Chase, Chance, and Creativity

by James H Austin

  EEG studies during sleep indicate that the two sides of our brain also "dream" differently. The findings suggest that the right side is more involved during the period when our dreams are more vivid and elaborate-rapid eye movement (REM) sleep." It appears that our left hemisphere may be more engaged in the several other phases of sleep in which dreams are less prominent.' There may be an underlying physiological basis for the predominance of the right hemisphere in visual imagery: the right brain tends to yield the greater electrical response when light is flashed in both eyes.'

  When cortical nerve cells are actively firing, they require a greater supply of blood. Blood flow studies in humans confirm the results of studies of electrical activity." That is, during verbal tests, the supply of blood increases chiefly in the left hemisphere. In contrast, visuospatial tasks cause increased blood flow chiefly in the right hemisphere. These differences are enhanced when the volunteers are motivated by a $20 reward toward higher levels of performance.

  Though the parieto-occipital cortex is clearly important early in visual perception, the frontal lobes, too, must be engaged when a decision is called for, as it is in visual problem solving. For this reason, it is noteworthy that when visual problems are solved, blood supply increases not only over the visual cortex, but over the frontal lobes as well.

  The studies I have cited do reveal special functions of the right side of the brain, but they require fairly elaborate equipment, mathematical processing, and interpretation. Less complicated observations are also revealing. Here, perhaps the "eyes" have it. Just noticing the characteristic direction of someone's eye movements under standardized conditions may yield very interesting information about his attitudes and ways of thinking."'

  To test this proposition in the laboratory, the subject's eyes are observed when neutral questions are asked that might be handled by either brain hemisphere. One question might be: "If you were President, how would you deal with the Middle East situation?" Or: "What is the meaning of the proverb, 'Better a bad peace than a good war?"' One observes that the subject's eyes glance (and frequently his head also turns) in one direction as he first begins to reflect about the answer. Some look quickly to the left; others look first to the right. The direction of gaze of most persons is reasonably consistent (78 to 80 percent of the time in the same direction). The direction of this initial flickering shift, at the moment of pondering, permits researchers to classify individuals as "right movers" or "left movers."

  What kinds of people glance to the left? Those who are more prone to focus on their internal subjective experiences. "Left movers" are more readily hypnotizable, more likely to have been a classical humanistic major in college, and are somewhat more likely to report clear visual imagery. It is significant to our understanding of creativity to note that the more readily hypnotizable person is one whose subjective experiences are rich, who accepts impulses from within, and who is capable of deep imaginative involvements.

  Who are the right movers? They tend to major in science or in "hard" quantitative subjects in college and they are better at mathematical problems than in verbal ability. They are also quicker to identify concepts when the problem centers on words, such as, "what adjective applies to these four nouns: sky, ocean, eyes, jeans?"

  What does the direction of a glance tell us about the way the brain functions? It implies a physiological bias-a preexisting "set." One hemisphere is poised to act a fraction of a second before the other. In a sense, the connections of this half of the brain will take the lead in the person's psycho-physiological functioning.

  Earlier, when you consciously glanced off to the left at the apple, you had an external object to look at, and it was activity within your right frontal lobe that directed your eyes to move to the left. But when there is no external target to look at deliberately, the glance is spontaneous, unconscious, determined by internal factors. It is plausible to think, then, that when "left movers" start their movement of internal reflection, they uncover greater facility in function within their right cerebral hemisphere. This bias in favor of the right hemisphere more readily activates the eye movement connections of their right frontal lobe and expresses itself in a quick unconscious glance to the left.

  How significant a glance may be as a clue to basic differences among persons in their temperaments, life styles, and the way they create can for the moment better be imagined than defined, for the basic descriptive work is still going on, and much still needs to be done before we know what is going on, and how.'' Again, we see that an observation raises far more questions than it answers. But in the interim, the issues raised illustrate the spectrum of decisions-subjective/objective, humanistic/scientific-that our two hemispheres make every day throughout many levels in the hierarchy of creative thought.

