The left and right hemispheres of the brain are connected by nearly two hundred million axons called the corpus callosum, a dense plate of white matter at the junction of the two hemispheres. Bands of axon threads lead from elite pyramidal neurons in every part of one hemisphere through this packed intersection and then, after crossing the divide, fan out to join every part of the other hemisphere. The corpus callosum is the ultimate associative network, the burners of your bottom-up boilers.
As processors churn away in both your left and right brain, they feed germs of ideas, little idea-lets, across the divide, assembling details into associations, and then, when your bottom-up fools stumble upon one or two candidates for the missing piece, the unifying concept, the ideal metaphor that brings everything together, you drop the soap and say those two most satisfying nonsensical syllables: “Aha!”
6.3.1 Synesthesia
Our brains create our worlds through the interplay of a bunch of processors that learn to associate sensory input with expected patterns. These processing structures span the spectrum from off-the-rack, preloaded instinctual formulas, like distinguishing the smell of a rose from the smell of garbage, to algorithms we build from scratch by adapting existing structures, like learning calculus. Wash-and-wear processes, like your ability to learn languages, lie somewhere between the instinctual and cooked-from-scratch extremes.
The neural circuitry that identifies the labels of fine craft ale has to have connections to the visual data processors in the back of your head. Sure, axons from the label-identifiers could connect to your visual processors no matter how far away they lie, but efficiency prefers to have related tools near each other.
Do different people come with different recipes that already have ingredients—pre-parameterized algorithms? Should we expect everyone to emerge from the womb with identical instincts? Of course not! We’re all different (except for Norm).
Synesthesia came up in chapter 4; it’s the disorder indicated by crosstalk between the senses. Synesthetics perceive numbers as colors, sounds as tastes, shapes as scents, and so on. Its hypothesized cause is incomplete neural pruning. That is, as babies’ brains gain experience deciphering different senses, they prune away excess connections that don’t help define the exterior world. Adult synesthetics retain some of that cross-wiring throughout their lives.
Might a brain with cross-wiring have an advantage at pulling rabbits out of hats?
A disproportionate number of successful artists, writers, and musicians are synesthetics. Could that crosstalk enable their brains to connect separate concepts and come up with more punch lines, more metaphors? Or are synesthetics at a disadvantage in fields that are heavier on analysis, and it’s this disadvantage that drives them to art, literature, and music? Or does learning the skills of artists, writers, and musicians promote the growth of synesthetic axons?
Does synesthetic cross-wiring encourage brains to come up with not more but better lateral, right-field ideas? Since value is subjective, we need to be careful with the word “better.” In science, better ought to mean more accurate; in engineering, greater functionality; but in the arts, better means that more people like it and/or that it pleases critics, or most importantly, that you like it.
I haven’t seen any data indicating that synesthetics tend to be great mathematicians or software hacks, but I suspect that the relative population of synesthetics among scientists, engineers, and techies is consistent with the general population. Here’s why: Suppose that synesthetics do have an advantage at relating concepts with processing centers that are literally close together. Being close together in the brain makes concepts easier to relate to for everyone. The easier they are to relate to, the more empathy they will generate.
When science types need to pull a rabbit out of their figurative hats, the value of that rabbit in accomplishing the given task has little to do with empathy. It needs to be novel in the sense that if it isn’t novel, someone has already tried it, but it doesn’t need to tie things together in a subjectively pleasing way. It just needs to work. And whether or not it works can be verified without asking critics.
6.3.2 Neural resonance, coherence, and flow
Resonance is the physical manifestation of the feeling you get when things match perfectly. Remember Butch, the caveman who has a hell of an arm? If he throws a rock with just the right speed at just the right angle so that it goes into orbit (a nice, steady orbit that does laps around Earth forever, the way that the Moon does laps around Earth and Earth does laps around the Sun), then Butch’s rock is in resonance with Earth. That kind of fine-tuning—pushing a kid on a swing, you and me singing the same note—is timing resonance. Separate neural circuits that combine into creative thoughts exhibit a sort of resonance, a synchronous domino effect of relationship identification.
Let’s go back to the binding problem. When something comes to mind, you assemble it in your working memory. We’re capable of holding from four to ten separate thoughts in working memory at once, which is why I have whiteboards in every room of my house and always carry a notebook.
Your ability to bind separate thoughts—ideas, perceptions, sensory inputs, whatever—into coherent concepts requires coordinated timing of the circuits that do your binding. Holding thoughts in working memory and folding them over each other to create something new also requires coherence.
Coherence measures how much the separate pieces of a whole are related, how in tune they are in the general sense, not just the melodic sense.
Think of waves crashing on a beach. Perfectly coherent ocean waves would be perfectly regular mound-trough sequences of water rolling perfectly parallel into a perfectly straight beach. The waves would crash on the beach in monotonous regularity forever. Waves can only behave with such utter monotony if they are somehow related. Coherent groups of ocean waves are related by the wind that blew them into existence.
