THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON CREATIVITY
What neural networks underlie those “aha” moments of inspiration and invention?
At the Drexel University EEG Lab, elastic caps are rigged with multicolored EEG electrodes to help map the thinking brain.
Don’t be too awed by the wonder of creativity. Much of it is simply moving matter around—a bit of clever rearranging. A Chippendale cabinet is nothing more than a transformed tree. The landscape artist, even a Van Gogh or Monet, did not invent the flowers—he just ran with them. And the most succulent hunk of beef bourguignonne you ever whipped up seems a lot less remarkable when you accept that somebody already spotted you the cow. You were not responsible for creating so much as a single molecule in your final product.
But what about the ideas that guided the way you manipulated that matter? The shape the cabinet would take—its whorls and lines and its final umber color materialized in a brain before they materialized in the world. The same is true of the lines of a sonnet or the chords in a symphony or the vision of what Sunflowers should look like before it looked like anything at all to anyone but Van Gogh himself.
The source of such inspiration has long stymied scientists. We’re all born with more or less the same brain, and we all use it in more or less the same way, but people we call creative seem able to summon up something else—insight from the ether, music from the void. There is no such ether, of course, and by definition, a void is a void. It’s the brain, at bottom, that is the seat of all creativity.
Somewhere in the 100 billion neurons and the 100 trillion connections they form are the lines of neural code that gave us The Nutcracker, Huckleberry Finn, the Saturn V rocket and every other bit of artistry or invention human beings have ever summoned up. Increasingly—thanks to better imaging techniques, a deeper understanding of the interplay of brain regions and more—scientists are learning how to trace the creative insight back to its source, understand what sparked it and figure out why that spark happens more often in some of us than in others.
“Some people think that creativity should be like magic,” says experimental psychologist Mark Beeman of Northwestern University. “But scientists are becoming better able to trace it to its precursors—to what was responsible for what we experience as an insight or ‘aha’ moment.”
One of the most important steps in figuring out how creativity works is to understand how it doesn’t work. Popular wisdom in recent years has held that the brain’s two hemispheres neatly divide the day’s tasks. The left brain, so the thinking goes, is the serious brain—critical, analytical, skeptical, mathematical. It’s also where language lives. The right brain, by contrast, is the wild child—artistic, abstract, insightful, intuitive. That’s not quite right.
For starters, one of the brain’s great features is its redundancy, its ability to create workarounds or to share tasks. Although it’s true that one brain region may be principally responsible for certain functions—the left hemisphere does do more of the heavy lifting when it comes to language—there’s also a lot of load distribution across brain structures.
That’s especially true of creativity. Beeman and his colleague John Kounios, a professor of applied cognitive and brain sciences at Drexel University, have investigated the creative process, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and high-density electroencephalography (EEG) to watch the brain as it sorts though a problem.
The particular problem Beeman and Kounios chose for their study was what is known as a remote association test, in which subjects are given three seemingly unrelated words and asked to determine a third word with which they could each be paired. Some are very easy: “loser, throat and spot” can all be paired with “sore.” Some are harder: “pine, crab and sauce,” for example, share “apple.” Some are harder still, like “wise, work and tower,” which share “clock.”
There are two ways to solve any of these puzzles. One is to think it through deliberately, rigorously, pairing up one word with a possible answer (“pine” with “cone,” say) and seeing if it works with the others (in this case, nope). The other, the seemingly magical way, is simply to stare at the words, let them roll around in your head until—bang!—the answer presents itself. Psychologists label those twin approaches the analytical and the intuitive, and it’s no contest that the intuitive feels better, more exciting—more creative. The brain arrives at the answer and gives itself—and you—a reward in the form of a sense of surprise and satisfaction.
“You solve a problem and you have this burst of enthusiasm,” say Kounios.
He and Beeman were able to map how all that happens. During the studies, the subjects were shown the three test words and were told to press a button and announce the solution as soon as they had it and to press another button to indicate whether they arrived at it analytically or intuitively. When the answer was intuitive, about a third of a second before the subject pushed the answer button, the EEG picked up a burst of gamma-wave oscillations above the right ear. The fMRI pinpointed that activity in the right inferior-superior temporal gyrus.
