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Cognitive Underpinnings of Creative Thinking

50,000 years ago humans shared the land with other hominins like the Neanderthals and the Denisovans. But somehow, over the course of the next 30,000 years, every other hominin species went extinct while the modern day humans saw huge growth and advancement.

Some people point to the development of language and tools that gave us a Darwinian edge. But evidence of language and tools, some of which were fairly sophisticated, have been found in Neanderthals and the other hominins. So what made us special?

According to Thomas Suddendorf, professor and author, what set us apart was not language or tools, rudimentary forms of which exist in other animals, but our ability to do open-ended imagination and make connections between different concepts. This enabled us to do mental “time travel”, going back in time and in the future, and allowed us to foresee and plan for our survival. In addition, making connections allowed us to find novel and interesting solutions to problems that we faced.

From a cognitive perspective, our brain allows us to voluntarily think of a concept which then triggers another concept, which in turn triggers the next one and so on, leading to a stream of thought, something that likely doesn’t exist in other animals. As Professor Liane Gabora explains, “With this ‘self-triggered recall and rehearsal loop’ we could now activate and re-activate visions and dreams, such that with each successive conception of them they were looked at from a different angle, embedded a little more firmly in the constraints of reality as we know it, and potentially turned into a form in which they could be realized.”

This cognitive ability is the direct result of how our brain stores information associatively, and is the reason why humans are able to come up with novel and creative ideas.

Think about how a computer stores information. To store the word “apple” in computer memory, each word is broken down to its letters and each letter in turn is converted to its binary code and stored. For example, the binary code for “a” is “01100001”, for “p” is “01110000” and so on. That’s not how human brains store information.

Human brains store each concept as a whole, connected to other concepts. So the word “apple” is stored as a concept by itself and is linked to other concepts with different kinds of links. So “apple” might be connected to “fruit” by a thing to category link, to “red” by a thing to property link, or “rash” by a cause and effect link if someone is allergic to apples. These links have different strengths in the brain so the dominant link for one person might be apple to red, but apple to fruit for someone else.

When you consciously think of an idea, your brain automatically activates some of the connecting ideas and brings them into your consciousness, leading to a stream of thought.

This also explains why it is sometimes hard to think of new ideas or solutions. As we think about a problem, some of these links get reinforced and strengthened making it hard to change perspective or think in a different direction. In other words, “These same pathways, however, also become the mental ruts that make it difficult to reorganize the information mentally so as to see it from a different perspective.”

The associative nature of the brain also comes into play when it encounters ideas that are not related. To see how this works, look at the two words below:

                          Bananas                            Vomit

If you are like most people, the moment you read the two words, your brain automatically tried to connect the unrelated words with a causal connection, forming a scenario where eating bananas led to vomiting, leaving you with a somewhat unpleasant feeling. 

You didn’t have to consciously think of this, your brain did the work of finding the best possible connection between the two words.

These two aspects of the associative nature of our brain – activating connected ideas and finding connections between random ideas – are what make it possible for us to think creatively. In fact, most creative thinking techniques rely on these two underlying mechanisms in one form or the other to generate novel ideas.

  1. Traversing Connected Ideas: Techniques like “Slice and Dice” and “Cherry Split” in Thinkertoys or segmentation in TRIZ, work by forcing the brain to traverse different paths in the associative network by explicitly listing out the triggers.
  2. Adding a Random Component: By simply introducing a random element into the mix, the brain automatically tries to find the best way to incorporate the random element into the solution. Techniques like the “Brute Think” and “Hall of Fame” in Thinkertoys are an example of such an approach.

What made us come so far is likely because of our unique cognitive strengths – how we store and process information in our brains, combine different ideas and run mental simulations. These strengths allowed us to solve problems, make inventions and build on each others ideas, and they just might turn out to be key for our future as well. 

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Tips To Bring Improv Into The Classroom

When you say improv, most people think of the hugely popular show,  “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” Watching how Colin, Ryan and Wayne, effortlessly create brilliant sketches and songs, can make the idea of using improv in classroom quite intimidating.

Which is ironic, since improv actually started off as exercises for young students!  

Viola Spolin, considered to be the mother of improvisational theater, was an educator who developed a lot of the games that are now used in improv, for her students. Her goal was not just to teach students theater techniques, but to make them more spontaneous and draw out their creativity. She believed that students learn best by direct experience and she evaluated students as a group in a non-judgemental way, giving them the safety and space to learn by themselves. Much like what Project Based Learning (PBL) aims to accomplish now.

