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This Is Your Brain On Creativity

Scientists have always been interested in how the brain works and how specific parts of the brain aid in specific tasks or behaviors. One of the earliest people in this domain, Franz Gall, developed his keen interest of observing his classmates’ skull sizes and features into the field of Phrenology. While phrenology is now debunked as pseudoscience, advances in brain scanning technologies have led to a much improved understanding of the brain, and the birth of cognitive neuroscience.

Recent work by cognitive neuroscientists in the field of creative thinking has shown that some of our earlier beliefs about the right and left parts of the brain are not exactly correct.

In one study, researchers split participants in high creative group and a low creative group based on their performance in the Creative Functioning Test. They then gave the two groups tasks for fluency (FAS – list as many words starting with the letters ‘F’, ‘A’ or ‘S’) and divergent thinking (DT – list as many uses of a brick). They found that the high creatives used prefrontal regions on both hemispheres on the brick task compared to the low creatives who mostly used regions in the left hemisphere.  

In another study, researchers gave the Unusual Uses task from the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) to two groups – one that scored in the 99th percentile on the TTCT and the other that scored 50th percentile. The 99th percentile group showed elevated activation of both the right and left hemispheres during the task (although the activation was higher for the right hemisphere).

So one key takeaway from these and other studies is that creative problem solving recruits both sides of the brain. As psychologist, Keith Sawyer concludes, “there is no evidence for the popular belief that creativity is located in the right hemisphere of the brain. Many regions of the brain, in both hemispheres, are active during creative tasks.”

One reason that both hemispheres show activation during divergent thinking (DT) is that semantic memory is primarily stored in left hemisphere. However, these semantic memory traces most likely include primary associations. So when a user thinks of different uses for a brick, the first set of responses come from these primary associations and which lead to more common responses. To come up with more original ideas, secondary associations need to be tapped and these are more likely to be in the right hemisphere. Given this theory, the classic brainstorming advice of going past the initial set of ideas to get to more original ideas makes more sense. Once the initial set of ideas that use primary associations are exhausted, the second wave of ideas start recruiting structures from the right hemisphere more.   

A better way to think about creative cognition is not in terms of the left-brain right-brain dichotomy, but as distributed networks in the brain that span both hemispheres.

Professor Scott Barry Kaufman lists three large scale networks that play a crucial part in creative cognition:

    • The Executive Network: The Executive Network gets involved in tasks that require focused attention, that place demands on working memory, like solving a tricky math problem.
    • The Imagination Network: The Imagination Network, also known as the Default network, is associated with spontaneous and self-generated thought that includes mind wandering and social cognition.
    • The Salience Network: The Salience Network monitors both external stimuli and internal stream of thought, and flexibly switches between the two as needed.

 

Advances made in cognitive neuroscience are helping us understand how the cooperation between these three networks leads to more creative thought. It has now become evident that the right side of our brain isn’t just an intuitive center – it plays a critical role in creative and complex problem solving!

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Imaginary Worlds and Creative Giftedness

As a little boy, Satoshi Tajiri loved the outdoors and was especially fascinated with insects. His interest in collecting and observing different insects in his hometown of Machida near Tokyo, earned him the title of “Dr. Bug” among his friends. He spent several hours everyday finding new insects, and understanding their world and unique behaviors. In his own words, “They fascinated me. For one thing, they kind of moved funny. They were odd. Every time I found a new insect, it was mysterious to me. And the more I searched for insects, the more I found.”

His fascination with insects and his interest in video games led Satoshi to create a world of pocket monsters, which eventually became Pokémon, one of the most lucrative game concepts.

Creating imaginary worlds, or paracosms, is not unusual among children and are an indication of creative giftedness. Famous examples of paracosms include the fantasy kingdoms of Gondal, Angria and Gaaldine created by the Emily, Anne, Charlotte and Branwell Bronte. The Bronte sisters went on to be accomplished novelists and poets. Compared to the typical imaginary play, paracosms are much more complex and elaborate requiring a sustained interest over several months or years. The Bronte family actively engaged with their fantasy worlds for several years and frequently revisited them in adulthood.

Michele Root-Bernstein, creativity scholar who studies paracosms, found that the prevalence of creating fantasy worlds in childhood were significant higher among recipients of MacArthur genius awards, a group that is known for their creative contributions among and across disciplines. She believes that the creativity involved in creating paracosms prepares children for bigger creative achievements in adulthood. The kinds of skills required in building fantasy worlds, like imagining, empathizing, modeling, problem solving and rule-breaking are exactly the kinds of skills needed for high creative accomplishments. As she explains, “childhood worldplay does appear to provide an early apprenticeship in absorption and persistence, discovery, synthesis, and modeling.”

Beyond problem solving and creativity, such imaginative play has also been found to have other psychological benefits. Creating imaginary worlds has been found to build a sense of self among children and also provide a sense of control and order.

