devote all their energy to their work, and leave nothing behind
for the practical aspects that are necessary for sustaining and building
a freelance career. It’s important to find the right balance—to leave a little
something in the cup.
Reading
Cohen, Ben. The Hot Hand. Harper Collins, 2020.
Dietrich, A. “Neurocognitive Mechanisms Underlying the Experience of

Flow.” Consciousness and Cognition 13, no. 4 (2004): 746–761.
Gold, J., and J. Ciorciari. “A Review on the Role of the Neuroscience

of Flow States in the Modern World.” Behavioral Sciences 10, no. 9
(2020): 137.
Huskey, R., S. Wilcox, and R. Weber. “Network Neuroscience Reveals

Distinct Neuromarkers of Flow During Media Use.” Journal of
Communication 68, no. 5 (2018): 872–895.

14
Table of Contents
THE BRAIN
SCIENCE OF
BEAUTY
What each person finds
beautiful depends on their brain.
What your brain does with
information—how it extracts
layers of meaning—depends
on your own experience, mood,
and context. The nascent field
of neuroaesthetics seeks to
understand the brain basis of
aesthetic appreciation. This
lesson presents what researchers
have learned so far and what
their findings can tell us about
how we experience beauty.
105
Neuroaesthetics
Interestingly, a person becomes more beautiful when you learn that their
personality is attractive. Vistas, landscapes, and paintings earn greater
appreciation with closer examination. But what does your brain do to turn
a stimulus into something beautiful—whether it’s sound, light bouncing off
objects, words strung together, or any number of other things?
Scientists don’t need to rely solely on self-reports to gauge whether a person
thinks something is beautiful. Aesthetics can affect behavior, and researchers
can objectively track those effects, like the fact that beautiful things are more
highly valued or expensive. Beautiful people are treated differently. And
beautiful places shape behavior as well, in measurable ways.
Mindful of the pitfalls inherent in objectively analyzing something so
subjective, researchers in the field of neuroaesthetics are working hard
to develop a conceptual framework and apply scientific rigor to their
investigations. The study of beauty raises some interesting questions: What
are the necessary and sufficient conditions for us to experience beauty? How
might it affect our decisions or other behaviors? And why do we find the
search for it motivating? This last question is likely the easiest to tackle first,
especially through the lens of humans as infovores.
Infovores
In 2006, vision researcher Irv Biederman and his student Ed Vessel proposed
a compelling idea. They started with the premise that human beings are
infovores—that is, we are motivated to seek out information. We search
for meaning.
When we’re not engaging in fulfilling our primal drives for sex, food, water,
or comfort, we look for ways to entertain ourselves to avoid an aversive
default state: boredom. It’s not just that going on adventures or exploring the
meaning of life is rewarding; we actively dislike being bored.
Our drive to seek out information can even be seen in the simple preference
we seem to have for more information-rich stimuli. We generally prefer
complex shapes over simple ones and variations on a musical theme over the
theme itself. And when information has some personal relevance, we show an
even stronger preference.
14 • The Brain Science of Beauty 106

Biederman and Vessel suggest that seeking information might even play an
evolutionary role, like physical beauty does, by making us more attractive
to others. They point out that intelligence seems to heighten our appeal to
potential mates. This trend holds across different cultures.
Mu-Opioid Receptors
Biederman and Vessel propose that the brain’s natural opioid system might be
at least partially responsible for information gathering’s effects. Opioids cause
this system to release endorphins in our brain that make us feel good.
Little gates on the surfaces of brain cells called opioid receptors respond to
opiate binding. The receptors are more densely populated in some brain
regions than others. These gates let in ions—charged particles—that change
the activity of the cells when an opiate opens them.
One type of gate is called a mu-opioid receptor. These are rare in parts of the
brain that process simple perceptual information, including the first stop in
the visual pathway, or V1, where simple features of the visual world—like
edges and some color—are first tracked. As visual information travels up the
pathway, from V1 to V4 and beyond, the features that are processed become
more complex, encompassing shapes, movement, and even ultimately object
recognition. During this process, more and more mu-opioid receptors become
present.
These receptors are most densely packed in the association areas of our brain,
where our current environment’s contents are matched up with our memories,
prior knowledge, and input from other senses. As we make more and more
associations—deriving more information—we activate more of these
receptors, which makes us feel more pleasure.
Neuroimaging Studies
Using neuroimaging techniques, Ed Vessel followed up on the theory that he
and Irv Biederman proposed. Vessel found that there is a time signature to
the pleasure we get from experiencing great art or looking at a great view. It’s
dynamic; it ebbs and flows.

These dynamics are built into the way brains work. We first detect something
through our senses, then we feel something, and then we assign the stimulus
a value as we search for and find additional cultural or individual meaning.
We end up with a judgment, perhaps proclaiming something is beautiful
or worthy of an encore. When we look at a pleasing visual image, aesthetic
pleasure grows slowly, is sustained as we consider it, and then slowly decays as
we begin to sense that we’ve seen enough.
Until recently, most neuroimaging studies of this experience stuck to one
moment in time looked at a relatively short time interval. But in 2018, Amy
Belfi teamed up with Ed Vessel and several other authors to publish a study
laying out brain dynamics across time.
In their study, the researchers showed participants various works of art
and tracked their brain activity over the course of about 30 seconds. The
researchers found a strong correlation between felt pleasure and how moving
an image was. For the most part, when a painting was pleasurable to look at,
participants also rated it as more moving.

The researchers also found a dynamic interplay between activity in different
brain regions. Perceptual networks—engaged in what we sometimes call
bottom-up or stimulus-driven processes—are activated early on, making sense
of the visual features. Then the reward system is turned on; the experience
begins to feel pleasant. At the same time, the default mode network is
also activated. This is a connected set of regions that represent internal
mentation—a person’s inner thoughts when they’re not focused on anything
in particular.
The authors interpret these findings as suggesting that pleasurable art pulls
a viewer in and engages their inner mental world. When viewing non-pleasing
art, the activity in the default mode network was inconsistent—sometimes
more, sometimes less—as it would be if a person were bored and had a
wandering mind.
Getting the Chills

Pulling the listener in is exactly what great music does as well. There is at least
one measurable, observable physiological response that can be used as a proxy
for the pleasure we feel when we hear something particularly moving: the
chills, also known as frisson.
This physiological response is accompanied by a sense of understanding,
connection, or pleasure, as a series of studies from Robert Zatorre‘s lab have
shown. The phenomenon usually happens during some emotional climax,
such as a brilliant high note at the apex of a lyric aria or the return to
a melody in a ballad after the bridge.
People who have studied the chills have found that certain features of
music are more likely to generate them. Not everyone will get the chills
from the same piece of music, but when a person does get the chills on
one listen, they’re very likely to get them again when they hear that
same piece.
The chills are observable. They can produce sweaty palms and changes in
heart rate and breathing. Therefore, they are a great way to see the brain
changes that accompany a pleasurable aesthetic experience.

Valorie Salimpoor conducted much of the seminal
research on the neural basis of the chills and
identified one piece of music—Samuel Barber’s
Adagio for Strings—that seems to be particularly
good at generating the chills. Some have called it the
saddest piece of music ever written. Barber sets up
your anticipation as he builds the tension—and then,
when you get to the final chord, it’s as if the sun has
burst through the clouds and all is well in the world.
Interestingly, Salimpoor noted that the second most
commonly cited piece that gave people the chills
was in a completely different genre: electronic dance
music. But this was a remix of the Adagio for Strings.
That meandering melody is captivating no matter how
it is interpreted.
Neuroimaging tells us that the brain basis for the chills has much to do with
the release of dopamine. Dopamine can be thought of as the salience or
meaning chemical, as it’s involved in assigning value to experiences—good or
bad. Receptors for dopamine are found all over the brain. Different receptors
have different actions, and dopamine has different effects in different regions
of the brain.
But dopamine also has two distinct roles in the reward system, which we can
map onto wanting and liking. When we want or crave something, dopamine
levels are higher in a part of the brain called the caudate nucleus, which tracks
things in the environment that lead to reward.
Then there’s the pleasure of satisfying the craving. There’s also some
dopamine involved. But this time, it’s in a part of the reward pathway called
the nucleus accumbens. While the caudate induces wanting, the nucleus
accumbens provides pleasure.

When the tension is building in a piece of music—when a person is
anticipating a climax, for instance—dopamine levels are higher in the
caudate. When the listener gets the chills—when the tension is released—
dopamine spikes in the nucleus accumbens.
Reading
Belfi, A. M., E. A. Vessel, A. Brielmann, A. I. Isik, A. Chatterjee, H.
Leder, D. G. Pelli, and G. G. Starr. “Dynamics of Aesthetic Experience
are Reflected in the Default-Mode Network.” NeuroImage 188
(2019): 584–597.
Biederman, I., and E. A. Vessel. “Perceptual Pleasure and the Brain:

A Novel Theory Explains Why the Brain Craves Information and Seeks
It through the Senses.” American Scientist 94, no. 3 (2006): 247–253.
Chatterjee, A., and O. Vartanian. “Neuroaesthetics.” Trends in Cognitive

Sciences 18, no. 7 (2014): 370–375.
Pearce, M. T., D. W. Zaidel, O. Vartanian, M. Skov, H. Leder,

A. Chatterjee, and M. Nadal. “Neuroaesthetics: The Cognitive
Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience.” Perspectives on Psychological
Science 11, no. 2 (2016): 265–279.

15
Table of Contents
CAN BRAIN
DEGENERATION
UNLEASH
CREATIVITY?
Changes to the brain
can change our minds.
Sometimes, under specific
circumstances, they can
make us more creative by
changing our motivations,
launching obsessions,
showing us the world in
a different light, and giving
us new experiences.
112
Adams and Ravel
At the age of 46, Anne Adams pivoted from a career in academia to focus on
artistry. Early on, her work was simple, but by her early 50s, her paintings
were far more creative. Eventually, she painted Unraveling Boléro , inspired by
Maurice Ravel’s symphonic piece Boléro.
Unraveling Boléro
Ravel completed Boléro when he was 53—the same age Anne was when she
started working on her painting of it. Around the time of the composition,
Ravel’s handwriting had begun to deteriorate. Shortly thereafter, his speech
and language abilities became compromised. Ravel was frustrated by his
impairment, even while his understanding of language and music seemed to
be unaffected.
He died nine years later, when a neurosurgeon tried to correct his deficits.
We now think that Ravel had a form of a language disorder called primary
progressive aphasia. In his case, this was likely due to a disease called
corticobasal degeneration, in which the language and motor areas of the brain
deteriorate over time.
15 • Can Brain Degeneration Unleash Creativity? 113

A year after painting her interpretation of Ravel’s most famous piece, Anne
entered her most prolific and productive period as an artist. But just like
Ravel, she too began to have trouble speaking. By the age of 64, she was
almost mute, and she was experiencing motor difficulties. Three years later,
she died, likely from corticobasal degeneration.
Paradoxical Facilitation
Although she might be the most famous, Anne Adams was by no means
the only patient who showed an emergence of creativity that paralleled
her neurodegeneration. The enhancement of a skill or cognitive function
accompanying brain damage is called paradoxical facilitation—an unexpected
benefit of deterioration.
Paradoxical facilitation was a focus of Bruce Miller, Bill Seeley, and other
researchers at the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California,
San Francisco. There, the researchers met, treated, and studied Anne Adams,
along with other patients who were artists.
Many of the patients who showed a newfound or renewed interest in an artistic
pursuit were losing the ability to communicate using language. That loss
seemed to drive them towards other forms of self-expression. These patients
often chose the visual domain, pursuing painting, sculpting, gardening,
collecting coins, or playing solitaire. This indicates that their interests seemed
to gravitate toward the sense least affected by their disorder.
In these patients, the deterioration of the brain usually started in the left
hemisphere, in the frontal or temporal lobes, where language and conceptual
information is stored and processed. But the back of the brain—where vision
resides—was relatively unaffected.
By comparison, patients with Alzheimer’s disease often show visual deficits
fairly early in the disease. They have trouble copying a complex figure or
fixating on an image. These patients are not likely to take up painting, but they
do retain a love of music until the very late stages of their disease.
The patients who exhibited paradoxical facilitation often moved away from
music and toward visual art, even if they had previously had some interest
in music, when their language areas were damaged. The Memory and Aging

