This doesn’t mean we’re nowhere. Actually, thanks to ongoing advances in brain imaging technology, we’re farther along than ever before. But before we unpack what we’ve learned, let’s start with a more basic question: What do brains do?
Brains turn information into action. They gather information, both via the senses and from our own internal processes (i.e., thoughts and feelings), then turn it into action via the muscles, preferably as energy efficiently as possible. This also explains a little bit about basic brain structure. Information from our senses and those internal sources represents the brain’s input stream, while motor actions represent the output stream. Most animals have limited options for actions, because they have small brains. It’s a real estate problem. There’s just not enough neurological real estate between sensory inputs and motor outputs, so the circuit is extremely tight. This is why we use terms like “instinct” or “reflexive behavior.” It’s why zebras in Africa today behave pretty much like zebras in Africa have always behaved.13
But the same is definitely not true for humans.
Why? Because humans brains are different. Our cerebral cortex grew much bigger than it did in most animals. This gives us twin advantages. First, this extra real estate puts distance between sensory inputs and motor outputs. That added brain space means we don’t always have to run on automatic pilot. We have options. We can make choices. We can use this upper portion of the brain to repress our instinctive behavior, gather more data, consider possibilities, choose to act, choose to wait, choose to dance the fandango. In short, we get to pick from a much wider variety of action plans.
Second, the forward portion of the cortex, our prefrontal cortex, can run simulations.14 This part of the brain allows us to time travel and experiment with other possible futures and other possible pasts. It can ask: What if? What might be? What could have been?
Creativity, then, from the perspective of brain structure, is always about options. That’s one reason it has proved so stubbornly difficult to understand. It’s an invisible skill hidden inside our oldest skill: the exploration and execution of action plans. If our explorations produce the same old action plans, we’re being instinctive (a.k.a. efficient) but not creative. If we’re producing completely novel action plans, we’re creative but perhaps not efficient. But if we’re producing novel action plans that are also efficient (a.k.a. useful and valuable), we’ve arrived at the now standard psychological definition of creativity—“The production of novel ideas that have value”—yet on a sounder neurological footing.15
Even better, we’ve gained insights into how the brain produces these valuable ideas. In simple terms, we’ve learned that creativity is always a recombinatory process. It’s what happens when the brain takes in novel bits of data, combines it with older information, and uses the results to produce something startlingly new. We’ve also discovered that this recombinatory process typically requires the interaction of three overlapping neural networks: attention, imagination, and salience.16 And if we can understand how these three networks function, we can begin to think about augmenting their effects, which means we can start training up creativity—which is, after all, the point.
THE ATTENTION NETWORK
If creativity starts when the brain takes in novel information, then what do we need to take in that information? The answer is attention. As psychologist William James famously explained: “Millions of items . . . are present[ed] to my senses which never properly enter my experience. Why? Because they have no interest to me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.”17
The executive attention system governs James’s process of “selective interest,” or what’s sometimes called “spotlight attention.”18 This is the go-to network for intense concentration, for the laser focus that allows us to make choices. We can choose what to zero in on and what to ignore. When you’re writing an essay or listening to a lecture or kicking a ball, this network keeps your mind on target.
Neurobiologically, this network comprises the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the orbitofrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex, the parietal cortex, and the subthalamic nucleus. While these names may mean nothing to you, if we tack on their functions, a clearer picture starts to emerge.19
The story begins in the subthalamic nucleus.
Information comes in via the senses and gets routed (via the thalamus) to this location. Here, neurons have two main jobs. First, they help regulate instinctive behaviors. Second, this area also provides the “spotlight” in spotlight attention—only not in the way you’d suspect.
Rather than highlighting the thing you want to pay attention to, the subthalamic nucleus dims everything else, essentially removing all possible distractions. Imagine a hundred dancers crowded onto a well-lit stage. In this situation, it’s hard to know where to put your focus. But turn down the stage lights completely, place a spotlight on a single dancer, and problem solved. Attention now has no choice but to stay locked on target. This is exactly how the subthalamic nucleus works.
From there, the data goes to both the anterior cingulate cortex and the parietal cortex. The anterior cingulate handles error correction. If that incoming information doesn’t match a prediction the brain has already made, this is the part of the brain that notices. For example, say you’re reaching for a doorknob. You think the door is unlocked, but it’s actually not. The moment your hand encounters resistance—the knob won’t turn—this part of the brain lights up. It means your reality isn’t matching your prediction, and you might want to make other, possibly more creative, plans for getting out of that room.
