“Cre­ativ­ity is not just about the cre­ation of an art object, or a piece of music, or a film, or the cre­ation of a sci­en­tific project, but also about the cre­ation of social rela­tions and of cul­tural insti­tu­tions,” says Anto­nio Dama­sio. “Peo­ple rarely asso­ciate these lat­ter areas with cre­ativ­ity, but any­time we pro­duce some­thing new, be it an archi­tec­tural draw­ing, class­room cur­ricu­lum, or a new approach to a busi­ness prob­lem, the cre­ative process is at work.”

Accord­ing to Wikipedia, cre­ativ­ity “is a men­tal process involv­ing the gen­er­a­tion of new ideas or con­cepts, or new asso­ci­a­tions between exist­ing ideas or con­cepts.” In her book, The Cre­ative Habit, the chore­o­g­ra­pher Twyla Tharp writes an excel­lent guide to fos­ter­ing the habits that pre­pare you to be cre­ative. As with all forms of brain exer­cises, it takes con­sis­tent effort, orga­ni­za­tion, and com­mit­ment. Green­man Review sum­ma­rizes:

Tharp’s basic premise as this: you can’t be cre­ative if you work with­out struc­ture. This struc­ture can take many forms. One is the struc­ture of daily rou­tines or rit­u­als. Tharp starts her day, every day, at 5:30 a.m. with a cab ride to the gym where she works out for two hours. Some­times struc­ture involves par­ing away unnec­es­sary dis­trac­tions. Tharp talks about Henry David Thoreau going to live alone at Walden Pond as a way of allow­ing his inner voice to be heard more clearly, and men­tions that she often avoids watch­ing films while she is in the mid­dle of a project. Often struc­ture takes the form of a record of the steps you took to get from the begin­ning to the end of a project. Tharp uses heavy card­board file boxes to hold var­i­ous arti­facts that relate to each of her cre­ative projects. She labels them and stores them on indus­trial shelv­ing in her work area. Other peo­ple might use file fold­ers or note­books or elec­tronic files to store these records.

Nancy Andreasen is a psy­chi­a­trist and neu­ro­sci­en­tist at the Uni­ver­sity of Iowa. Based on her research using positron-emission tomog­ra­phy (PET) scans of people’s brains dur­ing cre­ative tasks, she sug­gests that cre­ativ­ity arises largely from the “asso­ci­a­tion cor­tex”—parts of the frontal, pari­etal and tem­po­ral lobes that inte­grate sen­sory and other infor­ma­tion. In her book, The Cre­at­ing Brain: The Neu­ro­science of Genius, she lists cul­tural fac­tors that have spurred cre­ative thought in the past: intel­lec­tual free­dom, open com­pe­ti­tion, a crit­i­cal mass of cre­ative peo­ple, the pres­ence of men­tors and patrons, and some degree of eco­nomic pros­per­ity. She also sug­gests that to boost cre­ativ­ity, adults prac­tice mak­ing close obser­va­tions of a cho­sen item or imag­in­ing one­self to be some­place or some­one else. Her rec­om­men­da­tions for chil­dren include: less tele­vi­sion, more music, and more out­door activity.

Alice Fla­herty from Mass­a­chu­setts Gen­eral Hos­pi­tal and Har­vard Med­ical School presents a three-factor model of idea gen­er­a­tion and cre­ative drive, focus­ing on inter­ac­tions between the tem­po­ral lobes, frontal lobes, and lim­bic sys­tem. Tem­po­ral lobe changes, as in hyper­graphia, often increase the quan­tity of idea gen­er­a­tion, some­times at the expense of qual­ity. On the other hand, frontal lobe deficits may decrease idea gen­er­a­tion, in part because of rigid judg­ments about an idea’s worth. The bal­ance between frontal qual­ity and tem­po­ral quan­tity is medi­ated by inter­con­nec­tiv­ity within each cor­ti­cal area that mutu­ally inhibits the other area. Dopamine in the mesolim­bic path­way influ­ences nov­elty seek­ing behav­ior, cre­ative drive, and goal-directed behav­ior. Although cre­ative drive and actual skill are nei­ther the same thing nor use the same brain anatomy, cre­ative drive does cor­re­late bet­ter with suc­cess­ful cre­ative out­put than actual skill does. Tra­di­tional neu­ro­sci­en­tific mod­els of cre­ativ­ity, such as the left brain — right brain hemi­spheric model, empha­size skills pri­mar­ily, and stress art and musi­cal skill at the expense of lan­guage and math­e­mat­ics. This three-factor model pro­posed by Fla­herty opens up to research find­ings in a broad range of nor­mal and patho­log­i­cal states.

Fur­ther Links
Mind/Body, Emo­tions, and Decision-Making
Social Intel­li­gence and Mir­ror Neu­rons
Social Intel­li­gence and the Frontal Lobes
An Ape Can Do This. Can We Not?
“Use It or Lose It” : What is “It”?
The Exec­u­tive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civ­i­lized Mind by Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg
Brain Exer­cise at the Osher Life­long Learn­ing Institute

Be Socia­ble, Share!

•