Center researchers wondered how their brain changes affected their view of
the world. To study this, they used a method involving the tracking of eye
movements as patients saw different images.
The Changing Mind’s Eye

The researchers found that as these patients’ brains changed, so too did their
mind’s eye. Vanishing points are relevant to their findings: When a person
sees a picture with an obvious vanishing point, they generally spend at least
some time looking at the vanishing point. It’s one of the first things that
a beginner learns about drawing; it’s how people understand that a two-
dimensional picture represents three-dimensional space.
But the viewer only cares about the vanishing point if they understand
what the image is supposed to depict. One neurodegenerative disease,
which seems associated with paradoxical facilitation—semantic dementia—
attacks conceptual knowledge. Semantic dementia involves the slow
degeneration of the temporal cortex, which causes a predictable pattern of
conceptual knowledge loss. For instance, eventually all animals may seem
indistinguishable. In the late stages of semantic dementia, a person’s vocabulary
is devoid of specific nouns. They use general terms like stuff, thing, or that.
As their conceptual knowledge narrows and disappears, patients begin
to focus on new things. For instance, when Memory and Aging Center
researchers showed them pictures of common scenes or objects, their eye
movements did not follow the expected trajectory. Instead, they inspected
textural elements, or seemed to see things in the images that most people
ignore. Such a patient, when seeing train tracks, might focus on gravel and
other elements rather than the tracks’ vanishing point.
Obsessiveness
Seeing things in a new way is a fundamental component of creativity, and
it seems that semantic dementia gives people a different way of looking—a
new perspective. But there’s also another feature of the disease that many
creative people share: obsessiveness. Damage to the frontal cortex can lead to
obsessional preoccupations.

Both Maurice Ravel and Anne Adams were fascinated by geometric patterns.
So strong are these preoccupations that people with semantic dementia will
often retreat from social interactions to focus on them.
The frontal lobe is involved in some aspects of creativity, especially the person
is working toward a goal. But when it comes to spontaneous creativity—
improvising in jazz, or painting by impulse, for instance—we see less activity
in the frontal lobes. In patients like Anne Adams, some creativity may be
unleashed as the frontal lobes release their hold on the mind. Most of us are
dominated by language-based thought. When that dominance is eased or
removed altogether, the rest of the brain takes over.
Visual Searching
In another demonstration of how degeneration can enhance some functions,
the Memory and Aging Center researchers asked patients to do a visual
search task. The researchers showed participants arrays of colored letters. The
objective was to find a target that either popped out—an O among Xs, for
instance—or shared features with other items, like a green L among orange
and green Ts.
In the healthy control group, when the target popped out, it didn’t matter
how many other letters were in the array: People were just as fast and accurate
if there were five as they were if there were 30. But when the distractors
shared all the features of the target, the more distractors there were, the longer
it took the participants to find them, and the more likely they were to make
a mistake.
By contrast, the semantic dementia patients were just as accurate and even
faster on the shared-features task than controls, no matter how many items
were in the array. The disease made them better at this exercise.
It’s tough to say exactly why this happens, but one idea is that semantic
dementia patients are not distracted by the other items because they don’t
see the world in the same way. Without conceptual knowledge, a T and an L
aren’t letters of the alphabet. They’re just shapes, so they don’t share as many
features as they otherwise would.

The researchers also found that there’s one area in the parietal lobe—where
information across senses is integrated—that seems to underlie this ability.
People who were better at the shared-feature task had greater brain volumes—
more gray matter—in this region than those who weren’t very good at it.
Anne Adams had more brain matter in this part of her brain. And people with
synesthesia—a neurological condition that involves sensory crossing, such
as assigning colors to letters—also have more connections in this part of the
brain than neurotypical people. However, Anne never described her artistic
method as being driven by synesthesia. According to her husband, she seemed
to create these associations explicitly in her mind, mapping them out before
painting them.
Injuries and Passions

There are cases in which a passion
seems to be unleashed after a Progressive Changes
circumscribed injury, like a stroke.
For example, in his book Musicophilia, Semantic dementia is
Oliver Sacks writes about Tony progressive. Rather
Cicoria, an orthopedic surgeon who
than occurring all
was struck by lightning. His heart
likely stopped because of this, but at once, damage
neurologists and other physicians happens over time.
didn’t see any indication of lasting This progression
damage to his brain.
gives the brain time
But Tony’s mind had changed. A to adapt, change,
few weeks after the lightning strike,
and rewire. The brain
he began a lifelong obsession with
classical piano. This new interest is more capable of
seemed to come on suddenly. He neuroplasticity—
went from working 12-hour days at of physical and
his hospital to spending every free
minute listening to, then playing, functional change—
then composing classical piano music. than scientists first
Notably, he didn’t even particularly thought.
like classical music before the incident.

There are other stories of people like Tony, in whom a talent or skill is
suddenly unleashed after a brain injury. Darold Treffert, who collected stories
of such cases, called this condition acquired savant syndrome.
Although at first it might seem like the new talent comes from nowhere,
a close examination of these cases inevitably shows that the new abilities
are accompanied by obsessions. Affected people think about nothing
else, practicing many hours a day and expending all their mental energy
developing the skill.
Instead of suggesting that we all have talents just waiting to be unleashed,
this disorder may speak to what we could accomplish with a singular focus.
But of course, the price we pay—in terms of other cognitive skills, social
relationships, or careers—is steep.
Reading
Viskontas, I. “Tracking the Eyes to Study the Brain.” American
Scientist 103, no. 6 (2015): 388–392.
Viskontas, I., and B. Miller. “Art and Dementia: How Degeneration

of Some Brain Regions Can Lead to New Creative Impulses.” In
Neuroscience of Creativity, edited by O. Vartanian, A. Bristol, and J.
Kaufman, 115–132. MIT Press Scholarship Online, 2013.
———. “Paradoxical Creativity and Adjustment in Neurological

Conditions.” In The Paradoxical Brain, edited by N. Kapur, 221–233.
Cambridge University Press, 2011.

16
Table of Contents
BEETHOVEN,
DYSLEXIA, AND
CREATIVITY
Ludwig van Beethoven, born more
than 250 years ago, is considered to
have been the greatest composer of all
time, and his music is still regularly
performed today. Frequently abused as
a child, he was forced to practice the
piano by his parents, and he grew up
into a sullen, angry young man. He
found composing to be a struggle, and
yet he redefined the music of his time.
He was, in short, a creative genius. This
lecture looks at what we can glean from
examining how his brain worked.
119
A Brief Biography of Beethoven
Beethoven was born into what music historians call the classical period in
Western music, spanning from about 1730 to 1820. He lived between 1770
and 1827. In his last years, he helped usher in a new era in music—the
Romantic period—often thought to pick up where Beethoven left off.
His early work, when he was forging his craft, is rooted in classical elements.
Then, during his middle years, Beethoven was heavily influenced by Joseph
Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
For a time, Beethoven wasn’t fully committed to becoming a composer;
he was developing a reputation and skills as a piano virtuoso. Still, he
performed some of his own compositions, winning piano duels against the
top players of his time. In 1799, he published his eighth piano sonata—better
known as the Pathetique—which marked a significant improvement in his
compositional style.
From then on, Beethoven’s work set him apart from his influencers and
contemporaries in its emotionality—the use of melodies, modulations, and
textures to paint emotions. In this way, he planted the seeds for the Romantic
era in classical music.
Interestingly, as the style of Beethoven’s compositions was changing, he himself
was also undergoing a physical or neurological change. He began to lose his
hearing, which he blamed on an argument he had with a singer in 1798.
Beethoven and Dyslexia

Many musicologists and historians attribute the emotionality in Beethoven’s
music to the suffering he went through as his hearing deteriorated. But there’s
an argument to be made that his deep understanding of emotion and his
ability to express it through music predates his hearing loss. In fact, it might
have even stemmed from the way his brain was wired from birth.
There is evidence that Beethoven might have had dyslexia, which scientists
today believe has genetic underpinnings, present at birth. And one of the
more surprising conclusions they’ve come to is that people with dyslexia seem
to be more emotionally reactive than their neurotypical peers, and they are
better able to detect and empathize with other people’s emotional states.
16 • Beethoven, Dyslexia, and Creativity 120

Phonological Processing
Dyslexia comes in many
forms, though it is often
mistakenly thought of as
just a reading or writing
problem. The most
common mechanism of
dyslexia is a problem with
phonological processing—
the ability to break words
down into smaller sound
units and then to figure out
what these units look like
in written words. In other
words, it’s largely a problem
with parsing sounds.
There is some evidence for Beethoven’s dyslexia, which potentially had

consequences for his work. Beethoven apparently couldn’t multiply or divide,
and he would often write dates incorrectly, putting the numbers in the wrong
order and transposing digits. He made many spelling mistakes. Composing
was like physical labor for Beethoven, and there are manuscripts of his music
that show how he struggled to write it down.
Dyslexia’s Development and Strengths

Newborns who are at risk of dyslexia because of genetic factors respond
differently to speech sounds than their peers do. Neuroimaging shows that
their brains do not react as strongly to changes in speech sounds, suggesting
they don’t hear those changes in the same way as their typically developing
counterparts.

As kids grow, there are measurable differences in brain structure and function
in those who go on to develop dyslexia compared to those who don’t,
particularly in the left hemisphere’s language regions. Research mapping
these differences has traditionally focused on what fails to develop or remains
underdeveloped in the left hemisphere. But recently, neuroscientists have
begun to ask what the right hemisphere might look like in people with
dyslexia. They have also started to focus on what strengths dyslexia might
bring, as opposed to just documenting weaknesses.
While the left hemisphere might show less activity, the right hemisphere
seems to show hyperactivity in people with dyslexia, especially in regions that
underlie emotions, like the anterior insula. There’s now growing evidence
that people with dyslexia sense and generate stronger emotional signals than
neurotypical people do and that their bodies are more physiologically and
viscerally reactive. When it comes to physical manifestations of emotions,
such as changes in heart rate, dyslexic people tend to have larger responses
than those who are not dyslexic.
There are also higher rates of depression and anxiety in people with dyslexia,
which has largely been attributed to the challenges they face in school and
society. But what if they also feel emotions more powerfully? What if they are
more attuned to affective states than people whose brains are wired differently?
Beethoven’s music now is known for its emotional power—for ushering in a
revolution of expressiveness. Perhaps that’s not just because he suffered as a
child, or because he had to face hearing loss as an adult. Perhaps it’s also in
part because his brain was wired for emotion.
Emotional Music
In a sense, our brains are prediction engines—we want to know what’s
coming so we can behave accordingly. To do this, we find patterns, especially
ones that are meaningful to us, like faces in clouds or cliffs. We’ll search for
meaning in even the most banal things.
Music, too, is about pattern recognition. It involves multiple layers of meaning
embedded in patterns of sounds. To help us find sound patterns, lots of cortex
activity works toward processing sound for meaning, whether as language,
music, or both.