That region of the brain has a role in a number of processes, including language; it also helps mediate the neurology of the reward experience. The gyrus, it seems, was working on the problem all on its own and served up both the answer and the feel-good experience at the same time.
“That was the moment the solution popped into consciousness,” says Kounios. “We isolated it in space and time. ”
He and Beeman then traced the phenomenon back further, looking for anything that might have happened even earlier to help make that “aha” possible—and they found it. A full second before the insight, there was a burst of alpha-wave activity in the right occipital cortex, which plays a central role in processing vision. Alpha waves are known to be suppressors, dialing down brain activity rather than ramping it up. That actually makes sense in the case of problem-solving, at least when the alpha waves occur in the occipital.
Consider how people who are asked a difficult question will often close their eyes or look up at the ceiling or down at the floor while puzzling it out. There’s a great deal of distracting visual stimuli streaming into the brain all the time, and minimizing that helps us devote more energy to an immediate task. Subjects in the study were specifically told to keep their eyes open and not look away from the words, but alpha waves could still help them process less of what they were seeing.
“We call it a brain blink,” says Kounios. “For an instant before you have an insight, you’re less aware of your environment.” That, he explains, is also part of the reason so many people do their best thinking in the shower. “There’s sensory restriction—white noise and you can’t really see much,” says Kounios.
It’s not just the activity of the brain that determines a role in creativity; it’s also its wiring plan. David Dunson, a statistical scientist at Duke University, and his collaborator Rex Jung, a neuroscientist at the University of New Mexico, have been studying what are known as the brain’s white-matter tracks—bundles of nerve fibers covered by fatty sheathing that serve as the cabling connecting various brain regions and structures. (The gray matter consists of the actual nerve-cell bodies and fibers within the cabling.) Dunson and Jung’s work has involved both fMRI and another scanning technology, known as diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), which tracks the diffusion of water across the white matter, creating a road map of its arrangement.
“In the brain’s gray matter, the diffusion of water is weak in all directions,” says Dunson, “but it’s directional along white-matter bundles.” All he and Jung have to do is follow where that water is going.
What they’ve found is that white-matter roadways across the brain are nearly the same in everyone; we’ve all got about 1 million bundles threading there along similar routes. But there can be differences in the cables that cross from right to left.
“There aren’t many connections that span the hemispheres,” Dunson says. “Individuals with more of them also tended to have higher creative reasoning scores.” How a greater number of cross-hemisphere connections leads to greater creativity is unknown for now, but it’s not hard to imagine that bringing more processing power to any problem—especially from parts of the brain that also bring different strengths and perspectives—could certainly lead to novel solutions.
Jung stresses that what the white-matter tracks say about creativity says nothing about intelligence. Brains of people who score high on intelligence tests do have discernible features—the mass of gray matter in the higher cortex is thicker, and so is the white-matter insulation. The creative person’s brain may not be similarly bulked up, which could mean, at least in theory, that it’s a less intelligent brain. The key is that its regions are more closely tied together.
Many psychologists—notably Scott Barry Kaufman, author of multiple books on creativity and intelligence—take a more macro view of the creative brain, mapping three different cognitive networks that connect different brain regions and studying how they dial up or settle down as needed throughout the creative process.
The first of the three networks, known as the executive-attention network, is where the muscle work of creativity gets done. It’s that network that helps us do the fiercely focused studying, reading and practicing that gives us a mastery of, say, language or music or color and light. That, in turn, is what gives us the tools we need to write poetry or compose songs or paint paintings. Executive attention requires close communication between the prefrontal cortex, which gathers and absorbs incoming information, and the posterior parietal cortex, which integrates different data streams from different sensory systems. The novice sculptor who learns new information from the color of the marble, as well as the sound it makes when it’s chipped and the feel of its resistance to the hammer, is relying heavily on the posterior parietal.
Next is the imagination network, which allows the brain to do previously untried things with the information the executive-attention network has provided. Here, not only are the parietal and the prefrontal involved but also the medial temporal, which is involved in memory, and the posterior cingulate, which has a role in planning and daydreaming. When Picasso first learned the lines of the human form, he engaged his executive-attention network; when he blew all that up to develop Cubism, he was using his imagination network.
