Creativity #3: The Creative Process Tathagat Varma Knowledgepreneur http://thoughtleadership.in

2% body weight, but needs 25% O2 and 20% Calories! Our Brain!

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External Parts of Brain

What is your creative process?

  Think of things that you do when you have to come up with something creative

  What all do you do, in what order…?

  Time: 5 min

Left Brain – Right Brain

  In 60s, some of the research work led to this thinking

  Left brain: Logical, Scientific, etc.

  Right brain: Emotional, Creative, etc.

Left Brain – Right Brain

Left Brain-Right Brain Myth!

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-real-neuroscience-of-creativity/

The Reality!

  Creativity doesn’t involve a single brain region or single side of brain!

  Entire creative process consists of many interacting cognitive processes and emotions

  Depending on the stage of of the creative process, and what you’re trying to create, different brain regions are used, that work as a team to get the job done

Different tasks…

  When you mentally rotate a physical image in your mind, you use Dorsal Attention / Visuospatial Network

  If the task involves language, Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area are more likely to be recruited

  For creative cognition, three networks are critical   Executive Attention Network

  Imagination Network

  Salience Network

Brain and Creative Thinking

  Attention Control Network   Helps us focus

  Imagination Network   Remember the past, and

  Imagine the future

  Construct mental images

Attentional Flexibility Network   Monitoring things around us and inside brains, and

  Switching between earlier two

Executive Attention Network

  Recruited when a task requires focus like a laser, like when you are concentrating on a complex problem, etc. which requires heavy usage of working memory

  Involves efficient and reliable communication between lateral (outer) regions of the prefrontal cortex and areas towards the back (posterior) of the Parietal lobe

  Probably used more heavily in the second phase of creativity – focusing on, checking and sharpening the final product, rather than the initial freeform creative process.

Imagination Network

  According to Randy Buckner and colleagues, the Default Network (referred to here as the Imagination Network) is involved in "constructing dynamic mental simulations based on personal past experiences such as used during remembering, thinking about the future, and generally when imagining alternative perspectives and scenarios to the present."

  The Imagination Network is also involved in social cognition. For instance, when we are imagining what someone else is thinking, this brain network is active.

  Involves areas deep inside the prefrontal cortex and temporal lobe (medial regions), along with communication with various outer and inner regions of the parietal cortex.

Salience Network

  The Salience Network constantly monitors both external events and the internal stream of consciousness and flexibly passes the baton to whatever information is most salient to solving the task at hand.

  This network consists of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortices [dACC] and anterior insular [AI] and is important for dynamic switching between networks.

Attention Control Network and Imagination Network

Neuroscience of Creative Cognition

  In a recent large review, Rex Jung and colleagues provide a "first approximation" regarding how creative cognition might map on to the human brain. Their review suggests that when you want to loosen your associations, allow your mind to roam free, imagine new possibilities, and silence the inner critic, it's good to reduce activation of the Executive Attention Network (a bit, but not completely) and increase activation of the Imagination and Salience Networks. Indeed, recent research on jazz musicians and rappers engaging in creative improvisation suggests that's precisely what is happening in the brain while in a flow state.

  However, sometimes it's important to bring the Executive Attention Network back online, and critically evaluate and implement your creative ideas.

Latent Inhibition

  We get literally billions of inputs. Brain needs to filter out irrelevant information. This ability is known as Latent Inhibition

  Without this subconscious inability to pick and choose what’s relevant to us at that point, we would have to deal with too much of noise!

  a study using high-IQ individuals found that those with lower latent inhibition scores were more likely to be creative.

  The authors wonder whether an innate propensity to be open to experience might play a role in creativity. Simply put, people who are less likely to classify an object or a sound as "irrelevant" are at an advantage when it comes to producing creative, original content.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/306611.php?page=2

Processes behind Creativity   1. Attention “Both for focusing in deep work and sustaining oneself through

thick and thin to finish the creative work, and for flexibly searching in memory and one’s environment for crucial clues to the puzzle.”

  2. Analogy/metaphorical thinking “For connecting knowledge bits that might seem unrelated.”

  3. Network organization of memory “With spreading activation and susceptibility of these activation patterns to be altered by external input, e.g., Priming can overcome Functional fixedness.”

  4. Forgetting “Natural tendency of memories to decay over time (this might be why Incubation helps when you are stuck on a problem, forgetting allows for unproductive thought patterns to decay and stop hogging memory space)”

  5. Imagination “Capacity to construct multiple construals of stimuli, and to flexibly combine bits of memory into novel representations”

http://creativesomething.net/post/57423335221/what-neuroscience-teaches-us-about-creativity

Creative Process?