These creative and psychological benefits come largely from a child’s ability to create their world, as opposed to simply participating in existing virtual worlds like in some video games. Dr. Bernstein suggests encouraging children to expand and elaborate on the virtual worlds they encounter through games.

“While these pursuits in and of themselves stimulate imaginative participation in invented worlds, the child’s part in that invention remains largely a passive or, at any rate, a reactive one. The child consumes a world imagined by others and does not construct or create her own. Unless she furthers the play experience in book or video game by adding to it some imaginative construction that is under her full creative control, she is not engaged in the creative behaviors and processes of imaginary world invention.”

The long lasting benefits of imaginary worldplay prompted us to create a project-based learning program where students get to experiment with paracosms. In this program, elementary aged students will create imaginary worlds, with real and fictional characteristics and then dive deeper in to specific aspects. Over several weeks, we will  study ancient civilizations, modern laws and customs, animal societies and other topics to help students refine their own fantasy worlds, and at the same time build a deeper appreciation for worlds that already exist.

We hope that the program not just helps students learn topics from school curriculum but also provides a stimulating playground to build their own creative potential.

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Designing Products to Build Intrinsic Motivation

In a recent study researchers wanted to explore the relationship between rewards and motivation in the context of education. In order to understand the impact of gamified elements on student motivation and learning, they designed a long-term study for students enrolled in a semester long course. Students were divided into two groups – a gamified group that used a reward system aligned with the learning goals, and the control group that received the same instruction but without any gamified elements. They looked at student grades at the end of the course along with student surveys, and confirmed what some educators had always suspected.

The researchers found that the non-gamified group not only did better at the end of the semester exam, they also reported higher levels of motivation and satisfaction at the end of the class! As the researchers explain, “The results suggest that at best, our combination of leaderboards, badges, and competition mechanics do not improve educational outcomes and at worst can harm motivation, satisfaction, and empowerment. Further, in decreasing intrinsic motivation, it can affect students’ final exam scores.”

While typical gaming elements like points and badges can lead to increased engagement in the short term, it is now believed that the initial appeal is due to a novelty effect, and that engagement and motivation decline as the novelty wears off. And this effect is more pronounced for younger age groups, where novelty and interest declines faster.

Educational products routinely employ rewards like badges and scores to get initial interest and traction among users, however, as research is now pointing out, these elements have negative long term consequences as they promote extrinsic motivation instead of building intrinsic motivation among students.

So,  how can we design educational products that focus on building students’ intrinsic motivation?

Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, professors of Psychology, have studied motivation for several decades and developed the Self Determination Theory (SDT) of motivation. According to their theory, three innate psychological needs play a role in motivation – competence, autonomy and relatedness. The main premise behind their theory is that humans have an inherent tendency to learn, have agency in their development and connect to others. Their theory has been widely used in many contexts, including gamification.

Based on the underlying theory of self determination, here are some high level product approaches that can be used in lieu of rewards to build the right kind of motivation:

Exploration

Creating a playful environment that leads to self-directed exploration ties to the underlying need for autonomy and competence. Games or products should allow for the freedom to fail, by allowing users to recover from mistakes without penalty. Games should also provide a freedom of choice, where users can decide what they want to work on or what skill to develop.

Feedback

In a classroom, feedback can be slow and constrained as teachers can only provide feedback one at a time. Games where feedback can be immediate can have a positive impact on the need for competency. Feedback messages that are actionable (guide the student in the right direction) and focus on growth mindset have been found to be effective.

Collaboration

A typical classroom environment fosters competition among students instead of collaboration, which in turn reduces intrinsic motivation. Elements like leaderboards have the same effect due to social comparison. A better way would be to design products that allow meaningful collaboration among students, and tap into the need for relatedness. Social cues that signal working together have been found to boost intrinsic motivation.  

 

Intrinsic motivation has been found to link positively to learning outcomes as well as personal wellbeing. Introducing the right kind of gamified elements into product elements can boost intrinsic motivation among students, but it involves walking away from more traditional elements in games like badges and points.

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Is Creativity Domain-Specific Or Domain-General?

From the earliest times people have been fascinated with creators and what leads them to make an original piece of work. Almost all cultures predating middle ages including Greek, Judaic and Hinduism, held the belief that a higher spirit or power gave “inspiration”  or even full formed ideas directly to these creative geniuses. In fact, the word genius literally means a guardian spirit that guides and directs an individual. For obvious reasons then, creative people were held in high esteem as they seemed to have special access to higher forms of power.

We now know that creativity has nothing to do with divine intervention, and a lot to do with the environment, personality and individual creative thinking abilities. And that everyone can learn to be more creative than they are. What we don’t know that well is whether creative thinking is a general skill that can be used in many different contexts or does it work in only one area. In other words, can a creative writer also be a creative product designer?