When it comes to executive attention, the parietal lobe has three functions. It helps our eyes stay locked on the target, allows goals to be integrated with attention, and, to help us meet those goals, allows novel action plans to be executed. In other words, if you’re intent on leaving the party and reaching for the doorknob and a friend calls your name, this is the portion of the brain that keeps your eyes locked on the knob and your hand reaching for it. This is also the part of the brain that helps you deviate from normal behavior, meaning instead of doing what you always do—that is, staying for another beer—this time, you ignore your friend and head on home. And tomorrow morning, when you wake up without a hangover, you can thank your parietal lobe.
From there, information rockets up to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and orbitofrontal cortex. We’ll take them one at a time.
The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is where our working memory lives. This is short-term information parking for the brain, temporarily storing a bit of data while we gather additional information and consider what to do next.
The orbitofrontal cortex, meanwhile, helps us make decisions, primarily by doing risk assessment and social cognition. As mentioned, if you’re trying to solve a difficult problem by yourself, well, that might be risky. But if you’ve got a bunch of friends helping you solve that problem, now it’s not so dangerous. This is the part of the brain that helps make that social calculation. It’s also a part that inhibits instinctive behavior and enables us to make more creative choices.
Of course, there’s more to executive attention than these five regions and these five regions perform a lot of other functions besides the ones explored. Yet, despite being oversimplified, we now understand a bit more about how neural networks are wired and how this particular network provides the attention required for creativity.
THE IMAGINATION NETWORK
The imagination network—to borrow psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman’s moniker—or, more formally, the default mode network, is all about spontaneous thought.20 This system is active when we’re awake but not focused on anything in particular—which research shows is about 30 percent of the time. When switched on, it’s the brain in daydreaming mode, simulating alternative realities and testing out creative possibilities.21
Neurobiologically, this system i
ncludes the medial prefrontal cortex, the medial temporal lobe, the precuneus, and the posterior cingulate cortex.22 And once again, if we combine structure with function, we can start to see how these parts work together to make the greater whole known as creativity.
The medial prefrontal cortex is about theory of mind, or our ability to think about what others are thinking about, and creative self-expression.23 If you’re telling a joke to a friend and suddenly your friend starts crying, the medial prefrontal cortex notices the crying. It also tells you to stop telling the joke and start comforting your friend.
The medial temporal lobe is a memory structure, as is the precuneus, though this latter area is primarily involved in the retrieval of personal memories. Taken together, in our above example, once you make the creative decision to deviate from the joke and start comforting your friend, these two structures help you scour the databanks for previous times when jokes went bad and friends started crying. Their goal is to find other information that can help you decide exactly how to comfort your friend.
The precuneus takes this an extra step. Beyond memory, this area handles self-consciousness, self-related mental simulation, and random thought generation. If you’re telling that joke but suddenly imagine yourself at an amusement park, shrieking on a roller coaster, and feeling embarrassed in front of your date—well, blame your precuneus.
Finally, the posterior cingulate cortex allows us to integrate various internal thoughts into more coherent wholes, essentially gathering all the data generated by these other brain areas into a single idea.
Yet, these brain areas don’t tell the full story.
At the start of this breakdown, our stated goal was to figure out how these networks work together to produce novel ideas that are useful. And here’s the rub. Under normal circumstances, these networks don’t work together.
The default mode network and the executive attention network operate in opposition. Typically, the activation of one causes the deactivation of the other. But this is not the case with creatives, who can keep both systems active at once and shift back and forth between them with far more fluidity than most.
This means, to return to all of our examples, creatives can start telling a joke to a friend, which requires spotlight attention. They can then notice that the friend has started crying, which is a novel signal that should serve to tighten that spotlight. Yet, instead, creatives will remember the time they shrieked on the roller coaster—which is a signal generated by the default mode network. Noncreatives would never notice, and instead keep their attention on the crying friend. But creatives can shift their spotlight onto this internal signal and stay there long enough to remember that feeling of embarrassment. Suddenly, the posterior cingulate cortex snaps it all together. They realize their friend is crying because they’re embarrassed, and instead of comforting them, they should apologize for that insulting joke.
This information also gives us a look at the work ahead. When we’re training the brain to be more creative, a part of what we’re training is this capacity for network co-activation.
Why?
When both of these networks are co-activated, we can perform the three Bs: bend, break, and blend.24 These are the skills beneath creativity, allowing us to bend what we see, break apart what we sense, and blend it all back together in a brand-new way. But there’s one more part to this story, which is the network that actually controls the whole show, the one that allows us to shift back and forth between these other two networks.
THE SALIENCE NETWORK
Salience, as a term, refers to noticeability.25 Objects have physical salience because of color or intensity, such as when a shiny red Corvette catches your attention. Objects can also have emotional or personal salience, such as when that shiny Corvette reminds you of your grandfather’s old car. The salience network, then, is the part of the brain that notices this noticeability.26
This network works like a giant information filter, monitoring incoming data and tagging it as important or irrelevant. And it monitors both the external world and our internal world, which is part of the reason the salience network is so critical for creativity.
