Episode 58: Creativity and the Brain with guest Dr. Rex Jung
About Dr. Rex Jung
Dr. Rex Jung is a neuropsychologist, brain imaging researcher and a clinical professor of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico. Rex's latest research focuses on identifying the brain regions, cognitive functions, and behaviours associated with the creative process.
What is Creativity?
According to Stein - in the 1950s - creativity is defined as the production of something that both novel and useful. Creativity creates a dynamic tension between novelty production on one hand and utility on the other. This dynamic tension is both interesting and important. You cannot just have novelty because it creates silly things at its extreme and things that are useless. In addition, something that is only useful – but not new – could be considered boring, dull, and unstimulating. So, there is a kind of sweet spot between novelty and utility that is where creativity resides.
Creativity also creates a dynamic interplay for the brain as well. One part of the brain is responsible for novelty generation. But, then it needs to be down selected in such a way that it can be useful at the end of the day. When you look at the brain correlates during creative process, you see some of the dynamic push and pull between different brain structures and functions that produce creative output.
Different Types of Creativity
Processing mode: deliberate vs. spontaneous
Cognitive domain: knowledge vs. emotional
In deliberate types of creative activities, it requires a lot of deliberate effort. For example, you create hundreds of different pieces before stumbling upon the right one (e.g., like Edison who created hundred of different filaments before stumbling upon the right lightbulb.) In contrast, spontaneous creativity happens more effortlessly. For example, improvisational musicians create music on the fly. The spontaneous creative process often takes place in a state of “flow.” If you have a knowledge base that you can pull from and do something creative on the fly – you can essentially get into a groove and produce something almost out of thin air.
The knowledge domain versus emotional domain is another creative distinction where you are kind of stereotypically thinking of scientific creativity versus more artistic creativity. Of none, you aren't stuck in these different categories of creativity. You can move around from spontaneous to deliberate types of creativity during different stages of your own creative process as well. But, having the categorical distinctions helps scientists study creativity in a coherent way.
Where does Creativity exist in the Brain?
While creativity is likely a whole brain process, recent discoveries have identified certain parts of the brain that are particularly helpful in the creative process. For one, certain brain networks work together to produce novelty. For example, the default mode network, which is deep in the middle parts of the brain, is very important to novelty generation. In addition, the executive control network is very important to that down selection for the best idea that is more about utility and pushing ideas forward into the external world. Essentially, there is a back and forth - this interplay between novelty and utility. Researchers have begun to map out different large cortical networks that are important - not only to creativity, but other cognitive domains as well. So, while scientists can't localize creativity to a certain part of the brain, they can start to articulate different parts of the brain that are particularly important to creative processes.
There is some research that has come out about the role of the frontal lobes in creativity. Research shows that the frontal lobes of the human brain is the last part to undergo changes as we become young adults, and it is also one of the first areas of the brain to undergo age-related changes. Given this, is there is a special opportunity for creative output in older age?
Dr. Jung says he only has anecdotal information on whether aging is associated with greater creative output. There is a somewhat famous researcher that studied frontal lobe myelination and found that only in the early 40s did the frontal lobes and the anterior temporal lobes finish myelinating. The frontal lobes started to demyelinate or dismyelinate from back to front from the mid-40's into senescence. The demyelination could be important to the creative process because of this down regulation of the frontal lobes during novelty generation. There is corresponding research that implicates a quieting of frontal lobe checking processes during novelty generation in creative cognition. This implies that older people – who experience age-related changes to their frontal lobes - might have the capacity to be more creative. Anecdotally, people who are in their late 50s or early 60s (entering into their retirement) will start to pick up creative endeavors. They will take up photography, painting, quilting, learn a second language or go back to college. Older adults really start to pursue a different type of creative endeavour than they did in their working years and they will flourish. So, Dr. Rex Jung, thinks that anecdotally this is compelling; but, he’s not aware of any empirical research that has been done to show that there's a systematic relationship between the two as yet. It would be an interesting study – to examine the correspondence between frontal loosening, and an increase in novelty generation with age.
Creativity & Survival
Creativity is a fundamental survival characteristic that allows humans to reason in very important ways – especially in situations that have not been encountered previously. For example, what should people be in the current coronavirus global pandemic? It is this kind of creative problem solving that is now a part of our everyday creativity. We have to do some novelty generation to create useful solutions in our everyday lives.
Creative Characteristics
One personality characteristic that has been discovered to be related to creativity is openness to new situations. Creative people are more willing to pursue and seek out new types of experiences (e.g., going to museums, travel or learning poetry.) Openness to new situations is a personality variable that is linked to higher creative capacity.
Interestingly, being disagreeable is also linked to higher creative success. If you start to think about being more conforming or agreeable it can lead you to more useful ideas because you're conforming to the group consensus. But to create something that is truly novel (and useful,) sometimes you have to go against the grain. So, a disagreeable nature is oftentimes the person that is leading the charge as opposed to following the group.
Persistence and perseverance are also important to creativity. High creativity is associated with putting out lots of ideas. The creative geniuses that you can think of (e.g., Picasso, DaVinci etc.) didn’t always have successful ideas. They experienced lots of duds along the way. You have to put out lots of ideas out to get that the creative gems.
How to Facilitate Creativity
Creativity is associated with a down regulation of the human frontal lobes. Of note, there are certain activities that can help facilitate the down regulation of your frontal lobes. The classic example is Archimedes and the warm baths. He was pondering this idea of how you would figure out how much gold there is in a crown. He was in a bath at the time and it occurred to him that if he submerges the crown in water, he could measure the displacement of the water to inform how much gold was in the crown. He cried out, “Eureka, I've found it!” A warm bath is one of the classic ideas of how you can get away from the problem for a while and just let the idea incubate in your mind.
The incubation period of creativity is very important. Other ideas that can help you get away from the idea for a while is to take a walk, meditation, etc.. People have lots of different strategies to do help down regulate their frontal lobes. Hemingway, for example, talked about writing drunk to loosen up the frontal lobes and then editing sober (not recommended).
Rex believes that creativity is a type of problem solving, so it is important that we foster it. For example, think about how important recess was when you were a little kid. Recess is one of the most important classes, because this downtime allows ideas to percolate. As a species, we really emphasize knowledge acquisition - but not spontaneous idea generation. Dr. Jung believes that is to our detriment. Play allows us an opportunity for creative ideation generation. Having the white space gives our brains and opportunity to think openly and have freedom of thought. We need quiet time where we can do spontaneous idea generation. Let things run together that otherwise would not have spontaneously.
Conclusion
Dr. Rex Jung has a website that he uses as a repository for articles and videos. If you would like to learn more about Dr. Rex Jung, creativity and the brain, you can visit his website - CLICK HERE.
Dr. Rex Jung is also active on Twitter – to follow him - CLICK HERE
Dr. Jung also edited a more academic book on creativity called, “The Cambridge Handbook of the Neuroscience of Creativity. To learn more, visit Amazon – CLICK HERE.