  I have touched earlier on certain specific frontal lobe activities; the chief functions of our frontal lobes, however, are far more abstract. Common to most of them is the ability to organize complex patterns of behavior and project them into the future, drawing on all the learning of the past. In short, the frontal lobes help you put storm windows on your house at winter's first chill, fertilizer on the rose bed at the beckoning of spring, and a few dollars away in the bank now for your children's future education. Your frontal lobes also help screen out irrelevant distractions. They preserve a persistent continuity of action throughout the many complex sequences involved in problem solving. With no clicking of mental gears, your preliminary analysis flows smoothly without interruption through a definition of alternatives, discrimination among many choices, and on to final effective action.''

  A vast chorus of internal dialogue, verbal and nonverbal, embellishes our loosest associations as we dream, or focuses our concentrated attention when we are awake. This is not performed by one single hemisphere. Many caveats apply to the recent psychophysiological research in creativity.' Yet most critics agree with Katz that both the right and left hemispheres contribute to creativity, and that each side has specialized regions that prove complementary to the functions of the other. Communication between the two hemispheres of the brain is essential if we are to integrate our creative efforts in many dimensions-verbal and visuospatial, internal and external, past, present, and future. Indeed, when the two halves of our brain exchange their disparate experiences, pool their viewpoints and approaches, the resulting synthesis brings to problem solving a whole symphony of talents.

  How does this exchange occur? The corpus callosum, the great commissure of white, myelinated fibers bridging the two hemispheres, serves as the major thoroughfare for the rapid transfer of this information.' Through it, the left hemisphere speaks, quite literally, to the right, and the right hemisphere answers with its own repertoire of musical refrains or vivid visual metaphors, sotto voce.

  Because the frontal, parietal, temporal, occipital, and limbic lobes of the brain are each paired, we begin to see the whole coordinated creative quest as a major orchestral performance, with drum beats and clashing cymbals from all the more primitive deeper structures of the brain stem contributing rhythm and passion to the score.

  At certain times, the whole orchestra-both sides of our brainsneeds to work in concert. But at other times, we need to shift the balance from one cognitive mode to the other, from verbal, linear thinking to nonverbal Gestalt processing. How is this possible? Galin has proposed that normal persons might do this if they were to inhibit impulses from the left hemisphere, say, from reaching the right.'' Such inhibition could permit the right hemisphere to function for a period with an internal life of its own. During the sabbatical in Kyoto in 1974, I studied one of several mechanisms that might make this possible."' It turns out that when you stimulate certain nerve cells down in the brain stem on one side, they release norepinephrine from their terminals way up in the cerebral cortex on the same side. When this transmitter reaches cortical nerve cells, it stops them from responding to impulses that normally cross over from the opposite hemisphere. Inhibitory messages ascending from this deep b
rain stem system then, plus signals from other subcortical systems, could help us shift the functional balance from one hemisphere to the other either by inhibiting one side or by enhancing the other. We may have in our own brains, therefore, not only the orchestra, but also the conductor, one whose hand and baton will tell us whether the left, right, or both of our hemispheres are to be fully engaged.

  When you glanced over at that red object lying on a table, focused attention on it, and recognized that it was an apple, you drew together messages from regions all over the back of your brain. One unified percept leaped to mind. How did your brain "hind" together so much data from so many sites? Current research suggests that such "psychological" events (which combine both instantly focused attention and recognition) correspond with distinct physiological epochs. During these split-seconds, we synchronize the firing of many distant relevant cell assemblies. It seems likely that processes of a similar nature enabled Charles Darwin, Fleming and other notable scientists to suddenly "arrest an exception" and to begin to intuit some of its potential significance.

