Healthy Brain, Happy Life (34 page)

Working memory is also involved in the second key function of the prefrontal cortex that plays into creativity: cognitive flexibility. Cognitive flexibility allows us to shift between modes of thinking and between different rules. Damage to the DLPFC reliably causes impairments in cognitive flexibility. Normal people can quickly and flexibly adapt to the changing rules, but patients with damage to the DLPFC instead perseverate (get mentally stuck) on a single rule and can’t seem to explore other options despite feedback telling them that their answers are wrong. The ability to manipulate information in your working memory and then flexibly combine it, looking at it (in your mind’s eye) forward, backward, upside down, and inside out personifies what creative people often do.

BRAIN HACKS: INVENTION

These Brain Hacks can make your brain think of a new way to approach a familiar habit or routine and possibly lead to creative problem solving and invention.

•  Think of two new ideas to make your workday more efficient. You might rearrange your desk or the art on your walls. Or try changing the order in which you tackle tasks, starting with what you usually do in the middle of the day. Let this new order of activities or events create new neural patterns.

•  Think of two ways to streamline the organization of your desk at work to improve productivity.

•  Create a new kind of date to have with your partner, spouse, boyfriend, or girlfriend. Instead of going to your favorite restaurant, take an art, singing, or dancing class together. Or go to an interactive play or dance performance, in which the audience gets to be part of the action. Or try a brand-new kind of exercise class together.

•  Try to cook something you have never cooked before, maybe something Persian or Russian or Cambodian. Try something that will allow you to play with new flavor combinations.

But that’s not all the DLPFC does. This region has also been strongly implicated in directed attention, which is the ability to focus attention on a particular idea, item, or spatial location for long periods of time. This function is critical for deliberate forms of creativity in which attention to lots of things at the same time is often needed to sort through complex problems.

These three key functions of the prefrontal cortex—working memory, cognitive flexibility, and directed attention—are all critical for creativity. But this does not mean that this brain region is the sole site of creativity. Indeed, the prefrontal cortex is connected to other key brain areas that bring in and manipulate information in the service of creativity.

What are those other areas? As I mentioned earlier, emotion plays a critical role in creativity. Previous studies have shown a strong link between creativity and positive emotions such that people are more likely to have creativity breakthroughs if they report that they were happy the day before. Creativity is positively correlated with positive emotions, such as joy, love, and curiosity; art is often used to take viewers on an emotional journey through visual or auditory or even tactile stimulation. While emotions like fear and anger are typically not correlated with high levels of creativity, other studies show that strong negative emotional responses can sometimes be channeled into something positive and highly creative. For example, women whose children were killed in car accidents created Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). This was a situation in which profound grief and anger sparked the creation of a powerful new organization. So there are examples of creativity being inspired by the whole spectrum of emotion from joy to devastation and back. Three key brain areas involved in emotional processing are the amygdala, within the temporal lobe; the cingulate cortex, located in the middle of the frontal lobe; and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, also part of the prefrontal cortex. The amygdala and cingulate cortex process emotional information and then send it to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area involved in higher levels of social functions, personality, emotional planning, and emotional regulation.

THE ROLE OF IMAGINATION

There is still more to understanding what is happening in the creative process. Recent studies have shown that the hippocampus does more than just provide information in the form of long-term memory to the prefrontal cortex. It also seems to have a role in another important form of creativity: imagination.

Imagination
is defined as “the faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses.” Imagination is related to but not identical to creativity. While creative ideas can germinate and percolate in our imagination, imagination alone does not guarantee that these ideas are implemented. By contrast, creativity includes both the germination/percolation of ideas aided by imagination and the abilities that lead to implementation. In other words, it’s fine to imagine something, but to follow through on that idea or insight is the truer measure of creativity.