Changes in the wind and irregularities in the shape of the beach break the relationships between the waves and limit their coherence. The coherence time of a system is how long you can expect a set of related phenomena to last before losing their interrelationships, their synchrony.
With the idea of coherence right in your forebrain, dare I say coherently bound to the concept of resonance, picture a set of neurons transmitting action potentials to other neurons. Some neurons don’t respond because the sum of action spikes they receive isn’t high enough to engage them, but others respond by firing their own action potentials along to other neurons.
The binding problem boils down to coherence among all those action potentials; the stronger the binding, the longer the coherence time. The more in tune the resonance, the more dominos fall, the greater the degree to which the pattern that triggered them excites more patterns.
The “zone” is another type of resonance, the state of being in tune with whatever you’re doing. Your internal breezes die down; the coherence time of your thoughts stretches out; you find it easier to assemble greater numbers of concepts and act on them with little effort.
The state of being in the zone is called “flow” by a psychology professor named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (yeah, it’s a mouthful; just try “cheek-sent-me-high-ee”). Here are more descriptions of flow: intense engagement; involvement in the task at hand that’s so intense that the rest of the world sort of falls away; balancing challenge and skill to the limit of your ability; the feeling that you’re about to burst out laughing or crying, but aren’t sure which. Picture your comfort zone as a chair; when you experience flow, you’re at the edge of that metaphorical seat. Right on the edge doing something you’re good at and that challenges you to the limit of your ability, just barely within that limit.
Flow is a resonant coherent state.
6.3.3 Language as spatial resonance
All the time spent practicing by the railroad tracks makes Johnny lonely, so he leaves his guitar under the tree and moseys into town. He walks into a bar where he’s played often enough that the bartenders re
cognize him. He asks for an IPA and chats with the bartender. Then he sees someone walk in.
Having woken to the sight of a rainbow, Starla spent the day in a burst of creative joy, so inspired that she composed a dozen poems. The first one, about rainbows of course, came out so fast that she rode it into another and another, until a few minutes ago when she went for a walk and decided to pop in to her local bar for a quick pint. She sits on a barstool next to a man about her age.
Johnny and Starla have never met.
Starla admires his artsy appearance, his purple paisley shirt, his long curly hair, and his worn boots. She even notices his long fingers and the precise way that he lifts his mug and tucks his hair behind his ears. He uses his fingers like precision instruments.
When Starla sits down next to him, Johnny’s blown away. She’s beautiful in a way that locks into his preferences, not Hollywood or New York City beautiful, but capable, practical beautiful. The word “present” comes to mind, as though her mere presence is beautiful. She looks at him, and he pushes his hair back but can’t think of anything to say.
She sighs.
He feels that he has to speak or risk losing this opportunity forever.
“So, umm, how’s it goin’?” he says and immediately kicks himself internally. Only losers ask how it’s going!
“Oh, not much,” she says.
Mercy, he thinks to himself, she’s not even listening to me.
Then she laughs and her laughter truly sounds like a ringing bell.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “I meant that it’s going wonderfully! How are you?”
He says, “Fine.” And then there’s a pause. He asks if she lives nearby, and she gives a vaguely positive answer. Then there’s another pause. He feels her interest slipping away, but he can’t think of anything to say. If only he had his guitar, he could let it do his talking.
Starla smiles inside. Could this day get any better? The man is smitten to the extent that he can barely talk. She lets him babble through a few more pointless pleasantries, and then she rescues him: “You have beautiful hands,” she says. “Are you an artist?”
Johnny rubs his thumb across the calluses on the fingertips of his left hand. “I play guitar.”
Starla says, “I write poetry.”
“Have you ever set your poems to music?”
“No, every time I think of a melody, it turns out to be something Chuck Berry already played.”
They laugh together and, now on common ground, they find their zone; someday, they’ll make beautiful music together, or some other cliché. I apologize for that.
The combination of speaking and meaning that is language provides a simple example of spatial resonance.
When Starla speaks, a huge network lights up in her brain. The thought she’s trying to convey forms behind her forehead in her frontal cortex. Circuits connecting the germ of the thought to the memories on which that thought is built light up like streetlights at sundown.
She wants to tell Johnny about her special morning. She envisions rainbows and circles and how it felt to write her poems. Her visual cortex pulls up rainbow images; her parietal cortex, the region toward the center and along the top of her brain, positions them in space. Her words form in Broca’s area, just behind her left temple, and she assembles the words into proper sentences in Wernicke’s area, halfway up the side of her head above her left ear. The sequence connects to her motor cortex, which coordinates the muscles from her chest to her throat, and she blows through the inner guitar strings of her vocal cords. As she hears herself speak, another circuit lights up, connecting her ears, and she listens, interprets, and associates her words with his response.