  To register percepts and to comprehend their deeper significance requires an intricate partnership between thalamus and cortex. Cortex acting alone cannot do this. Recently, an EEG correlate of such an epoch was revealed in the report by Revonsuo and coworkers." They studied normal subjects during a related moment of visual "closure." The relevant brain waves first to appear were distributed not only over the back of the large visual brain but also on the right side. They were gatnrxa waves, synchronized at the faster frequencies around 40 cycles per second.

  In fact, this gamma wave episode peaked about four-tenths of a second before the subjects' consciousness underwent its salient shift. So this early peak was a pre-conscious herald; it signaled conscious events yet to arrive. As an EEC correlate, why is this early gamma activity so significant?

  Because it anticipated a striking change in consciousness. Next to come was a novel sense of meaning that transfigured the scene. Readers who have experienced the delight of seeing directly into "Magic Eye" pictures will recall, and can appreciate, how it feels when a similar kind of delayed realization abruptly breaks through into their consciousness.

  This mental shift happens automatically. Instantly, incoherent fragments assemble themselves. The flat, two-dimensional scene is transformed. The astonished observer beholds a meaningful, textured Gestalt image-now in three dimensions.

  This study of brain waves relied on leads that recorded only from the scalp. No surface EEG study can specify how much the deep input from the thalamus is contributing to such a visually meaningful closure. However, we do know that two association nuclei down in the thalamus are deeply allied with cortex in this kind of perceptual closure. They are the pulvinar and the lateral posterior nuclei. They, too, help bring attentive focus, salience, and a literal sense of texture into our usual, everyday grasps of comprehension.

  Other collateral evidence suggests that the frontal lobes contribute to similar thalamocortical correlates of binding. They also help us detect links among otherwise isolated clues, enabling them to be bound together into an intuitive leap of consciousness.'" On the other hand, it's also clear that our other most "willful" and perhaps "best" intentions (i.e. those directed more by our frontal lobes and anterior cingulate regions) can also block such intuitions from reaching their automatic closure. Accordingly, it takes a long time to nurture that fine art of "staying sufficiently loose" which may enable one's pre-conscious networks (on rare occasions) to deliver a flash of inspired creative imagination.

  28

  The Quest; The Quests

  The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful... intellectual beauty is sufficient unto itself, and it is for its sake, more perhaps than for the future good of humanity, that the scientist devotes himself to long and difficult labors. It is, therefore, the quest of this especial beauty, the sense of the harmony of the cosmos, which makes us choose the facts most fitting to contribute to this harmony, just as the artist chooses from among the features of his model those which perfect the picture and give it character and life.

  Henri Poincare

  As we ascend the phylogenetic scale, the amount and complexity of the cerebral cortex increases enormously. In man, a whole new realm, the intellect, has been added. And in man we can observe that the search for stimuli takes on a new dimension-that of a quest. The quest is both psychologically utilitarian and intellectually satisfying. Man's search to satisfy the physiological needs of his cerebral cortex now takes on a greater meaning, not only to himself but to society as well.

  Beyond the need that any animal has to seek new stimuli, A. H. Maslow believes that humans have an additional instinctual "need to know." This basic yearning for knowledge is reinforced by a social environment in which freedom and boldness are encouraged.'

  Frankl has gone on to base his whole system of psychotherapy, logotherapy (logos: meaning), on man's need to find meaning in his everyday existence.' In the past, man's need to identify with something constructive in life, his will to meaning, has probably been underestimated. In me, I find it exerts a powerful force, sustains a drive fully as compelling as the will to pleasure identified by Freud and the will to power noted by Adler.

  The ancient Greeks, as Dubos observes, attributed inspired deeds to entheos, a god within, a kind of divine madness that motivates man.' Over the centuries the word has lost none of its magical power, for it has been handed down to us as enthusiasm. Enthusiasm for the quest is the elixir that pervades creativity, inspires it, frees it so that anything seems possible, and enlists others in the cause.

