Charting Creativity: Signposts of a Hazy Territory

Grab a timer and set it for one minute. Now list as many creative uses for a brick as you can imagine. Go.

The question is part of a classic test for creativity, a quality that scientists are trying for the first time to track in the brain.

They hope to figure out precisely which biochemicals, electrical impulses and regions were used when, say, Picasso painted “Guernica,” or Louise Nevelson assembled her wooden sculptures. Using M.R.I. technology, researchers are monitoring what goes on inside a person’s brain while he or she engages in a creative task.

Yet the images of signals flashing across frontal lobes have pushed scientists to re-examine the very way creativity is measured in a laboratory.

“Creativity is kind of like pornography — you know it when you see it,” said Rex Jung, a research scientist at the Mind Research Network in Albuquerque. Dr. Jung, an assistant research professor in the department of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico, said his team was doing the first systematic research on the neurology of the creative process, including its relationship to personality and intelligence.

Like many researchers over the past 30 years or so, Dr. Jung has relied on a common definition of creativity: the ability to combine novelty and usefulness in a particular social context.

As the study of creativity has expanded to include brain neurology, however, some scientists question whether this standard definition and the tests for it still make sense. John Kounios, a psychologist at Drexel University, argues that the standard “has outlived its usefulness.”

“Creativity is a complex concept; it’s not a single thing,” he said, adding that brain researchers needed to break it down into its component parts. Dr. Kounios, who studies the neural basis of insight, defines creativity as the ability to restructure one’s understanding of a situation in a nonobvious way.

Everyone agrees that no single measure for creativity exists. While I.Q. tests, though controversial, are still considered a reliable test of at least a certain kind of intelligence, there is no equivalent when it comes to creativity — no Creativity Quotient, or C.Q.

Dr. Jung’s lab uses a combination of measures as proxies for creativity. One is the Creativity Achievement Questionnaire, which asks people to report their own aptitude in 10 fields, including the visual arts, music, creative writing, architecture, humor and scientific discovery.

Another is a test for “divergent thinking,” a classic measure developed by the pioneering psychologist J. P. Guilford. Here a person is asked to come up with “new and useful” functions for a familiar object, like a brick, a pencil or a sheet of paper.

Dr. Jung’s team also presents subjects with weird situations. Imagine people could instantly change their sex, or imagine clouds had strings; what would be the implications?

In another assessment, a subject is asked to draw the taste of chocolate or write a caption for a humorous cartoon, as is done in The New Yorker magazine’s weekly contest. “Humor is an important part of creativity,” Dr. Jung said.

The responses are used to generate what Dr. Jung calls a “Composite Creativity Index.”

Dr. Jung’s tests are based on ones created by Robert J. Sternberg, one of the country’s pre-eminent intelligence researchers and the man partly responsible for the standard definition. Dr. Sternberg uses similar types of tests at Tufts University, where he investigates how people develop and master skills. He explained that his team asked subjects to think through what would have happened if, say, Rosa Parks had given up her seat for a white woman when that Montgomery bus driver told her to move to the back, or if Hitler had won World War II. They might also present them with a fanciful headline, like “The End of MTV.”

As for Dr. Jung, his research has produced some surprising results. One study of 65 subjects suggests that creativity prefers to take a slower, more meandering path than intelligence.

“The brain appears to be an efficient superhighway that gets you from Point A to Point B” when it comes to intelligence, Dr. Jung explained. “But in the regions of the brain related to creativity, there appears to be lots of little side roads with interesting detours, and meandering little byways.”

Although intelligence and skill are generally associated with the fast and efficient firing of neurons, subjects who tested high in creativity had thinner white matter and connecting axons that have the effect of slowing nerve traffic in the brain. This slowdown in the left frontal cortex, a region where emotional and cognitive abilities are integrated, Dr. Jung suggested, “might allow for the linkage of more disparate ideas, more novelty and more creativity.”

Dr. Kounios, of Drexel, said that Dr. Jung was doing original and interesting work, but he maintained that trying to find a correlation between creativity and a single area of the brain is an “old-fashioned approach.”


“Creativity is a collection of different processes that work in different areas of the brain,” Dr. Kounios said, so the creative act must be broken down into tiny pieces. He also rejects utility as part of the definition, arguing that there can be brilliant and creative failures — what he calls near misses.
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Last year he and Mark Beeman, a psychologist at Northwestern University, published a paper on what he calls the “Aha! moment,” the sudden insight that solves a problem, reinterprets a situation or explains a joke. In their test, they used simple word puzzles that could be solved either with an instant creative insight or a quick analysis.

For example, here are three words: crab, pine and sauce.

Now, think of a single word that could be combined with each of the three to form a familiar term.

(Time’s up. The answer is “apple.”)

About half the subjects came up with a solution by methodically thinking through possibilities; with the other half, the answer popped into their minds.

A lot of different areas of the brain are involved in devising a solution, no matter which process is used, but during the Aha! moment, there is a burst of high-frequency activity in the right temporal lobe, Dr. Kounios said. What’s more, he said, he and Dr. Beeman could predict in advance which process a subject would use. They watched the brains of systematic problem solvers prepare by paying closer attention to the screen before the words appeared. Their visual cortices were on high alert.

The brains of those who got a flash of creative insight, by contrast, prepared by automatically shutting down activity in the visual cortex for an instant — the equivalent of closing your eyes to block out distractions so that you can concentrate better. In this case, Dr. Kounios said that the brain was “cutting out other sensory input and boosting the signal-to-noise ratio” to retrieve the answer from the subconscious.

