Writing > On Creativity > Bluebeard's Key > The Beast
 

Investigating the seat of thought

"Understanding creativity is a little like trying to unravel a kitten's fuzzball. You may be able to get the whole thing straightened out, but that does not give you a fuzzball." Anni Snyman

To my mind, the first step to understanding creative activity is scrutinising the creator. The beast. In trying to understand this phenomenon, I have intellectually wandered across miles and miles of written road on the subject of 'creativity' and 'creative people', I have met subscribers to the BRAIN, followers of the MIND, psychologists of the PSYCHE, shamans of the SUBCONSCIOUS, and a BODY of down-to-earth dirty geniuses.

I'd like to give you a short map to the planet according to the BRAINY ones. This is their approach to the mystery: "It is a quality that belongs to a physical human being? Therefore it must have physical qualities, not?" They then flatter or scare a couple of 'creatives' into a laboratory and subject them to a battery of tests and scans and autopsies (I kid you not) and so far (actually, towards the end of the previous millennium) this is my version of what they have come up with.

Dissecting the Mind

The right side of the brain is adept at spatial perception and pattern recognition, and the left side plays a dominant role in speech, reading, writing and logic. The two hemispheres, however, interact and co-operate in a variety of complex ways not yet fully understood. (See 'Drawing on the right side of the brain" and 'The man who mistook his Wife for a Hat')

On the other hand, Stanford University neurologist Karl Pribam says that: "If there is an important, simple, anatomical way of dividing the brain in relation to creativity, it's front/back and not right/left." The frontal lobe, in the front of the brain right behind the forehead, keeps time and place ordered in our perception and enables us to distinguish the future from the past; otherwise, we could experience only the present. The density of opiate receptor sites is highest in the brain's frontal lobe, progressively decreasing toward the hindbrain. There are about thirtyfold more receptor sites in the extreme front of the brain than in the parietal lobes (back) - these receptors may function as filters; filtering incoming sensory information. "You become plugged less into reality and more into an advanced consciousness. Such a filtering of reality may be conducive to creativity" - Neuroscientist Candace Pert (US National Institute of Mental Health).

The release of endorphins, the brain's natural opiates, increases during exercise and other physical activity. This puts you into an "endorphinergic state" a kind of altered state, the effect of which, for at least some people, is a burst of creativity.

Studying the brains of people during the creative process, they have found that brain waves differ according to the degree of creative output, indicating a physiological basis for differences in thought patterns during the creative process.

Tasks requiring mental effort (for example an arithmetic problem) increase activity in the cortex, with beta waves dominating. (In contrast, lower frequency alpha waves characterise the resting state.) However, when asked to perform a creative task, the more creative subjects' cortical activity declined and alpha waves increased - just the opposite of what was observed with less creative subjects. Cortical arousal goes along with the focus of attention. By focussing your attention, you essentially defeat creative efforts.

More creative subjects have more trouble 'blocking out' white noise - their mental state takes more time to change gear.

The physiological link between dream and creative states is not clear, however in the scanning of dreaming and non-dreaming brains, scientists have found that during non-dreaming sleep the overall metabolism and use of energy in the brain decreases. During dreaming, the metabolism actually increases in the emotional and motivational areas of the brain's centre.

Some mental illnesses might share certain brain  characteristics with creativity. Schizophrenics and manic depressives have low glucose levels and less frontal lobe activity than the average person.

The only physical difference that has been found in Einstein's brain (as to 11 other male brains) so far, is that he had more neuron nourishing glial cells. (These cells can divide, unlike the brain's neurons, and active neurons have more glial cells than inactive ones.) The question remains though, did he have more to begin with, or did he develop them as he struggled with the defining concepts of physics?

"It would be difficult to leave out any part of the brain in the interaction that brings about a true creative effort." Neuroanatomist Marian Diamond (University of California at Berkeley) in her address to creatives to please bequeath their brains!

Posted 04 August 2006, www.annisnyman.co.za, author: Anni Snyman

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