The link between the hippocampus and imagination was first made by examining patients who had hippocampal damage. A research group in London examined a group of patients with damage thought to be limited to the hippocampus and a control group. The two groups were given tests in which they had to provide a description of new, imagined experiences. For example, the participants, none of whom had been to the tropics, were asked to imagine a scene in which they were lying on a white sandy beach along a beautiful tropical bay. One control subject responded like this:

It’s very hot and the sun is beating down on me. The sand underneath me is almost unbearably hot. I can hear the sounds of small wavelets lapping on the beach. The sea is a gorgeous aquamarine color. Behind me is a row of palm trees and I can hear rustling every so often in the slight breeze. To my left, the beach curves around and becomes a point. And on the point there are a couple of buildings, wooden buildings.

A subject with hippocampal damage responded like this:

As for seeing I can’t really apart from just sky. I can hear the sound of seagulls and the sea. I can feel the grains of sand between my fingers. I can hear one of those ship’s hooters—that’s about it.

Why would a brain area involved in creating the long-term memories for the events of our lives (that is, the episodic memories managed by the hippocampus) also be important for
imagining
events? These two functions may not be as distinct as they seem. The idea is that the same brain areas important for thinking about the past (such as the hippocampus retrieving memory) are similarly active when we think about the future (or using our imagination). Functional imaging studies have shown that a network of interconnected brain areas, including the hippocampus, is activated for what neuroscientists call past and future thinking. This is an exciting new development and suggests that the hippocampus is not just specialized in memory but also is involved in constructing episodes—both past and future. This ability also reinforces the hippocampus’s ability to link items together as remembered experiences.

BRAIN HACKS: DIVERGENT THINKING

Sometimes creativity is thought of as divergent thinking: the ability to use an object for an original or novel purpose. Here are some exercises to help you think differently.

•  Think of four new uses for common items that you see every day: toothbrush, toaster, stapler, rubber band, and so on.

•  Think of a new way to drink your cup of coffee.

•  Think of three new ways to ask your kids (or someone else) what they did today at school (or work).

•  Think of three new ways to walk your dog or play with your cat.

•  Find a new use for all the items that you would typically recycle.

•  Find a new way to get to work and try to make it even more efficient than the way you are doing it now.

WHY STUDYING CREATIVITY IS SO COMPLICATED

While we are starting to appreciate how many different brain areas are involved in creativity, we are still far from a clear understanding of the neural basis of the creative process. One of the reasons creativity has been such a difficult nut to crack is the difficulty in finding a powerful and appropriate way to study the creative process. What is the best way to study creativity? Scientists have developed a few key tasks to be used as standard measures of creativity, focused on divergent thinking. One example is a test called the Alternative Uses Test. This test simply asks subjects to come up with all the possible uses for a brick that they can think of (for example, paperweight, doorstop, bug squisher, weapon). Most agree that this is a useful way to measure creativity, but it’s important to keep in mind that this test alone cannot survey all aspects of human creativity.

One of the most powerful tools we have to study creativity is to observe patients with brain damage, just like the famous amnesic patient H.M., whom we discussed in the beginning of the book. One recent study tested a group of forty patients with various brain lesions and a group of control subjects. All of the subjects took the Alternative Uses Test. Scientists found that patients who had damage to the part of the frontal lobe toward the middle of the brain, particularly on the right side, had lower creativity scores, consistent with the old right brain equals creativity idea. On the other hand, they found that patients with lesions in areas on the left side, including in the parietal and temporal lobes, had higher than normal creativity scores compared to control subjects.

Wait a minute,
what?
Lesions on the left side can increase creativity? What’s going on here? It turns out that brain damage leading to enhanced creativity has been seen before and is associated with a neurological condition called primary progressive aphasia (PPA). Damage to the language-associated areas on the left side of the brain, together with damage to the striatum, is commonly seen with PPA. Remember, the striatum is located deep in the middle of the brain and is associated with the brain’s reward system but is also involved in movement. PPA is a degenerative neurological condition that gradually erodes speech and language functions. One of the most striking and well-documented cases of a patient with PPA is a woman named Anne Adams.