Working with children from low-income neighborhoods, many of whom didn’t speak English, Viola invented these games that could reach across language and cultural barriers. Her inspiration came from Neva Boyd, another educator who she had closely collaborated with earlier, who said, “Play involves social values, as does no other behavior. The spirit of play develops social adaptability, ethics, mental and emotional control, and imagination.”

In more recent times, improv has seen an upswing outside of theater in educational and business settings. Several research studies have confirmed the benefits on using improv in building teamwork and creativity. Using an improv mind-set for case discussions in business classes led to more collaboration among team members and more creative solutions. In addition, improv exercises build confidence and reduce the fear of failure. Ronald Berk, Professor at the University of John Hopkins, who advocates the use of improv as a teaching tool, comments, “All students get to express themselves creatively, to play together, to have their ideas honored, and to have their mistakes forgiven.”

We routinely use improv games as warm-up exercises in our programs and find that they build more engagement, improve teamwork and set a more fun tone that is conducive for creative thinking. If you are curious about trying improv in your classroom, here are a few tips to get you started.

Start Simple

The main obstacle in starting improv is the fear of doing it. So the first step is to explain to students that improv isn’t necessarily about being witty or funny – it’s about keeping a conversation going. In fact, if someone focuses too much on being funny, the overall sketch often falls flat. Then start with some simple games that involve creating extended scenes but focus on building specific skills that don’t put too much pressure on students.

Some good exercises to start with are Storytelling, One Word at a Time (where students sit in a circle and create a story together with each student just saying one word to keep the story going), Fortunately/Unfortunately (where the group again tells a story but students alternate starting their sentence with “Fortunately” of “Unfortunately”), or Presents (where a student gives a box of present to another and the student receiving the present opens and declares what is in it).

Introduce Improv Concepts Early On

One of the key benefits of using improv is that the improv rules force behaviors that build collaborative and teamwork skills. The most important of these rules are:

  • “Yes, And”: The “Yes, And” rule is all about accepting what someone has said and building on it. For instance, if one student says, “Why do you have a banana on your head?”, their teammate can’t say, “I don’t have a banana on my head”. Instead, she could say, “Oh, that’s my hat for the royal wedding” or if she doesn’t want anything on her head, she could just say, “Oops, I forgot to take it off” and move on with the scene. When applied to the other kinds of teamwork, it’s clear that “Yes, And” encourages team members to listen, incorporate and build on each others’ ideas.
  • Deny, Order, Repeat or Question (DORQ): These are things that should not be done in an improv scene. When a student denies a reality that someone created, it violates the “Yes, And” rule. When they order someone else in a scene, they take away the other person’s ability to be creative in the moment. Repeating something that someone else says, ends up wasting time and not moving the scene forward (it’s essentially saying “Yes” without the “And”). Similarly, posing a question puts the onus on others to find a way out of the situation. All of these guidelines are also useful in improving productivity and psychological safety in any other kind of group discussion as well.
  • Make Your Team Look Good: One of most fundamental rules of improv is to treat everyone on the team like a genius. If a team member says something that doesn’t sound too interesting, but others treat it as brilliant and run with it, it often turns out to be brilliant in the end. When everyone in a team treats the others like they are geniuses, back each other up, the dynamics and outcome that result are so inspiring to watch!

Weave Into The Curriculum

Once students understand the basic tenets of improv and have some practice, you could include improv games into what students are already learning for a more fun and engaging session. For instance, if you reading a novel in the class you could create some fun twists to the story (by changing an event or character) and each group could find a different way to take the story forward.

Patience and Practice

While improv is easy to introduce to students and the underlying concepts are fairly simple, becoming good at improv takes time. In the beginning, students make mistakes in their scenes where they violate one or more improv rules. A quick debrief at the end can be useful in understanding what went wrong and what they could have done instead. Other students might be too shy to start right off  and need some time before they feel comfortable. But with some time and practice, it becomes a lot easier. Students start internalizing the improv rules and their teamwork skills start spilling out into other areas.

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Creativity Is Learning

One of the most famous psychologist and epistemologist of all times, Jean Piaget, developed the material for one of his most noted books in an unusual way. The subjects of his book, “The Origins of Intelligence in Children” were his own three children, whom he observed from infancy to about 2 years of age, over a period of several years. Piaget made detailed recordings several times a day, of at least one of his children, constantly for 3,000 days!

The result of these detailed observations led him to his theory of learning, providing the underpinnings of the constructivist theory of learning in more recent times. Piaget explained learning in terms of schemas (basic units of knowledge) and the process of adaptation. When a new information comes along, it can either be assimilated into an existing schema but if not, it triggers the process of accommodation where new schemas and organization takes place. A process of equilibrium in a child occurs when most new information can be incorporated through assimilation.