Multiple brain pathways are involved in the comprehension and production of
emotion in music. There is a direct link between what we hear and our limbic
system—the border between our subcortical structures (the basic functions of
our bodies) and our neocortex (the seat of cognition).
There’s also a pathway that links music to movement. In fact, movement is
key to understanding music. We don’t see rhythms; instead, we feel beats by
engaging our motor circuitry. And the spine-tingling emotional reactions
to music—the chills—are part of a third pathway that tags rewarding
experiences by activating our autonomic nervous system—our gut feelings.
Music connects us by putting us in sync. Our body and brain rhythms sync
up to the music, and thus to each other. The more we engage with music, the
more accurately we entrain to its rhythms. Keith Doelling and his colleagues,
using a tool used to look inside the brain—magnetoencephalography, or
MEG—showed that musicians’ brains more strongly entrain to Beethoven’s
unhurried Sonata no. 23 than nonmusicians’ brains.
Beethoven’s Approach
Beethoven could write long and complex themes, but he preferred to break
them into pieces—motifs sometimes as short as only two notes. He would
then layer these foundational bricks one on top of the other to build what one
biographer called a “cathedral of sound.”
Architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn loved Beethoven’s music,
responding to its spatial sense—it was as if he composed in three dimensions.
Yet numbers were difficult for him. His solutions to the musical challenges
that he created for himself belie a different mathematical ability.
It’s possible that Beethoven’s tendency to parse themes and rearrange motifs
stemmed from his experiences as a person with dyslexia. In most kids
with dyslexia, the challenges start with a difference in how they process
sounds, especially rapid sounds like speech, making it difficult for them to
know where syllables begin and end. Psychologists call this a problem with
phonological awareness. Often, children with dyslexia rearrange letters or
syllables, much like Beethoven did with his musical fragments.

Creativity Enhancements
Some studies suggest that people with dyslexia might be more creative than
their neurotypical peers, at least in nonverbal domains. Many have higher-
than-average nonverbal intelligence and faster visuospatial processing. Some
researchers have proposed that kids with dyslexia have left hemisphere
developmental weaknesses but right hemisphere strengths. One such
hypothesis came from Norman Geschwind and Albert Galaburda, who
suggested that alterations in the development of the left hemisphere are
mirrored by compensation in the right hemisphere, which leads to the
enhancement of abilities such as creativity.
However, the data supporting the enhancement of creativity in dyslexic people
is mixed. A couple of recent meta-analyses examining multiple studies found
no benefits of dyslexia for creativity in children. They did report small effects
in the adult population, however, as adults with dyslexia tended to score
higher on creativity tests than did peers without dyslexia. One hypothesis is
that living with dyslexia forces a person to think outside the box, to practice
more, and to find alternate ways to learn, all of which can manifest in
creativity enhancement.
It’s unclear whether people with dyslexia are more or less likely than the
population at large to become musicians. After all, many face auditory
processing challenges that might spill over into musical training issues,
though studies by Nina Kraus have shown that music training might help
kids with dyslexia overcome their auditory deficits.
There are few studies of musicians with dyslexia, but those that exist have
investigated various aspects of auditory and musical processing in musicians
with and without the condition. Overall, they find few differences on most
tests, though one issue that seems to persist even with musical training is that
people with dyslexia have a more limited auditory working memory, meaning
they can hold fewer tones or chunks of music in mind temporarily.

Understanding Beethoven
Given that people with dyslexia seem to be more emotionally reactive than
their peers without, a story is emerging that might help us understand
Beethoven’s creative genius from a neuropsychological point of view. He was
a child who was abused and who struggled to learn, but he also became a
perfectionist. At the same time, he was likely highly emotional.
Beethoven was attracted to the structure of classical music, and he learned to
compose and play within it. But it was not easy, and he likely found solace
and meaning in short motifs, bits of music, that he first unconsciously but
later more deliberately rearranged in his head. Then, at a pivotal moment,
he lost his hearing. It was at this point that he rejected the sterility of the
classical form to let his emotions speak, giving birth to an entirely new way of
approaching music.
If freedom was Beethoven’s objective, he found it by bending rules, altering
the ancient sonata form into something new. Over time, he grew steadily
in artistic power, in power of expression, and in inventing new types of
ornamental sound patterns.
Reading
Doelling, K. B., and D. Poeppel. “Cortical Entrainment to Music and
Its Modulation by Expertise.” Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences 112, no. 45 (2015): E6233–E6242.
Sturm, V. E., A. R. Roy, S. Datta, C. Wang, I. J. Sible, S. R. Holley,

C. Watson, et al. “Enhanced Visceromotor Emotional Reactivity in
Dyslexia and Its Relation to Salience Network Connectivity.” Cortex 134
(2021): 278–295.

17
Table of Contents
THE CREATIVE
ENVIRONMENT
This lecture’s topic is the impact

of place on creativity. A caveat is
in order before moving forward:
The study of creativity has ignored
women and people of color most
egregiously. Still, history shows
us that creative geniuses don’t just
appear sporadically in time and
space. Instead, they tend to cluster
together. Where and when we live
can either reveal our inner Mozart
or leave us stuck in a soul-sucking
cycle of misses.
126
Athens: Walking toward Ideas
Russian economist and philosopher Nikolay
Danilevsky observed the historical and
sociological conditions that nurture new ideas.
He posited that microcultures foster creativity
and that creatives are more likely to be successful
if they are able to be politically independent—
that is, part of a city-state in which citizens
have a voice and are not under the strict rule of
one grand monarch or emperor. There seems to
be some evidence to back this up.
Take, for example, the tiny Greek city-states that
were isolated from one another by a treacherous
landscape of hills and rocks some 2,500 years
ago. There were many of these city-states in 450 BCE, all enjoying similar
climates and geography. But the most innovative and lasting ideas of this era,
in politics and in art, were clustered in one specific place: Athens.
Physical activity may play a role here. Greek philosophy makes it clear that
thinking happened while walking, and there’s a wealth of evidence now that
walking or a similar low-impact physical activity is good for creativity. Ancient
Greeks walked a lot in Athens and spent lot of time outdoors in general.
A handful of studies support the idea that a city’s walkability might enhance
the creativity of its residents. Relevant here is a study by Friedrich Gotz, Shinya
Yoshino, and Atsushi Oshio. The study used data from Japan. It found that
extroversion and, to a lesser extent, openness to new experiences—a personality
trait that is positively associated with creativity —were positively correlated
with the walkability of a person’s environment. Access to and encouragement
of walking may have something to do with the development of creative hubs.
Walking itself doesn’t necessarily drive this entire effect. Athens’s culture
in general prioritized social interactions, which may have helped. And
walkability comes with many other factors that might be important drivers,
such as access to museums, art galleries, nightclubs, parks, and other places
where ideas might be sparked. We don’t know exactly which factors are
causal and which just correlate.
17 • The Creative Environment 127

The Song Dynasty
Some 1,500 years after Athens’s heyday, Song Caffeine
another golden age of creativity was in
full swingy. This one lined up with the Caffeinated tea
Song dynasty in China. By the 12th was a staple in the
century, China’s income was three times
that of all of Europe, and it became
Song dynasty. The
the first nation to issue banknotes. differences in the
The Chinese invented gunpowder and rate of caffeination
the means with which to weaponize and its metabolism
it. Their naval ships were far more
complex than those in Europe. They between tea and
were even archaeologists, and they spread coffee mirror some
knowledge rapidly with their inventions of the differences
of wood-block and, eventually, moveable-
in how creativity is
type printing.
valued in Western
Like Athens in ancient Greece, the
Europe versus China.
culture of the Song dynasty was built
on social interactions. Art shows, Coffee speeds
public festivals, social clubs, and the up thinking, but
like dominated city life. The jewel of some argue that
the Song dynasty was Hangzhou. As
Eric Weiner points out, Athens and
tea, with its slower
Hangzhou share many similarities: Both effects, deepens
were hubs in trading routes with vibrant thinking. In turn,
marketplaces where ideas and goods whereas Westerners
could be freely exchanged. Both had
centers bustling with artistic activity. value the creative
product, perhaps an
Florence Eastern philosophy
focuses more on
The ability to finance creative work
might also attract creatives to certain the process—on the
places. Take, for example, 15th-century work itself, rather
Florence. Like Athens, Florence was an than its outcome.
independent city-state, in this case ruled

by a handful of rich merchant families, like the famous house of Medici.
Individual freedoms were valued, and money was pouring in. Emerging out
of the Black Death—the worst pandemic in human history, taking 75 to
200 million lives—Europe was ready for the Renaissance, and conditions in
Florence made it possible.
When the Medici family ensured that their hold on political power was
secure, they created an environment that was conducive to the birth of great
art and ideas by funding it. The relationship between creativity, innovation,
and cash is complicated, but a certain level of financial and political stability
is necessary for artists to have the time and resources to devote to their art.
Ecosystems, Networking, and Failure

In Silicon Valley, the prospect of founding a unicorn company—a simple
idea that turns into a billion-dollar valuation—lures creatives from all over
the world. Competition is fierce, yet there’s no doubt that our modern world
has been reshaped by the innovations born here. Whether the reshaping is
ultimately positive is up for debate, but change has come.
Collaboration
While competition can motivate creative work, as
more and more of the low-hanging fruit in a domain
has been picked, collaboration becomes increasingly
important. Scientific articles with more than 1,000
authors have become much more common in the
past five years. The predictions among people who
study how science moves forward indicate that large-
scale collaborations are only going to increase in the
future. This is one reason behind the open science
movement, in which scientists share not only their
findings but even their raw data.

A notable reason why particular environments foster creativity, and one that
applies to Silicon Valley perhaps most obviously, is that in those environments
there is a platform that allows innovators to do their work—whether it be
a physical space or a virtual one like an operating system. Silicon Valley is
replete with people who build platforms that allow countless more engineers
and others to innovate and create. This can be thought of as engineering
creative ecosystems.
Another factor is networking. When there is a concentration of creatives in
a domain, networking is much more likely to be fruitful. Universities recognize
this. At least outwardly, they celebrate interdisciplinary programming and
centers or institutes that house professionals from differing domains who are
pursuing a common goal.
Finally, creativity benefits from the ability to fail. It has become almost
cliché in Silicon Valley parlance to celebrate failure. An embrace of failure
highlights the importance of taking risks, which inevitably lead to failures.
An environment that allows for failures, fast prototyping, and iteration is
conducive to innovation. After all, errors are often the unexpected seeds of
new ideas. Penicillin and microwaves are just two examples of innovations
built from mistakes.
Reading
Florida, Richard. Who’s Your City? Random House of Canada, 2010.
Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From. Penguin Publishing

Group, 2011.
Weiner, Eric. The Geography of Genius. Simon & Schuster, 2016.

18
Table of Contents
DESIGN THINKING
HELPS STRUCTURE
CREATIVITY
Most creative careers used to be taught
within an apprentice model. But now
there are degree-granting institutions
promising to teach people how to be
creative. One prominent approach to
teaching creativity is called design
thinking, and it is the topic of this
lecture. Schools that teach creative
thinking for design use this approach.
There are five steps to design thinking:
empathize, define, ideate, prototype,
and test. This lecture covers those in
turn before looking at how researchers
test the neuroscience of creativity.
131
Empathizing and Defining
By empathizing, designers diverge from academics and other kinds of
creatives. The goal is not to generate new knowledge or to test a hypothesis,
but to improve the experience of a specific set of humans. The end user
is the top consideration. Therefore, design students learn to walk in the
shoes of the people for whom they are designing. To accomplish this, they
conduct interviews, ask questions, and observe behaviors.
Once designers understand the needs of their users, they are ready
for the second step in design thinking: defining the problem. In this
phase, schools of design thinking teach their students to come up with
a problem statement that identifies the user, describes their needs, and
addresses any other considerations to keep in mind, which designers call
the insights.
Importantly, needs are described using verbs so that the designers understand
what the users will be able to do with their designs without fixating on one
solution. Here’s a sample problem statement:
My students (the users) need to learn foundational material about the
neuroscience of creativity (the need) on demand—that is, on their own
time, in a way that is both engaging and useful (insight).
Ideation
In the next step, designers transform the problem statement into a prompt
for generating ideas. They do this with a “how might we” question.
For example, the aforementioned problem statement might be rephrased
as: How might we create a course that teaches the foundational material
about the neuroscience of creativity on demand, such that it is engaging
and useful?
That gets designers to the next phase: ideation. In this phase, designers
generate many ideas without worrying about their quality. That evaluation
process happens in later stages. Usually, ideas flow fast and loose at first, then
level off and begin to decline.
18 • Design Thinking Helps Structure Creativity 132

Building on Others’ Work
Novice designers often believe that ideas come
from nowhere and that creativity is outside of their
control; instead, in the novice’s line of thinking, ideas
will drop in spontaneously. But inventors, artists, and
other creatives often build on the work of others.
Getting novice designers to understand that even
quintessential creative geniuses start with something
rather than nothing gives them the freedom to ideate.
Brainstorming sessions can be fun or excruciating, and their usefulness

is variable. Often, a lot of precious time is wasted during this process.
But the global design firm IDEO has a few tips when it comes to
brainstorming sessions.
y Allow one person to speak at a time. This helps prevent interruptions of
speakers.
y Keep focus. Smartphones, for instance, should be put away.
y Encourage wild ideas.
y Defer judgment.
Prototyping and Testing

Once ideas have been generated, it’s time to play. This is the phase in which
designers create prototypes of their designs, either on their own or by enlisting
the help of engineers or developers. Author David Lee, who wrote Design
Thinking in the Classroom, describes a prototype as a working model that
combines ideas from the ideation stage to meet the problem statement. This is
where testing and feedback come in—when designers can locate problems or
places that need improvements.

