Quick Creativity: Music, Improvisation, and the Brain

In this interesting paper from the NIH, researchers found that when jazz musicians improvised or made a spontaneously creative musical phrase using a MIDI keyboard, they deactivated large areas of their prefrontal (planning, attention) and limbic (emotions)cortices, and activated their sensory and motor areas. In this paradigm, then, creativity is the result of both negative and positive forces.

Some interesting implications come to mind - previous work on the coincidence of ADHD symptoms and creativity, the finding of delayed prefrontal development among children with superior IQ, and even the dichotomy between deductive / analytical and inductive / intuitive creative thinking.

From the perspective of the brain, we were also struck by the front vs. back pattern of deactivation & activation (conscious vs. subconscious, planned vs. unplanned) that improvisation requires. Jazz improvisation is immediate (unplanned) and musicians often say they feel more than think the music. This front-back pattern may underlie other forms of kinesthetic creativity that require quick / immediate on-the-spot problem solving, like the type you find great surgeons or crisis / rescue experts.

It also points out the folly of simply trying think creative. In fact, many of the techniques touted by corporate creativity trainers seem to be geared toward activating and retrieving possibilities that are decidedly not consciously determined.

PLoS ONE: Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Smart, But Underachieving: Knowledge, Creativity...
Coincidence of Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity and Creativity
Creative and Analytical Thinkers Differ in Their Use of Attentional Resources pdf

Out of the Box Thinking

There's a great test we like to give students when we're testing them - it's the Cookie Thief picture from the Boston Aphasia battery. When you show this picture to adults and ask them to describe it, the usual response is a dry recitation of what people, objects, and events are being seen in the picture.

But in many kids (often creative ones, young engineers, artists, or gifted storytellers), we get the most insightful, charming, and sometimes downright devious responses.

Typical adult answer: "I see a family. The boy's going to fall off a stool. The sink is overflowing."

Sample Creative kid answer: "Water's flowing out of the sink because the kids plugged it up with vegetables they didn't want to eat for dinner. While Mom is distracted, the kids steal the cookies. Johnny's going to fall and hit his head on the countertop. Suzy is laughing. They're going to be grounded forever!"

What is going on here? A lot of things from the brain's point-of-view- visual inference and causal reasoning (what's going to happen next), theory of mind, empathy, and social reasoning, analogy from personal experience, story generation, emotional memory retrieval - and much more. And it's one example of out-of-the-box thinking, and you can bet it would be valuable for just about any type of high level creative work, whether it's solving a complex social, mechanical, or biomedical engineering problem, performing a thought experiment about the limits of quantum mechanics, writing a novel, or designing a new product line.

Why is it that kids seems so much better at out-of-the-box thinking compared to adults? One reason may be that common expectations of becoming adults include become more organized, being able to plan and anticipate more events, and become more consistent in our behaviors. From the perspective of the brain, one would expect categorization tasks to be much more efficient in adults compared to children. But that may just be another way of saying that boxes are more common in adults.

How to nurture out-of-the-box thinking is a topic for another day, but for parents, to be aware of its importance is huge part of the answer. In a hurry to master the basics and high-level skills as well as acquire knowledge, we may lose sight of the importance of seeing beyond the box if we're not careful.

Minds, Persons, and Space fmri pdf
Fluid Reasoning in Children and Adults pdf
Emotional Personal Memory fmri pdf
Creative Story Generation fMRI pdf
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Humor and the Brain
Brain Break: Cut the Knot, Interactive Math Miscellany and Puzzles

Boys' And Girls' Brains Are Different: Listening, Reading, and Language

A Northwestern team has found that boys and girls (ages 9 to 15) respond to language tasks differently. Whereas girls abstract language information in a similar fashion whether they listen or read words, the accuracy of boys' responses depended more on the patterns of activation of their auditory (listening to words) or visual (reading words) cortices.

Excerpt from Science Daily:

"One possibility is that boys have some kind of bottleneck in their sensory processes that can hold up visual or auditory information and keep it from being fed into the language areas of the brain," Burman said. This could result simply from girls developing faster than boys, in which case the differences between the sexes might disappear by adulthood.

Or, an alternative explanation is that boys create visual and auditory associations such that meanings associated with a word are brought to mind simply from seeing or hearing the word."

The second possibility is an interesting one - suggesting that boys (in general, as a group) may file language information more with direct sensory associations (similar pictures, similar words), rather than in more specific word definitions. If this is so, it may account for why girls tend to be quicker at word retrieval than boys (if linguistic information is filed semantically, it would be more easily retrieved with specific language cues).

This gender difference might also explain why certain students have richer associations (vivid experiences,imagery) and when listening or reading stories, while others have more abstract (and perhaps more distanced, at least not directly sensory) perceptions. A number of implications come to mind - could this be why girls prefer personal fiction and boys are more commonly associated with the adventure genre? Could this imply that boys may be more cinematic in their processing style, and could this be why there are more male cinematographers and poets?

The implications for teaching may also be significant - girls may be ready for more abstraction and comparative analysis in reading and language tasks at earlier grades, whereas boys may thrive with more vivid sensory and associational approaches to reading and writing.

Unfortunately this paper is not online yet. We would like to look at the pictures. Hemispheric differences and individual differences would also be interesting to examine.

Boys' And Girls' Brains Are Different: Gender Differences In Language Appear Biological
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Searching for the right word in the right brain
Eide Neurolearning Blog: What Reading Really Does for the Brain
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Gifted Dyslexic Storytellers