The point of mapping Starla’s end of the conversation is to show how many separate brain regions have to work in concert, that is, how many circuits must resonate in a coherent fashion, before she has any chance of mating with Johnny.
6.3.4 Releasing your inner savant
In chapter 4, we talked about Allan Snyder’s work enhancing the creativity of test subjects. By suppressing the inhibitory properties of neurons from certain regions of the left brain, creativity seems to be enhanced.
It makes sense in the context of lateral thought.
When analyzing a problem, really digging in and trying to determine the underlying connections to a jumble of details, our bottom-up parallel processors compete for attention. Those processors that have experienced the greatest success in the past naturally have an advantage. They’re louder and capable of suppressing historically less-successful regions, but past performance is no guarantee of future results, especially when you’re working on something that you’ve never done before.
We’ve seen how our neural circuits are disproportionately affected by first impressions. The first snowmelt plots the path of the river that later forms a canyon. When you do something that’s never been done, you have to chart your own course. You have to try new and different things.
Miles Dylan once said, “The thing that makes complex systems impossible to understand is their complexity.”
The novelty quotient of creativity requires that we entertain the wildest ideas we can come up with. Like medieval kings struggling to solve a drought, we need fools in our courts who can suggest ideas like importing beavers to build dams.
Creativity requires insight, and insights are produced when our background, bottom-up processors propose solutions we had not previously considered. By reducing our inclinations to suppress information from certain sources, we enable our own geniuses.
6.4 CREATIVITY
Susan Greenfield, a neuroscience professor at Oxford, insists that for something to be considered creative, it must be meaningful. It has to shift our perspective and provide a way to “see one thing in terms of something else.”
Great paintings, music, and literature all make us see the world differently. Here’s an old joke among novelists: Our job is to keep you awake at night and make you cry. The tears and laughter come when you see the world through the eyes of the artist.
Creativity happens when you reach into your hat and pull out a rabbit, but before you can get a rabbit, you have to pull out a lot of lint. Try stuff. When it doesn’t work, try something else. Accepting, even anticipating and celebrating failure might be a key to creativity, but failure can be expensive. Along with resilience to failure, add these to your keys-to-creativity list: the freedom to try things, curiosity, confidence, exposure to as many ideas as possible, and of course, the knotted rope of talent, skill, and passion.
To apply a concept from one field to another requires lateral thought. To encourage ourselves to think laterally, we have to allow thoughts unrelated to the task at hand to float up. By silencing our tendency to anticipate and predict what comes next, we can push back prejudices, dice up categories, and open ourselves to new patterns. It helps to find the balance between engagement and anxiety, to get in the zone, stretch out, and slip into the puzzle. When ideas start bubbling to the surface, there will be periods of coherent resonance, and the best ideas will spread action-potential webs across your brain, front to back, left to right across your corpus callosum, and top to bottom from Feynman to frog.
When you play on a swing, you intuit its resonant frequency; you feel the harmony. I may sound like a new-age crystal salesman, but when you find resonance, you know it. When awesome ideas surface, they come up loud and clear—even when they’re wrong.
6.4.1 People use tools to analyze and create
We take our tools and build things with them. That’s about it.
The tools Michelangelo used to carve David from a block of marble look different than Professor Pedagogue’s tools for solving differential equations. To a silicon-based life-form from Andromeda, a poet’s tools look more like a mathematician’s than a sculptor’s. But in every case, the creator has a huge chest of tools and, as with everything else we do, the tools start out as sticks and rocks, grow more refined, like hammers and chisels, and then become abst
ract, like symbolism and software. We each assemble our tools and put them to work on one form of scratch paper or another—canvas, keyboard, marble, and, as we’ll soon see, beer.
Shortly after we become experts with our tools, we discover their limits. Johnny’s guitar doesn’t limit him, but his mastery of it does. Every new riff extends his abilities, and he digs his canyon of expertise ever deeper and more complex. Our tools become extensions of ourselves. Seriously, many experiments support the idea that Johnny’s guitar will become almost as much a part of him as his hands. You know this, though, because you have your own expertise. For me, even after thirty years playing with my guitar, it’s a foreign object, but my pens, keyboard, and beer mug are extensions of who I am.
We find comfort zones within our own expertise, but eventually a challenge or a desire will pull us out of our comfort zones, out of the canyons where we are experts. Then we have to climb.
Picture yourself climbing up out of the canyon. From your river rut, your challenge looks like an impossible climb; at some point along the way, frustration accumulates; you’re far from the comfort of your river, and then you finally realize that you’ve got a chance. You see the peak; sure, there’s a glacier in the way, but the wind feels like raw potential. When you get to the top of the mountain, back to the place where that metaphorical snow first accumulated, where you first set out to become who you are, you feel brand new. With the wind in your hair and the sun on your face, you can see for miles (kilometers).
The Left Brain Speaks, the Right Brain Laughs Page 14