In many cases, getting to the prototype phase sooner rather than later leads to
greater efficiency. Rapid prototypes are a signature of Silicon Valley startups
because the information gained from testing a prototype can completely change
the problem statement or design approach. The prototype doesn’t need to be
fancy—it just needs to be good enough to be testable in a meaningful way.
Rapid prototyping is one of the reasons that companies like Apple and
Google have been so successful. When someone has an idea, they can create
a prototype in a day or two to evaluate it, instead of wasting months or years
on something that won’t ever meet the user’s needs.
Testing Creativity
When it comes to studying the neuroscience of creativity, researchers are faced
with a major logistical problem: It’s messy. That’s especially true of the design
process. In many cases, they try to clean up the process by devising laboratory
experiments and tasks to query one aspect of design at a time. And to ensure
that the findings of these experiments are applicable in the real world,
researchers try to use experiments or observations that are as naturalistic as
possible, even if that means sacrificing some control.
Neuroscientists investigating design thinking are getting quite good at this.
After all, there are schools of design that promise to teach a person how to be
creative as a profession. And over time, schools teaching design thinking have
moved from discrete steps—empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test—to
embracing a more intuitive approach, one that aims to capture what it’s actually
like to design something. Some neuroscientists have tried to emulate this
approach, but there is some benefit, too, to taking things one step at a time.
For instance, a research group led by Katerina Alexiou published the
preliminary results of a relevant study in 2009. It looked at the brain basis of
interior design, and it presented participants with design-related challenges.
The study had three interesting takeaways.
y First, when the task was framed as a design task rather than a problem to
be solved, more regions in the brain were recruited for designing than for
simple problem-solving.

y Second, designing engages the right dorsolateral prefrontal
cortex, a region of the brain involved in planning, possibly
with a preference for spatial information, such as mentally
transforming objects.
y Third, the scientists also found greater activity in the anterior
cingulate cortex, a part of the brain known to be involved in
evaluating and monitoring our ideas and actions.
Another study by Yasuyuki Kowatari and others compared expert
and novice designers as they worked on designing a new pen. The
researchers found that while novices used the right and left prefrontal
and parietal regions equally, experts had more efficient brain activity,
recruiting more of the right side than the left. But interestingly, the
originality of the designs was related to how much interaction there
was between the right and left sides, not how much activation was in
either side.
Several similar studies have also used neuroimaging techniques to
map out brain activation during the design process. Probably the most
consistent finding is that the prefrontal cortex is involved. Additionally,
when we’re designing, our brains show different activity from when
we’re engaged in other types of problem-solving.
Mapping brain activity with neuroimaging techniques is useful,
but to capture the timing of design thinking, it is necessary to use
neuroimaging tools that have better temporal resolution. These tools
can track changes over time more accurately. This is where brain waves
come in.
Different modes of thinking can be measured using electroencephalograms
(EEGs) or event-related potentials (ERPs), which are essentially
EEGs locked to a particular event, like the viewing of a specific image or
some discrete moment in time. Using these tools, we can see that certain
steps in the design process seem to occur when the brain is driven by a
particular rhythm of activity. Alpha waves, for instance, signal a state
somewhere in between concentrated thought and rest.

Alpha waves commonly accompany divergent thinking—coming up with
new uses for a common object, for example, which can be thought of
as a design task. Directed thinking can leave us stuck on one function for
a tool, so we need to ease up—let our minds wander just a bit—to think
of alternate uses. We need to move from fast gamma waves to calmer alpha
waves. Overall, there is more power in the alpha band when designers are in
the ideation stage.
Reading
Chrysikou, E. G., and J. S. Gero. “Using Neuroscience Techniques to
Understand and Improve Design Cognition.” AIMS Neuroscience 7, no. 3
(2020): 319.
Mayseless, N., G. Hawthorne, and A. Reiss. “The Neuroscience of Team

Collaboration During a Design Thinking Event in Naturalistic Settings.”
In Design Thinking Research, edited by C. Meinel and L. Leifer, 143–154.
Springer, 2020.
Seitamaa-Hakkarainen, P., M. Huotilainen, M. Mäkelä, C. Groth, and

K. Hakkarainen. “How Can Neuroscience Help Understand Design
and Craft Activity? The Promise of Cognitive Neuroscience in Design
Studies.” FormAkademisk 9, no. 1 (2016): 1–16.

19
Table of Contents
CREATIVITY
THRIVES ON
DIFFERENCE
When two ecosystems meet,
biodiversity flourishes in a
phenomenon known as the edge
effect. Likewise, when ecosystems
of culture or neurodiversity meet,
creativity and innovation blossom.
Clearly, the edge effect is one of
the most powerful tools we have
to help creativity flourish. The
mixing of genres and cultures
characterizes many of the great
leaps in music, art, fashion, and
other creative fields.
137
International Fashion Fuel
International interactions and diversity are relevant to the edge effect. A study
by Frédéric Godart, William Maddux, Andrew Shipilov, and Adam Galinsky
examined 21 seasons of fashion collections from the world’s top fashion
houses. The study found that when fashion houses’ creative directors spent
time in other countries, their collections were rated as more creative.
The researchers are quick to note that just spending time abroad is not
enough; the creative directors must assimilate or adapt to the foreign place
if they are to reap lasting benefits to their creativity. They must engage
in deep learning experiences or integrate the foreign culture into their
own identity. Culture shock and homesickness, followed by a deliberate
immersion into the novel environment, might be the catalysts that spark
creativity. But the creatives also have to come home.
The researchers found that there is a curvilinear relationship between senior
leaders’ foreign experiences and the houses’ creative success. The breadth,
depth, and cultural distance of the experiences—that is, how foreign
and how immersive they were—were initially positively correlated with
creativity. But at high levels, the effects can even become negative.
19 • Creativity Thrives on Difference 138

This was true when it came to breadth—the number of foreign countries the
leader spent significant time in. The sweet spot was between two and three.
The same applied to cultural distance, or how foreign the foreign places were
to their visitors. Here, some distance was ideal, but not too much.
Only depth—the number of years the director worked abroad—showed
continued benefit. Even after 40 years abroad, the benefits to creativity
remained strong, unlike the breadth and cultural distance of the
experiences, which showed diminishing returns after a peak. These results
replicated or mirrored data from a similar study, also headed by Adam
Galinsky, investigating intercultural relationships and their effects on
a person’s creativity.
The Edge Effect in Science

The edge effect seems to extend to science as well. In 2014, Richard Freeman
and Wei Huang published a study examining more than 1.5 million scientific
papers written in the US between 1985 and 2008. They found that over
these few decades, the proportion of US-based authors with European or
English names decreased, while the proportion of US-based authors with
names originating in China and other developing nations increased. But
regardless of origin, authors were more likely to collaborate if they shared
names with similar ethnicity than pure chance would predict.
However, papers with greater homophily—that is, more names connected by
ethnicity—were more often found in lower-tiered journals. They were also
cited less often than papers with a greater diversity of authors, even when
the previous publishing performance of the authors was taken into account.
Papers with more authors in more locations and with longer lists of references,
in contrast, were more likely to end up in higher-impact journals and receive
more citations.
Scientists often size each other up with regards to the number of publications
a person has and how often they are cited. But Richard Freeman and Wei
Huang showed that diversity among authors is good for science.

Neurodiversity
Culture or background is one way of differentiating people. But there’s
another way in which people are not the same: We also have different brains.
Over the past two decades, there has been a shift in how neuroscientists,
psychologists, medical professionals, and advocates think and talk
about differences in brain development. The conversation is moving
away from a view that any divergence from the average is necessarily
undesirable and toward one in which neurodiversity is not just accepted
but respected.
People whose brains develop and function differently, like those on the
autism spectrum or who have learning challenges like dyslexia, have for too
long been asked to alter their thinking and behavior to fit into a society that
refuses to make the most basic accommodations. Navigating a world built
for the average brain can cause daily hardships and challenges for people
whose brains significantly diverge from the mean. But we are moving toward
a future in which people with cognitive or social differences have more
accommodations.
In a 2021 article published in the journal Technological Forecasting and Social
Change, Emmanuelle Walkowiak makes the case for creating a workplace
environment that is inclusive and accommodating of people on the autism
spectrum. She notes that our digital revolution creates a work environment
that is more favorable to autistic workers, as they have more flexibility
in terms of how they communicate and interact with their colleagues as
well as how they do their work. For example, if stimming—repetitive or
unusual movements or noises—helps a person concentrate and think,
a digital workplace means that the person can engage in those activities
without interrupting or disrupting their colleagues.
A caveat is in order here regarding stereotyping and the danger of lumping
together people with neurological differences into a single group. That is
misguided thinking, and it has serious consequences that are antithetical
to creating an accommodating and inclusive society. One such stereotype
is that all autistic people prefer digital technology to in-person interactions,
or that they are all somehow skilled in math, or computer coding, or

some other domain. Expecting an autistic person to have special
abilities and making the existence of these skills a prerequisite for a job is
also unfair.
Returning to Walkowiak’s work, she notes in her article that for most
of the population, two randomly selected people will be more similar
than they are different, at least when it comes to cognitive, perceptual,
and social-emotional traits. But if one or both people are autistic, these
differences are more pronounced.
Though the specific skills and abilities of autistic adults are heterogeneous,
they have been shown to offer an advantage in the workplace. In a 2017
Harvard Business Review article, authors Robert Austin and Gary Pisano
cite a program at SAP, a German multinational software company,
designed to facilitate the hiring of autistic workers and to create an
environment in which they can thrive.
After only four years, management at the company noticed productivity
gains, quality improvements, enhanced innovation, and general increases
in employee engagement. Nick Wilson, a manager at Hewlett Packard
Enterprises, where a similar program was in effect, said that no other
initiative at his company has delivered so many different benefits.
Innovation is particularly hard to come by in big companies. That’s
why including workers who think differently is of great benefit to large
corporations. But the neurodiverse population still has a very high
unemployment rate. One factor is what many managers think are critical
traits of a good employee: good communication skills, working well with
others, high emotional intelligence, and the ability to conform and to
network. These traits are found less often among autistic people than in
the general population.
But when they do get hired, neurodiverse workers are surprising their
employers, adding value to a broader range of tasks than expected.
They become product managers, HR specialists, and customer support
specialists. It is simply not true that autistic people can’t thrive in jobs that
require good social skills.

Reading
Austin, R. D., and G. P. Pisano. “Neurodiversity as a Competitive
Advantage.” Harvard Business Review 95, no. 3 (2017): 96–103.
Freeman, R. B., and W. Huang. “Collaborating with People Like

Me: Ethnic Coauthorship within the United States.” Journal of Labor
Economics 33, no. S1 (2015): S289–S318.
Godart, F. C., W. W. Maddux, A. V. Shipilov, and A. D. Galinsky.

“Fashion with a Foreign Flair: Professional Experiences Abroad Facilitate
the Creative Innovations of Organizations.” Academy of Management
Journal 58, no. 1 (2015): 195–220.
Lu, J. G., A. C. Hafenbrack, P. W. Eastwick, D. J. Wang, W. W.