It is easy to see how Piaget’s theories tie into the constructivist model of learning. The fundamental tenet of constructivism is that learning is a meaning-making process and “each learner individually (and socially) constructs meaning as he or she learns.” From a pedagogical perspective, constructivism implies putting the learner in the center of the learning process, providing them with experiences and opportunities to construct meaning for themselves. As Prof. Hein further explains, “The crucial action of constructing meaning is mental: it happens in the mind. Physical actions, hands-on experience may be necessary for learning, especially for children, but it is not sufficient; we need to provide activities which engage the mind as well as the hands.”

Piaget’s concept of schema is intimately tied to the associative nature of our brain. Daniel Kahneman, illustrates the concept of ideas and how they are related to each other in our brain. He is uses the analogy of nodes in a network, where each node is an idea and the vast network is our associative memory. He explains, “There are different types of links: causes are lined to their effects (virus -> cold); things to their properties (lime -> green); things to the categories to which they belong (banana -> fruit).” When an idea is invoked, it brings to mind other connected ideas in turn. For instance, if you hear the word “Strawberry”, you might then think of a smoothie if the link between strawberry and smoothie happens to be  particularly strong in your brain.

Learning something new in the associative model implies creating new nodes and relationships, between ideas. Psychologists have found that human associative learning results from conscious reasoning efforts. In their expanded model, propositions connect ideas and “learning is not separate from other cognitive processes of attention, memory, and reasoning, but is the consequence of the operation of these processes working in concert. There is, therefore, no automatic mechanism that forms links between mental representations. Humans learn the causal structure of their environment as a consequence of reasoning about the events they observe.”

In essence, both Piaget’s model (and constructivism by extension) and associative learning provide similar definitions of what learning means –  the building of ideas and relationships that are continually updated to incorporate new information. But how does this relate to Creativity?

Creativity is coming up with ideas (or building products) that are both novel and useful. Looking through the lens of learning, novelty implies that the existing structures (ideas and relationships) aren’t enough to represent the new idea, and some form of accommodation is needed to incorporate the creative idea. So, the process of creative thinking forces the learner to expand his existing structures, thereby improving his ability to assimilate future new information.

In other words, creativity isn’t just about making new things – it is learning in itself.

 

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Building Creativity Through Integrative Learning

Integrative learning, or the concept of combining multiple subjects or educational strategies, is not new. In the early 1800s, Johann Herbart, a German philosopher, psychologist and educator believed that only large units of subject matter are able to arouse curiosity and keep a young mind engaged in deep learning. Even when teaching a particular subject, he proposed teachers support the learning by correlating with and integrating other subject areas.

While his ideas gained ground in the US and other countries, social and economical changes in the early twentieth century led to a different pedagogical approach of teaching subjects independently of each other. Professors Mathison and Freeman write, “Industrial efficiency studies and scientific thinking characterized by objective, quantifiable measurement has led to the assumption “that complex tasks become more manageable (i.e. easier) once broken down into their so-called basic parts”” This approach of simplification-by-isolation soon became the predominant approach in teaching.

However, interest in integrative learning is rising once again in response to the more complex educational challenges of the 21st century. Professor Julie Klein, lists the three catalysts that are driving the trend back towards integrative learning. The first is “knowledge explosion” that over the last few decades has resulted in new areas of specialties like machine learning that didn’t exist before. The second is the complexity of problems we face today that require pulling solutions from multiple domains. Finally, the focus on educational reform is linking the two concepts with complementary pedagogies.

Our project based learning modules use an integrative and interdisciplinary approach to make for a more wholesome educational experience. Here are three things we typically do in each module:

Integration with Arts

Integrating arts into the regular curriculum has been found to improve test scores and reduce the academic achievement gap for economically disadvantaged students. In most of our sessions we typically use theater and improv exercises as warm-up games. Some of the improv games build the same cognitive thinking patterns that underlie creative thinking, which is likely why improv artists come up with more (and better) product design ideas than professional product designers.

Interdisciplinary

Our projects also integrate multiple subject areas like science and humanities. In our latest module, Imaginary Worlds, students are diving deeper into topics like natural and man-made habitats (architecture and geography), social hierarchy and norms (anthropology and anthrozoology) and mathematical symbols and operations (mathematics), as they work towards developing their own fantasy worlds.

Blended Learning

While students use the online platform during the module, they never spend the entire lesson on the computer. Each lesson also incorporates group activities or discussions, time for each student to think and work independently and also collaborate in groups.

 

We find that using the above approaches gives us a more well-rounded and engaging approach to teaching different concepts, including areas in STEM that some students find intimidating.

 

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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!