Finally, there is the salience network, which works by toggling between the anterior insula and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. The insula is what helps you monitor the world around you using multiple information streams, and the cingulate helps you sieve some of that out, concentrating only on what you need. The painter focuses intensely, minutely on the colors on the canvas, the condition of the brushes and the paint on the palette, but the noise of the children playing outside or the chill in the house or the smell of the dinner that’s been in the oven too long are shut out.
The precise balancing of all of those networks can change depending on the kind of creating that’s going on. A compelling 2008 study used fMRI to monitor the brains of pianists as they either played pieces they had practiced and knew well or improvised something new. During practiced performances, the self-monitoring and self-checking functions of the prefrontal cortex remained active. During improvisation, those functions were dialed back, allowing no-fault experimentation to take place. A 2012 study found something similar in rappers who either were performing a rehearsed song or making up something as they went along. Without the prefrontal giving the rest of the imagination network room to create, jazz and freestyle rap might never exist.
“Creative people are especially good at exercising flexibility in activating or deactivating these brain networks,” write Kaufman and his co-author Carolyn Gregoire in Wired to Create. “In doing so, they’re able to juggle seemingly contradictory modes of thought—cognitive and emotional, deliberate and spontaneous.”
The question none of this answers is why some people are creative and others are less so, and there are clues. As in so many things, genes may play a role. Father-son authors Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis, father-daughter musicians John Raitt and Bonnie Raitt and mother-daughter actors Meryl Streep and Mamie Gummer, or Beatles and their offspring—John and Julian Lennon, Ringo Starr and Zak Starkey and George and Dhani Harrison—do suggest that there’s something familial involved. But families also reward and encourage certain kinds of pursuits, so environment surely plays a role too.
A 2013 study in PLoS One found a suite of genes influencing music perception, serotonin balance and cognitive and motor function, and a sample group of musicians seems to share them. And a 2016 study in Nature Neuroscience looked at a genetic database of nearly 83,000 people in Iceland who had tested positive for an anomaly in a particular dopamine receptor on a particular gene. Those people also had a higher-than-average risk of schizophrenia. Cross-indexing those findings with national databases of artistic societies for actors, musicians, visual artists and others, the researchers found that the people with the dopamine abnormality were overrepresented among the artists.
“It has been suggested that those less restrained by practical cognitive styles may have an advantage in artistic occupations,” the authors of the study wrote. “These results provide support for the notion that creativity and psychiatric disorders, particularly schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, share psychological attributes.”
A larger, and rarely explored, question is what we mean by “creativity” in the first place. It’s a label we apply to certain kinds of people and certain kinds of creations, but creativity may hide in plain sight. Beeman recalls a patient who had suffered a brain injury that affected the language centers. The patient reported being able to understand the meaning of words but missing “the complex mosaic of language.” It was a term that disproved the very premise of the sentence—a creative metaphor that was part of the very mosaic that was supposedly missing.
Something similar applies to jobs that don’t carry any artistic glamour. The legislator who crafts a previously elusive compromise that solves an important problem has, by any measure, created something meaningful. The teacher who shapes a personalized study program for a student who is falling behind has created a curriculum that could change a life.
“In every field you have creative and less-creative people,” says Beeman. “I’d prefer to call it people who are more or less likely to have an insight.”
Certainly, it’s too much to say that we all create great things—and we wouldn’t want it that way anyway. Greatness lies in exceptionalism—in Michelle Kwan’s figure skating, in Picasso’s Guernica, in George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”
The rest of us get to enjoy what the most accomplished creators make. And then we go on to add our own creations to a world that is only richer for them.
Drexel neuroscientist John Kounios (above) uses computer-enhanced 3-D diffusion spectral imaging (below) to scan bundles of nerve fibers that transmit signals between brain regions.
Drexel grad student Brian Erickson live-streams EEG data to detect brain signals generated in a moment of insight.
Drexel’s Ho Ming Chow images rapper Mike Eagle’s brain while Eagle performs a freestyle (orange regions are most active) and a memorized piece (highlighted in blue).