Maddux, and A. D. Galinsky. “‘Going Out’ of the Box: Close
Intercultural Friendships and Romantic Relationships Spark Creativity,
Workplace Innovation, and Entrepreneurship.” Journal of Applied
Psychology 102, no. 7 (2017): 1091.
Walkowiak, E. “Neurodiversity of the Workforce and Digital

Transformation: The case of Inclusion of Autistic Workers at
the Workplace.” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 168
(2021): 120739.

20
Table of Contents
GET MORE OUT OF

GROUP CREATIVITY
Working in a group can bring

pitfalls. Interruptions during
brainstorming sessions can
derail thoughts, for instance,
and people may also socially
loaf—that is, they might slack
off when they are part of a team,
relying on others to pick up the
slack. This lecture asks: How can
we foster creativity in the group
setting? After all, we know social
interactions can be powerful
drivers of innovation.
143
The Four Ps and Groups
It’s helpful to think of the factors that influence group creativity within the
framework of the four p’s: the person, the place (or context), the process, and
the product. Group creativity can thrive or languish as a result of problems
with any one of the four p’s.
The Person
People who approach a group situation with a positive attitude are more likely
to generate a greater number of novel ideas. Consider, for instance, that the
first rule of improvisational acting (or improv) is to say, “Yes, and.” When
someone suggests something, it’s better to affirm that idea and add to it rather
than stopping the conversation with a “No, but.”
The Place
There isn’t a lot of consistent evidence that specific features of the environment
play a major role. Rather, it seems that the overall psychosocial context is what
matters most. For example, fear of being punished or criticized can cause the
creative process to stagnate. Also, extrinsic motivators often lead members of
the group to focus on the rules or conditions of the task rather than exploring
the problem at hand.
A collaborative environment promotes creativity, while a competitive one can
lead to a focus on the extrinsic rewards at the cost of intrinsic motivation.
But there are also examples of workplaces in which extrinsic and intrinsic
motivations can work synergistically, helping people work toward their personal
creativity goals while contributing to the larger group. One such example is
a creative team making a film or a podcast, in which each individual makes
a unique contribution, with the goal of developing a blockbuster together.
Putting together these first two p’s—the person and the place—we can start to
build a picture of an ideal collaborative group. First, it should be small enough
such that each individual feels valued. Second, the group should be made up of
individuals who can bring unique expertise to the discussion. Here, diversity in
terms of experiences, perspectives, and domain expertise seems to be the key.
20 • Get More out of Group Creativity 144

The Process and Product
To put person and place together with the last two p’s—the process and
the product—this lecture turns to a specific case of group creativity, one
that alternates between stages of idea generation and actual production
of a creative product. Musical groups provide excellent examples of
group creativity.
Improvising with a group of musicians, or creating a new interpretation of
an older piece of music, or premiering a newly written one are canonical
examples of group creativity at work. These are specifically ensembles in
which each member makes a unique contribution—think a string quartet,
not an orchestra, or a barbershop quartet as opposed to choir. Another
example is an egalitarian rock band—not one with a frontperson and
backing musicians.
These are groups where there is no conductor—the group members decide
who is leading and who is following at any given moment. That’s why every
group member matters. There’s no room for social loafing in an ensemble,
where each person plays a unique role.
Studying how effective musical ensembles learn to groove together—what
they do during their most creative performances—can teach us a lot
about group creativity in general. For instance, there are some important
differences that map onto how musicians with different levels of expertise in
improvisation approach the task.
Ceding Control and Making Connections

When jazz musicians improvise, we see less activity in the dorsolateral
prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex often controls our conscious
thoughts. When we hold something in mind, turn it over, and consider its
ramifications, we’re relying heavily on the prefrontal cortex, particularly the
dorsolateral area. When we have to make decisions, we engage this region.
When we’re inhibiting our impulses, the prefrontal cortex is also responsible.
But when we want to ride our feelings, it helps to turn down the prefontal
cortex. And that’s exactly what jazz musicians do.

Language in Music
When neuroscientist
Charles Limb and his
lab tracked the brains of
improvising musicians
while they traded fours—
that is, exchanged
four-bar sequences in
a call-and-response
format—they found
regions of the brain
involved in conversations
activated. Particularly
active were those
responsible for syntax, or
the grammar of language.
The prefrontal cortex is made up of several regions, and each has its own
strengths. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex we think of as the primary area
responsible for cognitive control—that is, the way we can flexibly adjust
what comes to mind on the basis of our shifting goals and how we plan our
behavior to reach those goals. Simply put, it’s how goals or plans influence our
behavior. A musician who enters a state of flow will cede cognitive control as
their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex grows quieter.
Decreasing cognitive control is what expert improvisers learn how to do. In
the process, they even create new connections between the prefrontal cortex
and other parts of the brain, like the cerebellum, which includes motor
coordination among its jobs. Neuroscientists interpret these new connections
as showing that experts can more easily pull learned motor sequences from
memory than novices.

When improvising, musicians also activate the rostral prefrontal cortex, while
simultaneously quieting the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. That pattern might
underlie the kind of musical self-expression that happens during this type of
creative performance.
The Ensemble Project

An undertaking called the Ensemble Project was designed to track what
aspects of group dynamics are predictive of groove. It pulled together six
musicians who were game to experiment. Each learned a piece of music on
their own, then recorded the piece under different conditions. For instance,
some conditions set rules regarding eye contact, gestures, and the ability
to vary tempo or dynamics, while another saw the musicians simply trying
their best.
When the musicians couldn’t see each other but just listened intently, they
found the performance felt more intimate. When they avoided direct eye
contact, they felt disconnected, and the performance was less coordinated.
When they made excessive eye contact, they felt uncomfortable, but it was
a bonding experience. Conditions in which they couldn’t vary the tempo or
the dynamics didn’t feel musical.
Other studies back up these observations. Musicians that use eye contact
and body coordination tend to perform more in sync—and are more
likely to groove—than groups of musicians who are more focused on their
individual performances. In another study, when researchers matched
pairs of musicians based on their natural body rhythms, they found that
the more similar the individuals were to each other on this measure, the
better they coordinated their performances. In fact, two less creative
musicians outperformed mismatched pairs who were predicted to be more
creative overall.
And when a musical partner is less cooperative, we ramp up activity in
our prefrontal cortex as we try to right the ship. But with a cooperative
partner, we can afford to turn down the prefrontal cortex and let other brain
regions—like those involved in expressing ourselves—take the stage.

Reading
Berger, Kevin. “We’re More of Ourselves When We’re in Tune with
Others.” Nautilus, July 24, 2019. https://nautil.us/were-more-of-ourselves-
when-were-in-tune-with-others-8350/.
Mullen, B., C. Johnson, and E. Salas. “Productivity Loss in

Brainstorming Groups: A Meta-Analytic Integration.” Basic and Applied
Social Psychology 12, no. 1 (1991): 3–23.
Slayton, M., A. S. Bristol, and I. V. Viskontas. “Factors Affecting Group

Creativity: Lessons from Musical Ensembles.” Current Opinion in
Behavioral Sciences 27 (2019): 169–174.

21
Table of Contents
OVERCOME
CREATIVE ANXIETY
This lecture has two guiding
questions: Can we harness stress and
anxiety, or find ways to mitigate it,
to be more creative? And how do we
ensure that everyone benefits, pulling
up those often left out of creative
endeavors, so that no one is left
behind? To answer those, this lecture
draws on lessons from the COVID-19
pandemic, work from the Sound
Health Network, and a collaborative
project involving Indre Viskontas’s
lab at the University of San Francisco
and Georgetown University’s Richard
Daker and Adam Green.
149
Background on Stress
We feel stress—a physical and/or emotional tension—when some demand
is placed upon us. Stress can help motivate us to meet the demand or to
change our circumstances so that the demand is no longer a factor. And the
amount of stress we experience depends on the demand. It can be weak, like
a deadline at work that you can easily meet, or strong, like an aggressive bear
staring you down on a hiking path. Stress can also be acute, like the need to
pick up a sick child from school within the next hour, or chronic, like trying
to work from home while also homeschooling young children for months at
a time during a pandemic.
Acute stress activates the sympathetic nervous system, whose job is to
coordinate your body to fight or flee. It can give you the boost of energy, but
it can also scramble one’s thoughts and produce undesirable physical reactions,
like overly sweaty palms. The body can only sustain the fight-or-flight
response for so long before it exhausts itself and goes into parasympathetic
rebound. The sympathetic nervous system is balanced by the parasympathetic
nervous system. For instance, if the sympathetic nervous system raises your
heart rate, the parasympathetic nervous system lowers it, and so on.
Acute Stress and Creativity

For some musicians and performers, stress reduction techniques like
meditation or positive thinking just aren’t powerful enough to overcome the
physical anxiety they feel. Some, therefore, take propranolol, a beta-adrenergic
antagonist (or beta-blocker), to turn down the sympathetic nervous system.
Propranolol is designed to treat high blood pressure and other heart-
related conditions as well as migraines. But off-label, it’s used by people
who experience performance anxiety, because it can dampen the physical
symptoms of acute stress. It typically works, to a point.
There is a curvilinear relationship between stress and creativity. One study
showed that when participants were solving problems easily, propranolol made
things slightly worse. But when they were struggling, propranolol seemed to
improve performance. Perhaps the key is that when we’re overwhelmed by
anxiety, beta-blockers can help. But when anxiety is giving us the impetus to
try harder, they may be best avoided.
21 • Overcome Creative Anxiety 150

Threats and the Amygdala
A threatening stressor
triggers an intense
emotional reaction that
increases activity in a
part of the brain called
the amygdala. The amygdala
modulates other regions,
including those involved in learning
and memory, and hijacks the prefrontal cortex, such
that we fall back on emotional habits and what we
often think of as instinctual reactions. We ruminate on
how we feel, not what we need to do to be successful.
One way of sorting out whether a stressor will be motivating or arresting

is to consider how the situation is appraised. When we see the stressor
as threatening or the task as beyond our ability, we become stressed to
distraction, and performance suffers. When we appraise the stressor as
a challenge and we perceive our ability as equal to the task, we ride the wave
of motivation, and the stressor can help us focus and perform at our best.
Chronic Stress and Creativity

Depending on its intensity, acute stress can be helpful or harmful to the
creative process. But what about chronic stress? After all, many creative
professions are chronically stressful. There’s often little job security, creators
are beholden to whatever their peers think about their creations, and so on.
What are the long-term effects of living with such uncertainty?

In 1936, the endocrinologist Hans Selye proposed a model for thinking
about these effects, which he called general adaptation syndrome. This
model is divided into three phases. Phase 1 is essentially what this lecture
has covered so far: the acute phase, in which alarm bells go off. The distress
signal reaches the hypothalamus, which is a part of the brain that modulates
our hormones. The hypothalamus then releases glucocorticoids, which in
turn set off the release of adrenaline, which drive the fight-or-flight response,
and cortisol. Like adrenaline, cortisol can be helpful in the alarm stage by
increasing energy levels and restoring balance once the danger has passed.
But chronic stress, which leads to the prolonged release of cortisol, can have
harmful effects.
In the second phase of the general adaptation syndrome, we have resistance.
This is the recovery phase, when cortisol levels are lower, but there’s still a part
of the person that is ready for the next stressful event. The stressed person
might feel that they’re managing well, but a constant state of vigilance can
impair their ability to concentrate, leaving them feeling irritable and angry.
People often don’t realize that these are signs of stress.
If the resistance stage lasts too long, the body adapts to a higher level of
stress, and eventually the stressed person can reach the last stage: exhaustion.
This is when their reserves are depleted. It often manifests as the straw
that breaks the camel’s back—all of a sudden, some tiny stressor can push
them over the edge. They may end up feeling hopeless, anxious, tired, and
burned out.
Long-term stress, largely driven by too much cortisol, has other, more
nefarious effects. Immune system function can be dampened, leaving the
person more susceptible to infections and even cancer. There can also be
significant brain changes in regions that are particularly important for
creativity with long-term elevated cortisol levels.
In the early stages of stress, we see new synapses forming in the brain,
particularly in the hippocampus, where new long-term memories are formed
and where there are lots of cortisol receptors. But with prolonged stress, we
see synaptic suppression, and, in the exhaustion phase, even excitotoxicity or
cell death.