  To me, and to other biomedical investigators, the scientific quest takes on some spiritual overtones, if it does not become a kind of religion in itself. One reason is straightforward. I start with the realization that our solar system began only four to five billion years ago; I then see increasingly the astounding complexity of all living things, the human nervous system in particular. And the gap between that nebulous beginning and the tangible present is so enormous that I am left with a reverent awe toward the creative forces in the universe, however defined, that have generated so much in such a relatively short time.

  Other satisfactions which lie at the end of the quest will vary subtly from one creative field to another. The medical researcher can respond deeply to the higher artistic works of the poet, the musician, and the artist. He can sense the aesthetic delights open to the mathematician, the physicist, the chemist, and the astronomer. But he is drawn early in life to explore the interface between health and sickness. Man is his canvas, man's diseases his concern, and in helping man toward health will lie his ultimate satisfactions. Apart from his own small contributions to this end, the young men and women whom he trains and influences will also give him a personally satisfying link with what resides in the future.

  I learned a lot about the pleasures associated with this process, not only from our children, but also from teaching our dog, Tom, and the next two generations of hunting dogs that followed him. The approach you take when you raise a good bird dog for the field is similar to that involved in trying to raise a creative child or researcher. You start to refine the chase into the quest even before the litter is conceived. First you search for the very best mental and physical pedigree you can find, balancing the sire's known assets and liabilities against those of the dam. This gives you the optimum opportunity to have the best "hard wiring" already built into your pup's nervous system at birth. Then you select the boldest, healthiest-looking pup as best you can tell from the way he stands, runs, cocks his ears, and socializes with you. Finally, you give him as much affection as you can without spoiling him. He'll not only thrive on this, but you later won't have to discipline him as much, for a word or a gesture will suffice instead of firmer measures. You'll give him as much wide open country to explore as freely as possible, graduating to tougher cover only when
he's tall enough for it, always trying to achieve that happy balance between preserving his intense feral qualities and keeping him out from under your feet. You'll show your enthusiasm with praise when he goes staunchly on point on a pheasant, and your disapproval when he chases a rabbit. If you and he are especially lucky, you'll have an older, wiser dog he can imitate, from whose experience he can quickly learn the wisdom of the chase that takes years to accumulate. Gradually, he'll learn that fun and serious work are not incompatible. Ultimately, then, what you will have tried to do is to supplement his basic genetic constitution with the best "soft wiring" you can help him add from his environment-this will include behavior that he's learned for himself, from you, and from another dog. Your goal is a strong, bold, wide-ranging dog, capable of practical, instinctive action in the field and still house-broken at home, a joy to watch in the field as well as to live with. If you should ever err, your bias should be in the direction of his independence in the field.

  In an active laboratory, researchers often have, say, three or four "irons in the fire" at any one time. These projects vary in size and in stages of completion. (Figure 10 abbreviates this temporal dimension, though it spares the viewer the many leads we never followed up.) Still other projects have grown "cold," stilled for want of a creative idea or for lack of funding. Clearly, as the title of this chapter suggests, various active and inactive "quests" are underway, both at any one time and over the course of many years.

  Similar forms of multiple explorations have characterized experiments in progress in busy laboratories worldwide, beginning at least a century or so before the era of Claude Bernard (1813-78) and Louis Pasteur (1822-95) and extending up to the present day. Given the fluid nature of such experimental situations, it can prove difficult always rigidly to apply Walpole's twofold definition. Walpole used words appropriate to his culture in the mid-eighteenth century to describe a tale that originated in a faraway land well over seven centuries ago. His coining of serendipity reflected on the general nature of the princes' quest. Like any Wtanderjallr, perhaps it seemed to be simply "one" quest when they first set out to wander abroad. And, in the context of this particular moment of embarkation, it was reasonable in 1754 for Walpole to limit serendipity to "discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not [then] in quest of." Fine, but what about Bernard's and Pasteur's and all the other later experimental research studies that often start with an hot idea, sputter, stop, cool off, and then reignite to evolve over the next several decades?