The imprecision of what it means ‘to be creative’ is one of
the main obstacles in understanding creativity from a neuroscientific
perspective. This imprecision leads to operational definitions and tests for
creativity that do not capture the full scope of what we mean by the word. The
best place to start will be by analyzing what we, as a culture, mean when we
use the word ‘creativity’. In this blog post I will try and parse out the
notion of creativity, and then show the value of two neuroscientific studies
done on creativity.
When we say that a work someone did is ‘creative’, we don’t
mean simply that ‘it was created’, for then the notion of creativity would
apply to every pin made by a pin maker, to use Adam Smith’s famous example of
rote production. The first thing to note is this: the definition of creativity
is not self-evident, and so researchers who want to work on the topic are
begged to engage this problem, either by providing an operational definition or
by stating the limits of their work (e.g. “this paper will focus on how
depression can correlate with more unique answers to a writing prompt”) Since
we do not have the solid ground of a definition, the next thing we must do is
make sure that we are not deluding ourselves in fantasy, and verify that there
really is something distinct in our experience that the notion of creativity
refers to. When we examine works that we call creative, we find that they are
distinguished by a number of features that. In addition, we can remember
experiences that we consider our own creative peaks, and these are also
distinguished by similar features. From these two things we can feel fairly
confident that we are not being led on a quixotic journey, and that there is
some distinct, but general, human activity that are trying to understand and
quantify in neuroscientific terms. Everything I have written in this paragraph
so far seems to me to be implicitly accepted by the authors of the articles
that I have read, I just wanted to outline those two points to show my own line
of reasoning in approaching this problem and hopefully dispel some ambiguities.
Now we run into a problem that many researchers seem to be
struggling with. We know creative works all exhibit some features, such as
beauty, originality, coherence, and I would argue complexity. One problem that
we encounter here is that these traits are difficult, if not impossible, to faithfully
quantify, another is that it is unclear how we are to relate each of these
features to creativity as a whole, yet another is that we do not know if any
give list of features is exhaustive of what creativity demands. In short, it
appears that many problems must be sorted out before we can accurately make
neuroscientific claims about creativity itself.
The authors of the two articles I will be covering took
different, but both admirable, approaches progressing towards an understanding
of creativity. Ms. Zabelina’s study concerned the nature of attention in
creative processes. She recognized that there are more distinctions to be made
under the broad heading of “creativity”, and conducted a study that suggests
that attentional perseverance is an important feature in order to accomplish
creative works, but it is not important regarding another measure of creative
thinking, divergent thinking tests (TTCT) (Zabelina & Beeman, 2013) . This study helps
point us in the following direction: creativity is not something that can be
directly tested for at this stage. Creativity can also be considered an
assemblage of features and experiences, with certain features, such as
attentional perseverance, remaining constant throughout creative endeavors in
different fields.
But it is important to note that Zabelina only studied only
one, albeit significant, component of creativity. As Dr. Morrison’s in-class
question suggested, is there not something missing from the conception of
creativity that was used in this experiment? Zabelina used a measure of
divergent thinking, the TTCT test, and a questionnaire about real-world
creative accomplishments to determine the creativity of her participants, but
none of these are effective measures of originality. Originality is central to
the notion of being creative, an author who copied the style of Kafka or
Rimbaud would not be considered creative. Indeed, many artists who are
considered the most creative were so
original that their works were not immediately accepted. There were those who
found the works of Mallarmé, Nietzsche, or Proust too different to be even moderately
good, while now they are considered some of the greatest works of art.
This is
a particularly difficult feature of creativity to test for, since originality
implies something that the experimenter did not imagine before seeing the
original product. But Fink et al. have found a promising approach to this
problem. Their study collected students into a control group with normal
psychological evaluations, and formed a separate group for students who scored highly
on a schizotypal personality questionnaire. The participants were given fMRI
scans as they were participating in the creative activity of coming up with
many original uses for banal objects like umbrellas. It was found that the
right precuneus region of the brain was less deactivated during the creative processes.
Similar studies repeated these results, and others have also noted that
schizophrenics and their relatives exhibit similar reduced deactivation of the
right precuneus. This experiment targets a population that is known for their
tendency not to internalize rules, and looks in real-time at their brain images
to give us an accurate picture of originality (Fink et al., 2013).
This study suggests the opposite result
of Zabelina’s study, that creativity is linked to originality and the ability
to form something out of very diverse resources. This study gives us an accurate
picture of originality, but an incomplete picture of creativity. What is
lacking is what Zabelina’s study targeted, the attentional perseverance to put
together a single work. Asking participants to come up with different uses for
umbrellas may engage part of the creative process, but not all of it. It should
be possible to reconcile Zabelina’s and Fink’s studies by using MRI scanners to
observe the brains of artists as they are engaged in their chosen art. We would
then be able to observe the relative importance of the activity of the right
precuneus and the activity of the brain region responsible for attentional perseverance
in each artist. Measuring the artist while they are engaged in a real creative
process will do away with the murkiness of the importance of testing for how
many uses for an umbrella the participant can come up with. There are many
other additional factors that this type of study could show us, and some that
we cannot anticipate. We would pay careful attention to the ‘give and take’ of
these two brain regions, during what periods of the creative process they were
active and how they might interact throughout. We could also study a build-up
effect of creativity, or how an artist can get into a ‘zone’ or favorable
working mind-state that helps to create their art. I think that, between the
study on originality and the study on attentional perseveration, a study such
as this could be a study on ‘inspiration’, which could be defined as the
combination of the two. As Picasso said “inspiration exists, but it must find
you working”. That is to say that inspiration, or a flash of originality, can
happen, but it will not be fulfilled unless you have the attentional perseverance
to unlock its potential.
Creativity is a difficult subject to approach because we do
not have a firm definition of the global picture of what we are looking for.
But I believe that with careful consideration of what we are testing for and
how these pieces fit together, we can come to a greater understanding of the
neural mechanisms that compose the creative thought process.
1.
Zabelina DL and Beeman M (2013) Short-term
attentional perseveration associated with real-life creative achievement.
Front. Psychol. 4:191. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00191
2.
Fink, A., Weber, B., Koschutnig, K., Benedek,
M., Reishofer, G., Ebner, F., Papousek, I., Weiss, E. M. (2013). Creativity and
schizotypy from the neuroscience perspective. Cognitive , Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, 14, 378-387.
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