We also see a shift in synapse formation from the prefrontal cortex to
the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex, with shrinkage of neurons in the
prefrontal cortex and growth in the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex. When
stress diminishes, these changes are reversible in younger individuals, but they
become more permanent as we age.
Prolonged exposure to glucocorticoids like cortisol is toxic to the brain. We
can even see measurable hippocampal atrophy, which might explain why
chronic stress causes memory problems.
Perceived Control
One factor that can mitigate the effects of stress is the perception of personal
control. Perceived control is basic to human functioning and a necessary
precursor for creativity. When we can assert some control over our environment,
we can begin to thrive.
That’s what happened to many creatives during the COVID-19 pandemic.
When the rug was pulled from under them, they found ways of creating
performances online. The pandemic represents a kind of edge effect—as so
many activities were disrupted, opportunities opened up for cross-fertilization,
exploring new avenues, and finding novel solutions to problems. However,
stress levels also drove many creative people to exhaustion. And these
opposite outcomes illustrate the individual ways in which stress, anxiety, and
creativity interact.
Creative Anxiety
The collaboration involving Indre Viskontas plus Richard Daker and Adam
Green focused on mapping out individual characteristics that affect creative
performance, especially when it comes to anxiety. Daker and Green developed
a creativity anxiety questionnaire, then validated it. It turns out that there
is a type of anxiety specific to being creative that’s separable from general
anxiety or other forms of worry.
The researchers found that a person’s creativity anxiety score predicted poorer
performance on canonical creativity tasks. They also found that women
showed greater levels of creativity-specific anxiety than men, even when
general anxiety was corrected for.

This finding was interesting to Indre Viskontas because of some other work
related to the leaky pipeline in science, technology, engineering, and math
fields. It’s long been known that women in STEM fields often fail to rise
to the top at the same rate as their male peers. What if creativity-specific
anxiety was one factor? What if creative women were more likely to choose
artistic fields, while the women who choose STEM fields suffer from greater
creativity anxiety?
There’s some evidence that women as a group undervalue their leadership
qualities and creativity. One fascinating study published in the Harvard
Business Review supports this claim. In 2012, Jack Zenger and Joseph
Folkman analyzed performance reviews of men and women in leadership
positions and found that women were rated as effective as men, and they were
rated even higher on some key measures of leadership competencies.
When the researchers later updated those analyses, their findings were
replicated. Women were perceived to be as effective, if not more so, than
their male counterparts on 17 out of 19 competencies, including taking the
initiative, problem-solving, leadership, and innovation. Yet the number of
female CEOs of Fortune and S&P 500 index companies remains below 5%,
and the trends are headed in the wrong direction.
The answer can’t be just that male leaders are biased, since they were the ones
rating women as more competent than their male counterparts. When women
rated themselves, they were not as generous. Now imagine that some women
have higher creativity-specific anxiety: They perceive themselves as not as
creative. That could mean that they don’t allow themselves to reach leadership
positions in STEM and other fields because these positions are thought to
depend more on creativity, while those that do see themselves as creative
gravitate to artistic fields.
Anxiety comes linked with uncertainty, and yet uncertainty is inherent
in creative work. Indre Viskontas is interested in exploring how we might
diminish creativity-specific anxiety and how we might find ways to convince
people that creativity is a skill that can be taught and improved. With an
increased sense of personal control, anxiety related to creativity, at least,
should diminish. And we would all benefit from a larger, more diverse, and
more creative workforce.

So far, the collaboration’s preliminary results suggest that when a person
scores high in creativity-specific anxiety, they report feeling more anxious
when asked to be creative. But interestingly, there isn’t a big effect on their
creative performance. It seems, instead, that the anxiety they feel is not related
to how creative they are, just how creative they perceive themselves to be.
That’s encouraging. If we can change that self-concept, what else might we be
able to achieve?
Reading
Akinola, M., C. Kapadia, J. G. Lu, and M. F. Mason. “Incorporating
Physiology into Creativity Research and Practice: The Effects of
Bodily Stress Responses on Creativity in Organizations.” Academy of
Management Perspectives 33, no. 2 (2019): 163–184.
Beversdorf, D. Q. “Neuropsychopharmacological Regulation of

Performance on Creativity-Related Tasks.” Current Opinion in
Behavioral Sciences 27 (2019): 55–63.
Daker, R. J., R. A. Cortes, I. M. Lyons, and A. E. Green. “Creativity

Anxiety: Evidence for Anxiety That Is Specific to Creative Thinking,
from STEM to the Arts.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 149,
no. 1 (2020): 42.
Ren, Z., R. J. Daker, L. Shi, J. Sun, R. E. Beaty, X. Wu, Q. Chen, et

al. “Connectome-Based Predictive Modeling of Creativity Anxiety.”
NeuroImage 225 (2020): 117469.

22
Table of Contents
CAN DRUGS
OPEN UP
THE CREATIVE
BRAIN?
For centuries, if not
millennia, humans have
turned to mind-altering
substances for recreation
and inspiration. This
lecture surveys the evidence,
evaluating the effects of
certain commonly used
substances on creative
thinking.
156
Stimulants
Caffeine is the most commonly used mind-altering drug in the world. In the
US, about 85% of adults consume a caffeinated beverage every day. It wakes
us up, lifts our mood, and helps us focus. But what happens when researchers
caffeinate research subjects and then test their creativity?
Darya Zabelina and Paul Silvia recently published a study testing the impact
of caffeine on different forms of creative cognition. Its results suggested
that when a problem has one correct answer, as is the case with convergent
thinking, caffeine can help you find it. But when it’s time to generate new
ideas, to be creative in a less constrained way, then caffeine is irrelevant. (There
is one caveat. It’s possible that the dose given in the test was too low, and to see
an impact on idea generation, higher amounts of caffeine are needed.)
Beyond caffeine, other stimulants are also worthy of study. For instance,
David Beversdorf studies psychopharmacology and its effects on creativity,
with a special interest in helping neurodivergent individuals, like those on the
autism spectrum or with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
One of the treatments for ADHD is to take stimulants. David Beversdorf and
his colleagues set out to test the effects of medication on creative performance
in the same individuals when they were on or off their medications. Molly
McBride was the first author on this paper, published in 2021. The results
of the study showed that stimulant medication had a beneficial effect on
creative performance. Taking stimulants improved performance on tests of
fluency, flexibility, and originality of divergent thinking. But it did not affect
performance on convergent thinking tasks.
Alcohol
Some creative types believe alcohol helps give bursts of inspiration, making
this another substance that has drawn the attention of creativity researchers.
To address certain limitations of earlier studies, Mathias Benedek and a group
of researchers used a placebo-controlled design. One group got real beer and
the other got the non-alcoholic version, and both were assessed on divergent
thinking tasks. Subjects were also asked whether they thought they were
intoxicated, as a person who believes they’re drunk might perform differently.
22 • Can Drugs Open Up the Creative Brain? 157

The study found that mild intoxication impaired executive function. Mild
intoxication also boosted insight-based problem-solving somewhat, and
though it did not affect performance on the divergent thinking tasks,
it seemed to improve performance on convergent thinking tasks. The
researchers did not find any differences in how intoxicated versus sober people
evaluated their own creative performance.
Biographies of eminent creatives—writers in particular, but other artists as
well—tend to conclude that alcohol ultimately had a detrimental effect on the
person’s creativity or ability to create. And the negative effects of alcohol on
a person’s career followed a dose-response curve: The more or the longer they
drank, the worse it was. And among those who felt that alcohol was a key part
of their creative process, the rates of bipolar disorder were high.
Perhaps alcohol is simply a recurring feature of bohemian lifestyles. Those
tend to include lots of socializing and bonhomie, which enhance creativity—
as opposed to the alcohol doing it. Disturbingly, when a highly creative
person begins to self-medicate with alcohol and other drugs, they are often
not only actively discouraged from seeking alternative professional help but
encouraged, as the myth that alcohol and other drugs fuel creativity persists.

Cannabis
Another drug commonly used by
musicians in particular is cannabis.
One relevant study in this area was
authored by Emily LaFrance and
Carrie Cuttler. They compared
creativity performance in cannabis
users and nonusers, and they
further asked users if they were
sober or currently high. Their
sample was impressively large: 721
participants, of which around 70%
were white females.
LaFrance and Cuttler found that
sober cannabis users tended to
consider themselves creative more
often than nonusers. They also
showed slightly better performance
on convergent creativity tasks than
nonusers when they were sober.
Finally, they were more likely to score higher on personality traits of openness
to new experiences. The authors linked the creativity enhancement found in
the cannabis user group to the trait of being more open to new experiences,
not to the cannabis itself.
Another study worth mentioning was randomized, double-blind, and placebo-
controlled. Here, Mikael Kowal and colleagues compared performance on
creativity tests in a population of regular cannabis users who had either taken
a low, high, or placebo dose of THC. They found that the high-dose group
was significantly worse on divergent thinking tasks when compared with both
the low-dose and placebo groups. The low-dose group was no different from
the placebo group on any of the tasks. Therefore, it doesn’t seem as though
cannabis has a significant or predictable effect on creativity, at least as
measured by these laboratory tests.

Psychedelics
One more class of drugs is worth considering as we discuss the relationship
between pharmaceuticals and creativity: psychedelics. Because many
psychedelics are classified as schedule I compounds—meaning they
are considered particularly dangerous and addictive by governments—
neuroscientists have not had the opportunity to study their effects, even in
microdoses, until very recently. Therefore, the study of psychedelics is still
a nascent field, but some theoretical frameworks are beginning to emerge.
Kalina Christoff and her colleagues use a theoretical model called the
dynamic framework of thought to map out the different types of thinking
during the creative process. Creative generation is considered a relatively
unconstrained mode of thought, much like dreaming. Creative evaluation,
by contrast, is highly constrained, like other forms of goal-directed thinking.
These two modes map roughly on divergent and convergent cognition,
respectively, and one can imagine that the more constrained the thinking, the
more the prefrontal cortex is involved.
Because creative generation, or divergent thinking, is explicitly not goal-
directed, it feels outside of our control. That’s why artists often turn to
drugs, meditation, or other activities like a new hobby to wake up the muse.
Psychedelic drugs are mind-altering, and as such, they set a person into a state
of unconstrained thinking—much like dreaming while fully conscious.
Specifically, drugs that are serotonin agonists (flooding the brain with the
neurotransmitter serotonin), like LSD and psilocybin, have been the focus of
recent work on how psychedelics might relate to creativity. The psychedelic
experience is often accompanied by rich visual imagery, a sense that everything
is connected, reduced reality testing or monitoring, emotional swings, meaning
attribution, and changes in our sense of self.
Essentially, then, psychedelics take many of the features of the creative process
and fold them into one experience. There’s still a lot of research to be done,
but one way that psychedelics might be useful in the creative process is by
putting the person into a mental state in which imagery is bolder and highly
original, and remote associations—links between distantly related concepts or
ideas—might be more easily found. Because the person remains aware, they
can make note of these associations and ideas for use in later creative work.