According to Kenneth Heilman, a neurologist at the University of Florida and the author of “Creativity and the Brain” (2005), creativity not only involves coming up with something new, but also with shutting down the brain’s habitual response, or letting go of conventional solutions.

Risk taking and addictive behavior should also be measured, since both traits play a role in creativity, he said.

There may be, for example, a dampening of norepinephrine, the neurotransmitter that sets off the fight-or-flight alarm. That’s why creative connections often occur when people are most peaceful — relaxing under a tree, like Isaac Newton, or in a dream state, like Coleridge when he thought up “Kubla Khan.”

John Gabrieli, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, cautions that there is always a gap between what happens in the lab and the real world: “It seems that to be creative is to be something we don’t have a test for.”


Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/08/books/08creative.html

A Campus Where Unlearning Is First

CAIRO — When Rafik Gindy graduated from high school, he knew he wanted to become an engineer. So he enrolled at the American University in Cairo and prepared to immerse himself in math and science.
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Mr. Gindy knew what he wanted to be, but did not exactly know who he was. That was what the university wanted him to think about, in a class called “The Human Quest: Exploring the Big Questions.”

“I thought identity was just your name, your culture, but now I know it’s really complex,” said Mr. Gindy, a slender freshman who shook his head at that revelation.

Who am I?

What does it mean to be human?

These are the kinds of questions posed to undergraduate students entering this 90-year-old university during what the president, David D. Arnold, called a first year of “disorientation.” During disorientation, the students — 85 percent of them Egyptians — are taught to learn in ways quite at odds with the traditional method of teaching in this country, where instructors lecture, students memorize and tests are exercises in regurgitation.

“It’s different here because there is room for people to express themselves,” said Manar Mohsen, a junior majoring in political science and journalism. “It is not that simple outside, where it is more about conformity.”

Egypt, like much of the Arab world, demands conformity in many corners of life. Education is based on the concept of rote learning, and creativity in the classroom is often discouraged. Students at Cairo University say they memorize and recite, never analyze and hypothesize.

So the idea of a liberal arts education aimed at developing critical thinking skills is often new to the students. That can make for a difficult transition. Plagiarism is often a problem at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, officials here said, because the students — accustomed to rote learning — see nothing wrong with spitting back someone else’s work and have never been held to rigorous academic standards.

“For a lot of the kids here, the idea that you are supposed to have your own ideas is a novelty,” said Lisa Anderson, the university provost who is on leave from Columbia University. “There was nothing in their previous education that would have exposed them to these standards.”

American University is a private, elite school, although university officials sometimes recoil at the elite label. Yet, the school is expensive and so is generally out of reach for all but the wealthiest families and a handful of scholarship students. Tuition and fees for Egyptian students run about $19,600 a year, a princely sum in a country where about half the population lives on about $2 a day.

The campus exudes affluence. Students joke about the “Gucci corridor,” a spot where well-coiffed students gather each afternoon. There is no cafeteria, only expensive fast-food stands.

“We are all rich and spoiled,” said one student, upset that more of her classmates were not more politically aware. But in some respects, the elite label is a strength. American University plays a central role as a sort of intellectual boot camp for young people who will become leaders in government and the economy.

“If we teach the elite to be good citizens, that’s not a bad thing,” Ms. Anderson said.

Nabil Fahmy, the former longtime ambassador to the United States, said that over his nine years in Washington, at least 40 percent of the embassy staff was made up of American University graduates, as was he.

The university was founded in 1919 by a group of Presbyterian missionaries. Unlike the satellite campuses of prestigious American universities in oil-rich Persian Gulf states, it is quite homegrown and often reflects the community around it.

The university was located originally in Tahrir Square, in the center of Cairo, a hyper-urban landscape where the air is thick, the din overwhelming and the mosaic of Egyptian life on every corner. That was part of the university’s appeal.

But over the years it has grown, and now serves 5,000 undergraduates on an architecturally inspiring, if geographically isolated, $400 million, 260-acre campus in a suburb called New Cairo. Instead of urban grime the campus is surrounded by villas and developments with names like Golden Heights.


The location redefined the university just as the university was beginning to redefine itself, as a first-rate university rather than a finishing school for Egypt’s elite. But as the school has grown, so has a conflict within the university itself: can it change its mission while retaining its liberal arts core and preserving classes like the Big Questions?
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“We are moving more and more into professional schools, like business, engineering, sciences,” said Mr. Fahmy, the former ambassador, who is the founding dean of a new school of global affairs and public policy.

“The challenge we have now is we have moved from a small college that thought it was a university, to a university that has to change its thinking from being a small college,” he said, defining a view that is anathema to some others on campus.

There are other pressures, too, coming from a society that holds engineers in such high esteem that the profession is also a courtesy title, like doctor.

“The humanities in general, and philosophy specifically, are seen as either frivolous or, at the very least, not financially prudent, by many of the very people who seek what makes A.U.C. unique,” said Nathaniel Bowditch, an assistant professor of philosophy. Dr. Bowditch argued that “learning how to think rather than what to think prepares a person for all professions,” and that without that “the academy becomes nothing more than a trade school.”

For now, the university leadership says it remains committed to its core mission, and will continue to ensure that incoming Egyptian students relearn how to learn, officials here said. “We want our students to be imaginative in their fields,” Ms. Anderson said.

So for the time being, at least, the Big Questions class remains safe, which seems to suit the students just fine.

“I took the course because my brother took it two years ago,” said Mr. Gindy, the freshman construction engineering major. “I like how it explained things we never knew, like how the world began.”

Source : International Herald Tribune

School kills creativity

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.