This question has led to some vigorous debate in the scientific community. For a while the scale seemed to tip towards a domain-specific view of creativity. A study conducted on 8th grade students who were asked to create a poem, a story, a mathematical word problem and an interesting equation, found low intercorrelations between the creativity ratings of different artifacts. Another study on undergraduate students, who had complete tasks in structure building, collage making and poetry writing, showed similarly low intercorrelations.

On the other hand, a large body of research has found that cognitive abilities for both creativity and general problem solving are applicable across domains. A reason that creativity looks domain-specific is that big accomplishments take many years, forcing people to choose domain specificity. So the consensus now seems to be that there are both domain-general and domain-specific aspects of creativity.

In our experience with students so far, we find that some of the cognitive processes used in creative problem solving show the domain-general nature of creativity. For example, our students have used associative thinking in coming up with novel product ideas as well as in producing creative stories.

However, there are some cognitive processes that seem to play a larger role in specific domains. For instance, analogical thinking seems to play a larger role in scientific creativity. That doesn’t mean that other kinds of thinking are not useful or haven’t been used in scientific breakthroughs, it’s just that analogical thinking leads to more “successes” (in terms of coming up with ideas that are both novel and useful) in science.

As we reflected on the work we have done so far, we have come to believe that regardless of the final outcome of the domain specific/general debate, we need to focus on strengthening the underlying cognitive processes used in both creative and critical thinking. And we need to do this in both domain-general and in domain-specific ways. If it does turn out that creativity is predominantly domain general, doing domain-specific tasks is still going to be helpful.

Our work so far has focused primarily on building general cognitive skills. But as we start next year, we’ll be working more on creativity in specific domains like literature, math or science. We hope to build up creativity focused content in the Common Core, which there isn’t enough of, and help improve student creative problem solving abilities in both general and specific ways.

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Growth and Creativity Mindsets

As a graduate student, Carol Dweck was deeply influenced by Martin Seligman’s work on understanding depression. In experiments conducted in the 1960s, Seligman found that when animals are given a painful stimuli without the ability to control the situation, they become passive – a condition he called learned helplessness. This sparked Carol Dweck’s interest in human, and more specifically, student motivation.

She noticed that not all people show learned helplessness when faced with adversity and asked, “Why do some students give up when they encounter difficulty, whereas others who are no more skilled continue to strive and learn? One answer, I soon discovered, lay in people’s beliefs about why they had failed.”

Her work with students over the next several decades led to the theory of Growth Mindset, which is now transforming educational outcomes. She found that students who believed that their abilities can improve with effort (growth mindset), outperformed those who believed that their intelligence is fixed (fixed mindset). This effect held for different subjects areas including math and science.

Growth mindset is especially important in creative work since such work often requires higher levels of perseverance. As she points out, “In a poll of 143 creativity researchers, there was wide agreement about the number one ingredient in creative achievement. And it was exactly the kind of perseverance and resilience produced by growth mindset.”

But there is also growth mindset about creativity, or in other words, the belief that creativity is not innate and can be developed just like any other skill. Research studies have found that when it comes to Creativity – people can hold both a fixed and growth mindset at the same time. They view great creative accomplishments, or Big-C creativity, as a fixed trait and believe that smaller levels of creativity, or little-c creativity, is malleable. In other words, people believe that Einstein was successful because he was exceptionally gifted but their own (limited) creative potential can be improved by putting in effort.

In an approach similar to the growth mindset, we teach children in our programs how their brain works as an associative engine and how that can help in coming up with creative ideas. In other words, everyone is capable of becoming more creative with some effort.

Apart from growth mindset, Creativity is also influenced by other beliefs and attitudes that help in different aspects of creative problem solving (collectively referred here as the Creativity Mindset). Some of these attitudes, and how we try to encourage them, are highlighted below.

Openness

Openness to Experience, which includes six dimensions, has been found to be the strongest and most consistent trait to predict creative achievement. One dimension, intellectual curiosity, has been found to be the best predictor of scientific creativity. Openness leads to the ability to seek diverse information and reconcile multiple perspectives which then often results in unique solutions. We encourage openness by building a collaborative environment where students take each others feedback and perspectives in improving their own solution.

Non-conformity

Having a non-conforming attitude means having the confidence to pursue ideas outside the mainstream norms. It helps people find uniqueness in their ideas, an essential component of creativity. One activity we use in building a non-conformist attitude is challenging commonly-held assumptions. We play games where students pick an assumption, reverse it, and find ways and situations in which the reversed assumption would be useful.

Playfulness

Being playful means taking things lightly and having an exploratory approach. A playful attitude enables flexible thinking and has been found to correlate with creativity. To build playfulness, we often use improv games as warm-up exercises.  The cognitive processes that underlie improv are the same as those used in creative thinking.  A research study found that improv comedians produce 25% more creative ideas than professional product designers.

 

In the end, both the growth mindset and the creativity mindset result in behaviors that are essential for high creative accomplishments. By fostering these mindsets in children and teaching them creative thinking skills, we can give them the tools to unlock their full potential.