The Creativity Trade-Off

Recently, Rex Jung and his group found that creativity as measured by divergent thinking and creative activity in 10 domains was associated with changes in cortical thickness. The changes were not all-or-none or clustered in a single location, but rather formed a complex network.

"This is the first study to link cortical thickness measures to psychometric measures of creativity. We found network where increased and decreased cortical thickness
related to creativity as measured with DT and creative achievement. The network was not limited to one lobe of the brain, nor to one hemisphere, nor to the ‘more is better’ notion..."

Areas that went up: right posterior cingulate, right angular gyrus
Areas that went down: left frontal lobe, lingual, cuneus, angular, inferior parietal, fusiform gyri

The observation that higher levels of creativity were associated with up and down areas of cortical thickness makes sense with some of the trade-offs that are seen with creativity and diffuse attention and right and left hemispheric competition.

John Allen has a nice summary of current creativity theory.

Excerpt: Alice Flaherty's model of creativity posits "...a network of brain regions, rather than be localized to one part of the brain or one hemisphere. Flaherty proposes first that cortical interactions between the temporal and frontal lobes are critical for regulating creative expression. Temporal lobe deficits can increase the generation of creative ideas, sometimes at the expense of quality, as in various manic states. In contrast, frontal lobe deficits can inhibit creative thinking. Thus via mutually inhibitory pathways, the frontal and temporal lobes work together to not simply generate ideas but those that are "novel and useful"--creative ideas.

In addition to the fronto-temporal network, another brain system is also critical for creative expression: the dopamine pathways of the subcortical limbic system (which also have strong connections to parts of the frontal lobe). Being creative is not a passive process, and creative people are more responsive to sensory stimulation, have higher baseline levels of arousal, and increased goal-directed behavior."

The notion of successful creativity being a balance between open-field running and yet appropriate focus, or divergent idea generation, but then effective application and execution makes sense and also immediately conjures up the different ways students can go wrong.

Understanding the trade-offs in the brain might suggest reasons why gifted-LD or twice exceptional students seem so common (over half of gifted students in one series) and why the highest IQ kids had thinnest prefrontal cortex in early development (figures from Shaw et al. below). The brain is not just a lumpy static hodge-podge of different areas, but rather a dynamic and constantly remodeling network in which the connections, activity, and competitions between different brain areas determine what will happen.

In the figure below, note how the cortical thicknesses of superior IQ kids are actually a lower than average and high IQ kids at the age of 7. They do bloom late - around age 12.

Creativity at Psychology Today
Neuroanatomy of Creativity pdf
Shaw et al. Superior IQ Cortical Thickness Executive Function
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Creativity, Right Hemisphere, and Diffuse Attention
Eide Neurolearning Blog: The Most Creative Brains are Slow
Mind Map picture

The Problems of Quickthink in the Internet Age

"In a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory." - Nicholas Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

With the explosion of information available at our fingertips through the Internet, we may be reading more and more - but thinking less and less. Blink aside, when we surf and flit rather than deep read, we're more susceptible to automatic responses for good or for ill.

I got thinking about all this because our teen said he wanted to know more about why people believe the things they do. This is a big topic of course and can be approached from many different directions, but as a starting point, we decided to read Influence by Cialdini and it looks to be a great read. In the first chapter, he introduces such common mistakes as expensive = good rule, Captainitis (if an expert says it, it must be true; e.g. in a famous WWIII crash how a copilot ended up crashing a plane because he thought a general had wanted him to lift the landing gear at that moment though he knew the plane was going too slow to fly), click-whirr (automatic) responding, and perceptual contrast (example: a realtor shows you a poor cheap house, a too expensive house, and then a middle house - leading you to buy it compared to the others). The lessons were so good, I had our daughter read it too. Then it made me think - why is this practical stuff not part of education?

As more and more of our reading shift to surfing and browsing rather than deep reading, seems like we should know more about what we're headed into and maybe make sure we get some regular practice at questioning our assumptions.

Another interesting read we discovered along the way: the full 99 cent Kindle edition of the 1841 classic Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. In it, we read the famous Tulipomania chapter and also looked at how some contemporary editorials comparing the Tulip bubble with the dot com bust.

Media Psychology Blog