In line with this hypothesis, a study published by Kim Kuypers and her
colleagues found that the psychedelic drug ayahuasca improved performance
on a divergent thinking task—the picture concept task, which asks
participants to find associations between different rows of pictures. One idea
is that psychedelics broaden the search space that subjects can access when
generating ideas, as though a boundary has been pushed further out.
Because the psychedelic experience often involves attributing new meaning
to everyday perceptions or experiences, a larger search space coupled with an
enhanced ability to find meaning in associations seems to align with what
the creative process entails. And there is some evidence that the psychedelic-
induced mental state shares similarities, in terms of patterns of activation
and entropy in brain waves, with the mental state that generates spontaneous
musical improvisation.
But there’s also evidence that a person’s rating of their own thoughts is
affected by psychedelics—they think they are more creative than they are. It’s
also possible that what felt highly meaningful in a psychedelically altered state
becomes more banal by the light of day.
This expectancy effect is particularly problematic when trying to
understand some of the recent work on microdosing—taking tiny amounts
of psychedelics. This habit has permeated places where creativity and
innovation flourish, like Silicon Valley. Microdosing has become a bit of a
fad—a productivity hack—and anecdotally is said to boost creativity and
productivity.
Of the few published scientific studies investigating the effects of microdosing
on creative thinking, most are not blind or placebo-controlled, making the
results hard to interpret. One study specifically set out to test the placebo
effect. The study involved telling participants that they were taking a
drug resembling psilocybin, which is found in magic mushrooms, but the
participants received a sugar pill. Despite that, 61% of participants reported
feeling some effects of the drug, including hallucinations, alterations in their
sense of self, and a break with reality.

And another study found that people who microdose hold beliefs about what
the drug is doing that were not supported by observed outcomes. Additionally,
a paper showed that current and former microdosers scored higher on the
unusual uses task—a divergent thinking task—than a control group made
up of people who had never microdosed. That might simply mean that
people who are more open to new experiences—the only personality trait
that consistently predicts creative behavior—are also more like to have
microdosed. The jury, therefore, is still out on microdosing.
Reading
Berge, J. T. “Breakdown or Breakthrough? A History of European
Research into Drugs and Creativity.” The Journal of Creative Behavior 33,
no. 4 (1999): 257–276.
Girn, M., C. Mills, L. Roseman, R. L. Carhart-Harris, and K. Christoff.

“Updating the Dynamic Framework of Thought: Creativity and
Psychedelics.” NeuroImage 213 (2020): 116726.
Lapp, W. M., R. L. Collins, and C. V. Izzo. “On the Enhancement of

Creativity by Alcohol: Pharmacology or Expectation?” The American
Journal of Psychology 107, no. 2 (1994): 173–206.
McBride, M., C. Appling, B. Ferguson, A. Gonzalez, A. Schaeffer, A.

Zand, D. Wang, et al. “Effects of Stimulant Medication on Divergent
and Convergent Thinking Tasks Related to Creativity in Adults with
Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.” Psychopharmacology 238
(2021): 3533–3541.
Sessa, B. “Is It Time to Revisit the Role of Psychedelic Drugs in

Enhancing Human Creativity?” Journal of Psychopharmacology 22, no. 8
(2008): 821–827.
Zabelina, D. L., and P. J. Silvia. “Percolating Ideas: The Effects of

Caffeine on Creative Thinking and Problem Solving.” Consciousness and
Cognition 79 (2020): 102899.

23
Table of Contents
BEING CREATIVE
IN A WORLD NOT
BUILT FOR YOU
The world is often not
accommodating to someone
who experiences the world in an
atypical fashion. This lecture
focuses on how people with
various physical and neurological
differences use their creativity
to solve complex problems every
day—problems that most of the
rest of people don’t even know
exist. Much of the lecture draws
on the work of Sara Hendren and
her book What Can a Body Do?
163
The Story of Stephen
In her book, Sara tells the story of Stephen, an autistic man in his early
20s who loved maps, directions, and transportation options. He worked
for a Boston tour company that offered tourists rides on a truck-boat,
an amphibious vehicle.
Sara describes Stephen as talkative and gregarious, fluent in English and
Italian, and a skilled pianist. He seems to navigate the world confidently.
But when he was 10, he was often paralyzed by fear. He found open spaces
like plazas, beaches, or the city after a snowfall terrifying. He wanted the
world to be broken into discrete sections. Despite having perfect vision, he
wore glasses with clear lenses because the frames compartmentalized his
visual field. Borders, lines, edges were reassuring.
After a chance encounter at a birthday party, Stephen began working with
professor and artist Wendy Jacob, who had been working on performance
art installations that involved lines traversing spaces. At the party, she
noticed Stephen stringing yarn between pieces of furniture, dividing the
space into more manageable bits. Intrigued, she invited him to her studio,
and they began to play with blue painter’s tape and white walls.
One day, Stephen had a stroke of insight. He used the tape to delineate
a large blue irregular mass on a wall, and it reminded him of a Looney
Tunes cartoon where the character would paint a tunnel entry onto a wall
and escape into it. That thought inspired a project Wendy and Stephen
called the Explorers Club, which involved walking outdoors and exploring
new parts of the city with tape in hand. Wendy and a research assistant
would mark out a path in a place where Stephen had never been, then ask
him to walk it, step by step.
Walking in a new environment had previously been frightening for
Stephen and often overwhelming. But over the course of several months,
he become more comfortable exploring new spaces with the help of the
taped visual aid. Now, Stephen loves adventuring, and has the tools he
needs to make the world navigable.
23 • Being Creative in a World Not Built for You 164

The Story of Cyndi
The taping was similar to a prosthesis for Stephen. But Cyndi Desjardins
Wilkens, a quadruple amputee, spent months working on getting myoelectric
prosthetic arms and learning how to use them. When she was 42 and a new
mom, she contracted necrotizing fasciitis, and all four of her limbs had to
be amputated to save her life. After
months of rehabilitation, she now uses
prostheses to walk. Localized Creativity
The new arms, however, were Sara Hendren lives
expensive and complicated to use.
Cyndi’s house became filled with in Boston and is
her own creative solutions to use acutely aware of the
her residual limbs, many involving fact that many prized
Velcro strips and specific appliances.
historical buildings
For instance, to help her open
up cupboards or drawers, she simply were not built
applied straps. to accommodate
With her team of prosthetists, Cyndi people with various
came up with a clever solution to give disabilities. But a
her back an activity that she prized: solution that works in
writing handwritten notes. They
developed a simple silicone glove,
the planning stages of
molded it to the precise shape of her a major building would
arm, and then lodged a pen through not be appropriate
two holes, just at the angle she’d need for the front steps
to write with. Cyndi was eventually
back to writing notes in her own of a 200-year-old
recognizable handwriting. This glove pub. Therefore, she
was also used to hold a fork so that she advocates for localized
could feed herself.
creativity—looking
This successful accommodation at each problem and
gave Cyndi a burst of creative
finding the appropriate
energy. Eventually Cyndi was able to
accomplish more tasks as the dexterity solution.
in her arms improved dramatically.

Assessing Legal Acts
In the US, the Americans with Disabilities Act protects the rights of that
population. Americans can feel proud of this law, as it is one of the strongest
in the world. But too often, people without disabilities think the problem has
now been solved, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. Many common
tasks still present challeges.
To understand how people with disabilities solve daily problems, a group
of researchers in Sweden dove into the topic. Sweden has a similar law, the
Discrimination Act, that makes inadequate accessibility illegal. Still, the
researchers found that many disabled people couldn’t do activities of daily
living, like shopping for groceries or getting to work, without some assistance.
Many said that they almost always ask someone to come with them on
errands. But when alone, they often get unsolicited aid from those around
them. For instance, people might move aside, open doors, or pass them items.
These gestures might indicate that most people are genuinely courteous;
however, they can be frustrating for individuals who would prefer to be able
to do these things themselves.

Getting stuck is one of the reasons why people in wheelchairs hesitate to go
out on their own. If a ramp can’t be used because it’s rusted or covered in
dirt, they might not be able to get out of a situation. Oftentimes, there isn’t
an experienced ramp operator around, so they might have to ask a loved one
or a hired personal assistant to help them get around. That means that they
need to plan out their day much more meticulously and farther in advance
than a person who does not need accommodations.
Compensatory Strengths
When our independence or access to activities we love is hampered by obstacles,
we are highly motivated to find a creative solution. But when one ability fails to
develop or is taken away, the brain compensates and even rewires, making its
own accommodations. Some people with vision loss, for example, can learn to
use echolocation—using the sounds they emit or make with a cane—to build
a mental model of the space around them.
Researchers led by Lore Thaler at Durham University published a study in
2021 on the topic of training people to use clicking sounds to navigate around
the world. Until this study was released, it was thought that echolocation was
a skill that could only be developed by kids who lost their vision early, when
their brains were still developing. The idea was that the visual cortex was
recruited and repurposed to process sounds in space.
But the study authors showed that blind participants, whose median age was
45 at the time of training, could learn echolocation, at least to the extent that
it improved their overall mobility. Among the participants, 83% of them
said they felt more independent and that their general well-being improved
three months after the intervention. Perhaps even more surprisingly, sighted
participants also showed learning.
The Medical and Social Models

Sara Hendren begins her book with a question: “Who is the built world built
for?” With that question, she emphasizes the difference between two models
of disability. She calls the first the medical model, where the body is where the
impairment begins and ends. In this model, the person embodying that body
is responsible for coping, surviving, overcoming, adapting to the world.

The other model is social. It widens the scenario to include interactions
between the body and the ways in which the world disables it. When the body
and the built world come into conflict, the result can be Rosemarie Garland-
Thomson’s concept of misfit. Disharmony runs in both directions, between
the body and the world.
A misfit is also a condition ripe for creativity. People with disabilities have to
learn to be open to new experiences, using the five stages of design thinking
to creatively solve everyday problems. They are highly motivated; they adapt.
Too often, people living in a world built for them fail to notice this creativity,
and they even actively discriminate against disabled people.
However, Sara observes that things might be changing, especially as a result
of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has changed so many aspects of how we
use the built environment. Sometimes something as simple as adding closed
captioning to a video call can open the floor to so many people who, for too
long, have been shut out. Adapting to a global pandemic has sparked great
creativity, and it’d be a shame to waste the resulting opportunity to adapt the
world for everybody.
Reading
Hendren, S. What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World.
Penguin, 2020.
Norman, L. J., Dodsworth, C., Foresteire, D., & Thaler, L. “Human

Click-Based Echolocation: Effects of Blindness and Age, and Real-Life
Implications in a 10-Week Training Program.” PLOS ONE 16 no. 6
(2021): e0252330.
Wästerfors, D. “Required to Be Creative. Everyday Ways for Dealing

with Inaccessibility.” Disability & Society 36, no. 2 (2021): 265–285.

24
Table of Contents
USING
TECHNOLOGY AS
A CREATIVE AID
There is so much interest in

cognitive creative enhancements
that people are willing to build
their own brain-stimulating
devices. Quite relevant here is
the topic of transcranial direct
current stimulation (tDCS),
which some people think
enhances creativity. This lecture
focuses on how tDCS works
and applications of artificial
intelligence for creativity.
169
How tDCS Works
Transcranial direct current stimulation is a technique used to change the
excitability of neurons in the outer layers of the brain—the cortex. Neurons
send signals to each other by inducing slight changes in the voltage of a cell’s
outer covering—its membrane. When the difference in charge between the
inside and outside of the cell reaches a certain number or voltage, little gates
in the membrane open up, and atoms of sodium rush into the cell.
When enough sodium atoms enter the cell, a cascade of events called an
action potential is triggered. That’s the cell firing, which takes the form of
a series of voltage changes across the membrane resulting from the exchange
of atoms through the opening and closing of these tiny channels.
An action potential flies down the axon of a neuron—the part of the
cell that sends signals to other cells—and at the tips, triggers the release
of neurochemicals. These are called neurotransmitters, because they are
sending signals to other cells, and their release sends them into the gaps
between neurons. These neurotransmitters bind to the receiving ends of other
cells, and the signal gets passed on or the cell’s function is otherwise altered.
24 • Using Technology as a Creative Aid 170

The language of the brain, then, is this set of voltage changes across the
membrane. At rest, or in a neutral state, a cell’s interior is more negatively
charged than its exterior—there are more negatively charged atoms inside
than outside of the cell.
When the interior of the cell becomes slightly less negative, or polarized,
than usual, the cell is considered excited, meaning it’s closer to launching an
action potential. That happens when a few positive atoms get inside the cell,
bringing its charge closer to zero, compared with what’s outside. We say it’s
depolarized—less because it’s inching its way to neutral. Polarization, after all,
describes the distance between two groups of things.
Since an action potential is triggered by a depolarization, any electrical activity
that depolarizes the membrane will make a cell more likely to fire—more
excitable. Anything that makes the cell more negative on the inside—a process
called hyperpolarization—makes it less likely to fire, and therefore inhibits it.
Transcranial direct current stimulation, then, can either ramp up excitability
by depolarizing the cell or tamp it down by hyperpolarizing it, depending on
the setup.
And tCDS is fairly simple to set up: Two electrodes are connected to a battery,
and a constant current runs between them. One electrode is negatively
charged—the cathode—and the other is positively charged—the anode.
When placed on the scalp, positively charged particles (like sodium) flow
toward the cathode, while negatively charged ions flow towards the anode.
This is because opposite charges attract.
If the goal is to make a specific brain region more excitable, the anode is
placed right above that region, and it pulls negatively charged ions toward
it, away from the inside of the cells. That makes the inside slightly less
negative—or depolarized. That means that the region becomes sparkier.
If the goal is to tamp down activity in a region, a cathode is placed there, and
the positively charged ions flow toward it and away from the cell. The cell’s
interior becomes even more negative inside than outside, and the cell is less
likely to fire. The region’s activity is inhibited.
This current is very weak, so the procedure is noninvasive and only lasts
a short while. It feels slightly tingly on the scalp.

