Neuroscience and Creativity: How the Brain Generates Innovative Ideas

 

            Innovation is the bedrock of human civilisation’. This quote sounds like what we must have come across before, but after one Google search, I realised we might be wrong. The quote might just be my innovative way of easing you into this article—and that…is creativity. But to explain how my brain came up with this, we have Neuroscience.

 

Before we proceed, keep in mind that ‘innovation’ is not ‘invention’ as that would mean that the idea of my quote is entirely new, rather, it is a known idea in a new form, hence, an innovation. You may have heard that the left hemisphere of our brains is the creative one while the right is the analytical one. Behold, I preach that scientists have proclaimed it a myth.

 

So what’s the truth? No one knows… for sure. There have been theories based on studies but none has a proven explanation of what the intersection between Neuroscience and Creativity is. This is because scientists have found that different parts of the brain fire in unison when they study the brain for creativity. The widely accepted conclusion is that different parts of our brain come together to birth creativity, and interestingly, these parts change depending on the kind of creative work or problem that is being solved.

 

Having read thus far, it would be a shame if we learn nothing; hence, here are some approaches scientists have explored to get us out of the ‘creativity’ medley:

 

The Word Problem

This is the part of research that often make people ascribe creativity to the frontal lobe,  prefrontal cortex or the right hemisphere, and as much as I would love to agree and put us out of the medley of misery ‘creativity’ has put us, I cannot. I dare say we might need a ‘creative idea’ to get out. Let’s get back on track.

 

In 2000, three scientists studied 13 subjects as they took a Remote Associates Test (RAT), a test of creative potential where you are presented with three words to cue you to a fourth word, and they found out that the anterior superior temporal gyrus (aSTG) of the right hemisphere (RH) was firing than the rest of the brain. However, in 2006, when another set of scientists tweaked this experiment, they found out that most of the frontal lobe was awash with neural activity, and a lot of other experiments pointed at the frontal lobe.

 

The Creative Storyteller

We all know that one person who is adept at concocting stories. If you do not anyone, you must

have seen a movie or read a book that blew your mind. A 2005 study researched how creative ideas that birth such stories are formed in our brains.

 

Again, three words were used. The subjects were given three words and asked to tell a creative story and some parts of the brain fired up significantly specifically the bilateral medial frontal gyri and left anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Feel free to ignore everything after ‘specifically’ but what you must note is that those terms are part of the frontal lobe. Seems the frontal lobe believers are winning.

 

The Wandering Creative

Sleep over it. Take some time off it. Do something else. These are all statements we heard or used at the point of solving problems that didn’t seem like they wanted to be solved, and there have been testimonies. Scientists have explored the reason behind these testimonies

 

They have found that our mind wanders 15% to 50% of the time and that the default network is tuned into this incubation state where we are necessarily not thinking or doing any cognitive activity. In this incubation state, it has been found that we get more creative. The default network is deeply seated in the prefrontal cortex which is in the front of the brain, but not limited to the part. Other networks that are involved in creativity are the Salience Network and Execution Network.

 

The Music Maestro

Since the piano is the mother of all instruments, scientists have studied pianists, the most, in this approach. Several studies have shown that many regions of the brain are activated. The interesting part is that these parts of the brain are known for our everyday improvisational action including selection and performance of movement, decision making, language processing and sequential auditory information, and inhibition of monitoring.

 

Among all of the approaches, experiments on creative music production seem to have elicited activation of more regions of the brain than others with the number hitting fourteen. Double perfection?

 

Closing: When Would It End?

The prefrontal cortex seems to be the scientists’ favourite and here is a proposed explanation that might end the experiments.

 

 The prefrontal cortex has a central role in creativity and it carries this out in three steps:

1. Regardless of the part of the brain involved in forming the creative/innovative insight, PFC brings it to our consciousness.
2. Evaluate it for appropriateness—-whether it is right/ makes sense or not before the eureka moment is complete.
3. Implement the expression of the insight. Any great idea requires work and as much creativity to bring it to fruition e.g Leonardo Da Vinci may have had the idea for the Mona Lisa in a day but it took him about 16 years to produce the work of art.

 

 

WRITTEN BY:

ÌBÙKÚNOLÚWA DÀDA

OS/23B/6046