Our internal world is murky. The signals aren’t always clear. The thoughts and emotions that bubble up are generally subtle, and often in conflict with more attention-grabbing inputs from the external world. The salience network is what alerts you to the fact that the idea that just bubbled up is a good one and worth your attention.
More critically, to provide that attention, the salience network is what controls our ability to shift back and forth between the default mode network and the executive attention network. It’s the master switch, making it the gateway to heightened creativity.
To understand how the salience network works, we need to unpack a few more brain regions, starting with the anterior insula and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. We’ll take them one at a time.
The insula plays an important role in self-awareness. It takes signals from your body, including everything from your energy level to your emotional state, blends them with key features of the environment, and then uses the most important results to make decisions. Say you’re climbing a ladder and the next step feels loose. The insula is the part of the brain that starts the process of turning that feeling into the decision not to climb that ladder.
The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is the upper half of the anterior cingulate cortex. This is the region responsible for error correction, the one that lights up when the door, which was supposed to be open, is actually locked. The upper portion handles cognitive errors, and the lower portion deals with emotional errors. In total, when you noticed the feeling of that loose ladder step, the insula used that looseness to catch your attention, while the anterior cingulate turned that salience into an error signal—don’t take that step, something’s wobbly in Denmark.
Finally, while the insula and anterior cingulate cortex are considered the anchor points for the salience network, equally critical are an additional trio of structures: the amygdala, ventral striatum, and ventral tegmental area. The amygdala is about threat detection. It’s the part of the brain that notices anything new and novel, though it’s especially sensitive to new and novel dangers. The ventral striatum and the ventral tegmental area, meanwhile, are both involved in motivation and rewards. These regions drive behavior, reinforce behavior, and generally provide a ton of feel-good neurochemicals to accomplish these tasks.
In the brains of creatives, all of these areas function differently than in other people.27 It comes down to “repetition suppression,” which is the automatic suppression of familiar stimuli. When you moved to San Francisco and first saw the twists and turns of Lombard Street, your brain produced a huge response. But that response got smaller the second time you saw those twists, and even smaller the third. By the fourth, there was barely any reaction at all. This is when Lombard Street becomes just another blur in the background as you walk toward the corner store—and this is repetition suppression.
But creative brains don’t have this tendency. Their repetition suppression reflex isn’t on the job.28 What this translates to in the real world is the ability to notice the new in the old.
What does all this mean?
It means, if your interest is in training up creativity, then you need to train up all three networks: salience, default mode, and executive attention. “For optimal creativity,” as Scott Barry Kaufman, a Columbia University psychologist and creativity expert, wrote in the Atlantic, “you want multiple brain networks to be firing on all cylinders, flexibly ready to engage and disengage depending on the stage of the creative process.”29
So how to get those networks to fire on all cylinders—that’s exactly where we’re headed next.
16
Hacking Creativity
The term “hacking” has a bad name. It comes out of coding and refers to someone trying to gain control over a computer system, typically for nefarious purposes. The word then morphed a bit, bec
oming pop culture shorthand for a “quick fix” or a “shortcut.” None of those definitions apply here. First, the system we’re trying to gain control over is our own neurobiology. Second, when it comes to sustained peak performance, there are no shortcuts.
Instead, when I use a term like “hacking” to describe an approach to peak performance, what I’m really saying is “figuring out how to get your neurobiology to work for you rather than against you.” This has been our approach to high achievement since we started this book, and it’s once again our approach here, when we turn our attention to ways to increase creativity.
Seven ways, to be exact.
Over the rest of this chapter, we’re going to take all the science we just learned and apply it to the problem of creativity. We’ll identify seven strategies for amping up our ability to produce novel and useful ideas, exploring how these tactics work in the brain, and seeing how we can apply them in our lives.
ONE: BEFRIEND YOUR ACC
When researchers talk about creativity, one of the most frequent topics of conversation in the phenomenon is known as insight. This is the experience of sudden comprehension, that aha moment when we get a joke, solve a puzzle, or resolve an ambiguous situation. Yet, while long recognized as core to the mystery of creativity, for much of the twentieth century, insight was a black box.
This changed at the turn of the twenty-first century, when Northwestern University neuroscientist Mark Beeman and Drexel University cognitive psychologist John Kounios found a way to shed some light on the subject.1 Beeman and Kounios gave people a series of remote association problems—a.k.a. insight problems—then used both EEG and fMRI to monitor the subjects’ brains as they tried to solve them.
The Art of Impossible Page 15