The Effects of tDCS
The tDCS procedure has been studied as a possible treatment for many
different neurological conditions, from stroke to schizophrenia, without much
success. There’s some evidence that it might help people with mood disorders
like depression and possibly anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, but
there’s still a lot to learn.
Research is more established when it comes to the effects of tDCS on skill
learning and creativity. When placed along the motor cortex, the part of the
brain responsible for controlling muscles, there’s some evidence that anodal
stimulation—making the region more excitable—can speed the rate of motor
skill learning. Some professional sports teams have used this process during
training sessions. So far, though, it’s not revolutionary, and it’s easy to use
tDCS incorrectly, such as by placing it on the wrong part of the scalp.
When it comes to creative cognition, however, there might be some
more definitive positives. Indeed, some of the earliest studies of cognitive
enhancement through tDCS were in the creativity space.
The prefrontal cortex sometimes needs to take a back seat for spontaneous
creativity to flourish. When we’re actively searching for a solution to a
problem, however, the same region can be critical. Luckily for creativity
researchers, this region is fairly large and right at the surface of the brain,
making it an ideal candidate for modulation via tDCS. Neuroscientists
interested in exploring the differences between these two types of creative
thinking and the role of the prefrontal cortex use tDCS to manipulate its
excitability.
One set of studies showed that cathodal stimulation, which inhibits the
dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or DLPFC, increased mind-wandering—that
is, the person was more likely to have unrelated thoughts. Letting your mind
wander can be productive if you’re incubating some creative ideas, so in
this scenario, pulling the DLPFC slightly offline can make it easier to hear
divergent thoughts. The opposite was true when anodal stimulation was
applied, making the same area more excitable.

Other studies have shown that turning down the DLPFC also leads to more
cognitive flexibility and better performance on divergent thinking tasks, like
Lila Chrysikou’s uncommon uses task. In this task, a participant is given an
everyday object, like a toothbrush, and asked either for an uncommon use—
which requires cognitive flexibility—or a common use, which does not.
Participants receiving cathodal stimulation inhibiting the left dorsolateral
prefrontal cortex were faster and less likely to self-censor their suggestions
for uncommon uses than people who got cathodal stimulation in the right
DLPFC and people who received sham stimulation.
Right and left DLPFC regions do play somewhat different roles in creative
cognition, with the left side being somewhat more important for editing or
other detail-oriented work. The right tends to be more dominant in big-
picture thinking or pattern recognition. Sham stimulation is essentially
a way of controlling for expectancy or placebo effects. In this case, divergent
thinking was improved above and beyond the placebo effect.
Studies of convergent creativity—using tasks like the remote associates
test, where you are asked to find the common word between three remotely
associated words—showed that the opposite pattern of stimulation was
effective. When the left prefrontal cortex was made more excitable, via anodal
stimulation, people did better on the task.
An overview of tDCS suggests that making the prefrontal cortex less excitable
might help the idea generation phase, while making it more excitable might
help in idea selection. But there are lots of other potential applications—like
jazz improvisation, for example—that are currently under study. It’s worth
noting that even in studies that find reliable effects, they are still small, and
they often require large groups of participants.
Artificial Intelligence
Beyond changing the brain’s excitability, there are other ways that technology
can enhance creativity, especially if we consider creativity to be thinking
outside the box. For example, what if we created with the aid of the least
human brain available—an artificial one?

Social interactions with people who
are not like us have been shown to Deep Blue
boost creativity. Living abroad, having
a close relationship with a foreigner, Grandmaster
and even maintaining friendships with chess champion
people from different countries are
all associated with greater innovation
Garry Kasparov
and creativity. This begs the question: has credited Deep
Wouldn’t an intelligent robot do Blue, an artificial
the same? intelligence
Relevant to this topic is Kulitta, a programmed by
program built to compose music. Its IBM, with stretching
developer is the computer scientist,
composer, and origami designer Donya him to become the
Quick, who created it as part of her best chess player
dissertation at Yale University. It’s now he could be. When
part of MUSICA (Musical Improvising
Deep Blue first beat
Collaborative Agent), a program funded
by the US defense agency DARPA, of him at chess, he
all places. Kulitta and other similar was crushed, but
programs are trained using vast canons today, he has made
of music—all of Bach’s compositions,
for example.
his peace with it
and calls his loss
MUSICA is able to improvise jazz
music. Imagine a collaborative partner
a blessing.
who can draw from all of Bach’s work,
as well as every jazz piece ever recorded,
in a “trading fours” exercise—the jazz style where one player plays a four-
bar solo and another responds. Having such a musical conversation with a
machine that can tap into all of the music ever written would certainly open
up new ideas.
These compositions are both highly original and effective. As part of her
dissertation work, Donya asked people to rate musical phrases by how human
they sounded, and Kulitta’s outputs were more likely to be categorized as
written by a human than by a machine.

In a similar experiment, composer Steve Larson programmed a concert
to be played by his pianist wife, Winifred Kerner, that included his own
compositions, a piece by Bach, and one by a computer program called
Experiments in Musical Intelligence, or EMI, which was written by David
Cope. EMI was also trained on all known compositions by Bach and sounds
remarkably like Bach.
To Steve’s dismay, the concertgoers, when asked which of the pieces was
composed by a computer and which by humans, categorized his pieces as
machine-generated. They were quite certain that what EMI had written had
all the sensibilities of a great human composer.
AI: Creative and Helpful

There’s a big difference between an artificial intelligence like Deep Blue,
programmed using a model called good old-fashioned artificial intelligence
(or GOFAI) and the next generation of AI chess masters, like AlphaZero,
which learned the game on its own. GOFAI uses a human-designed search
procedure, and Deep Blue won by brute force—it simply searched through all
the existing strategies and picked the one that would make it most likely the
winner at each move.
AlphaZero, in contrast, plays against itself and learns by trial and error, which
means that it can extract rules of the game that no human ever considered.
Arguably, it’s being creative. The truth is that we don’t even know how AI
built using reinforcement learning, as this strategy is called, works. Just
like the incubation phase that offers up a clever idea to our feeble conscious
minds, reinforcement learning in a deep neural network like AlphaZero is
a mystery.
A notable figure in the AI field is Mario Klingemann, a German artist who
creates artwork with the help of an AI that has two brains. The brains are
called generative adversarial networks, or GANs. One generates images; the
other accepts or rejects them.
Klingemann has won prestigious prizes and sold works for hundreds of
thousands of dollars. By any measure, that’s a successful creative professional.
His work is moving and interesting to look at.

There are still philosophers, neuroscientists, and even computer scientists who
argue that only humans can truly be creative. But it’s starting to become clear
that even if we retain ownership over the products produced by AI, AI can
certainly enhance human-driven creativity.
Reading
Aliman, N. M., & Kester, L. “Artificial Creativity Augmentation.” From
the proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial General
Intelligence, September 2020.
Green, A. E., Spiegel, K. A., Giangrande, E. J., Weinberger, A. B.,

Gallagher, N. M., & Turkeltaub, P. E. “Thinking Cap plus Thinking
Zap: tDCS of Frontopolar Cortex Improves Creative Analogical
Reasoning and Facilitates Conscious Augmentation of State Creativity in
Verb Generation.” Cerebral Cortex 27, no. 4 (2017): 2628–2639.
Lubart, T. “How Can Computers Be Partners in the Creative Process:

Classification and Commentary on the Special Issue.” International
Journal of Human-Computer Studies 63, no. 4–5 (2005): 365–369.
Lucchiari, C., Sala, P. M., & Vanutelli, M. E. “Promoting Creativity

through Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS). A Critical
Review.” Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience 12 (2018): 167.

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Creativity and Your Brain

EDITORIAL & DESIGN SERVICES

1 The Creative Life Begins in the Brain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

This course takes you on a

1 • The Creative Life Begins in the Brain 2

1 • The Creative Life Begins in the Brain 3

1 • The Creative Life Begins in the Brain 4

The Four C’s

1 • The Creative Life Begins in the Brain 5

Areas of the Brain

1 • The Creative Life Begins in the Brain 6

1 • The Creative Life Begins in the Brain 7

2 • Beyond the Right-Brain Creativity Myth 9

Language and the Brain

2 • Beyond the Right-Brain Creativity Myth 10

Epileptic and Split-Brain Patients

2 • Beyond the Right-Brain Creativity Myth 11

2 • Beyond the Right-Brain Creativity Myth 12

Mapping Functions to the Brain?

2 • Beyond the Right-Brain Creativity Myth 13

2 • Beyond the Right-Brain Creativity Myth 14

2 • Beyond the Right-Brain Creativity Myth 15

Dolcos, F., H. J. Rice, and R. Cabeza. “Hemispheric Asymmetry

Zedelius, C. M., and J. W. Schooler. “The Richness of Inner Experience:

2 • Beyond the Right-Brain Creativity Myth 16

Sadler-Smith, E. “Wallas’ Four-Stage Model of the Creative Process:

4 • Evaluating the Creative Product 26

The Brain’s Response to Art

4 • Evaluating the Creative Product 27

4 • Evaluating the Creative Product 28

Authenticity Boosts Value

4 • Evaluating the Creative Product 29

4 • Evaluating the Creative Product 30

Gerven, Dylan, Anne Land-Zandstra, and Welmoet Damsma.

4 • Evaluating the Creative Product 31

Many of us have this notion that

5 • Who Is the Creative Person? 33

5 • Who Is the Creative Person? 34

5 • Who Is the Creative Person? 35

5 • Who Is the Creative Person? 36

5 • Who Is the Creative Person? 37

5 • Who Is the Creative Person? 38

Beaty, R. E., M. Benedek, R. W. Wilkins, E. Jauk, A. Fink, P. J. Silvia,

Kaufman, S. B., L. C. Quilty, R. G. Grazioplene, J. B. Hirsh, J. R. Gray,

Power, R. A., S. Steinberg, G. Bjornsdottir, C. A. Rietveld, A.

5 • Who Is the Creative Person? 39

THE “MAD GENIUS”

6 • The “Mad Genius” Myth of Mental Illness 41

Nancy Andreasen’s Research

6 • The “Mad Genius” Myth of Mental Illness 42

6 • The “Mad Genius” Myth of Mental Illness 43

Bipolar Disorder Studies

6 • The “Mad Genius” Myth of Mental Illness 44

Creativity-Induced Mental Illness?

6 • The “Mad Genius” Myth of Mental Illness 45

6 • The “Mad Genius” Myth of Mental Illness 46

Johnson, S. L., G. Murray, S. Hou, P. J. Staudenmaier, M. A. Freeman,