 1926: The Art of Thought – Graham Wallace

 1940: A Technique for Producing Ideas: the simple five-step formula anyone can use to be more creative in business and in life! – James Webb Young

Wallace

  Extended ideas of the great Physicist Helmholtz’s three stages of formation of new thought by adding the stage 4 of verification

  Refers to work of Henri Pioncare in his book Science and Method

  Stage 1: Preparation

  Stage 2: Incubation

  Stage 3: Illumination

  Stage 4: Verification

Stage 1: Preparation

  Investigate the problem…in all directions

  Hard, conscious, systematic, and fruitless analysis of the problem

Stage 2: Incubation

  The Incubation stage covers two different things, of which   the first is the negative fact that during Incubation we

do not voluntarily or consciously think on the particular problem, and

  the second is the positive fact that a series of unconscious and involuntary mental events may take place during the event.

  No thinking done, but unconscious mental exploration done (Pioncare)

Stage 3: Illumination

  “…the thinker is preparing himself for the solution of a single problem, he will often (particularly if he is working on the very complex material of the social sciences) have several kindred problems in his mind, on all of which the voluntary work of preparation has been, or is being done, and for any of which, at the illumination stage, a solution may present itself.”

  Final idea came “with the same characteristics of conciseness, suddenness, and immediate certainty”

  I shall now discuss the much more difficult question of the degree to which our will can influence the less controllable stage which I have called Illumination. Helmholtz and Pioncare both speak of the appearance of a new idea as instantaneous and unexpected. If we do define the illumination stage as to restrict it to this instantaneous “flash”, it is obvious that we cannot influence it by a direct effort of will; because we can only bring our will bear upon psychological events which lasts for an appreciable time.

Stage 4: Verification

  Validity of the idea is tested, and idea itself was reduced to exact form

  “It never happens that unconscious work supplies readymade the result of a lengthy calculation in which we have only to apply fixed rules

Young

“An idea, I thought, has some of that mysterious quality which romance lends to tales of the sudden appearance of islands in the South Seas.

There, according to ancient mariners, in spots where the charts showed only blue-deep sea – there would suddenly appear a lovely atoll above the surface of the waters. The air of magic hung about it.

And so it is, I thought, with ideas. They appear just as suddenly above the surface of the mind; and with that same air of magic and unaccountability.”

Young

But the scientist knows that the South Sea atoll is the work of countless, unseen coral builders, working below the surface of the sea.

And so I asked myself: “Is an idea, too, like this? Is it only, the final result of a long series of unseen idea-building processes which go on beneath the surface of the conscious mind?

Young

This has brought me to the conclusion that the production of ideas is as definite process as the production of Fords; that the production of ideas, too, runs on an assembly line; that in this production the mind follows an operative technique which can be learned and controlled; and that its effective use is just as much a matter of practice in the technique as is the effective use of any tool.

Young

In learning any art, the important things to learn are, first, Principles; and second, Method. This is true for the art of producing ideas.

So with the art of producing ideas. What is most valuable know is not where to look for a particular idea, but how to train the mind in the method by which the ideas are produced; and how to grasp the principles which are source of all ideas.

Young

  Principles   An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination

of old elements.

  The capacity to bring old elements into new combinations, depends largely on the ability to see relationships.

  Consequently, the habit of mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas.

Process

1.  Gather raw materials 1.  Two kinds: specific and general 2.  In advertising, an idea result from a new combination of specific knowledge about the

products and people, and with general knowledge about life and events.

2.  Masticating the raw materials 1.  Bring facts together and see how they fit 2.  Mental digestive process

3.  Take a break! 1.  Put the problem away, sleep over it, do something else… 2.  Let your unconscious kind work on it

4.  Idea emerges out of nowhere! 1.  Just when or where you least expect it

5.  Shaping and polishing into a practical idea 1.  Share it with the world, submit to criticism 2.  Work like inventor to go through with applying this adapting path of the process.

Recap

  We are just beginning to understand the neuroscience of creativity, and it does NOT involve left brain-right brain!

  Various networks in the brain get triggered in the creative process, quite unconsciously

  However, a creative process can help us streamline how our brain approaches creative problem solving

  In the next class, we we do some creative exercises and play some creative games J

References

http://brainpickings.org/2013/09/06/what-is-creativity/

http://osho.com/highlights-of-oshos-world/what-is-creativity

http://www.ted.com/topics/creativity

http://hbr.org/topic/creativity

http://www.coursera.org/learn/creativity-innovation

http://www.coursera.org/learn/ignite-creativity

http://www.entrepreneur.com/topic/creativity

http://www.coursera.org/learn/creative-problem-solving

http://www.quora.com/The-Arts-What-standards-are-used-to-determine-if-something-is-creative-or-not-and-what-triggers-inspiration

  The Sources of Creativity and Innovation, http://www.fpspi.org/pdf/innovcreativity.pdf

  10 Surprising Facts about how Our Brains Work, https://blog.bufferapp.com/10-surprising-facts-about-how-our-brain-works

References

  For a more creative brain, follow these 5 steps, http://jamesclear.com/five-step-creative-process

  It’s time to bury the idea of the Lone Genius Innovator, https://hbr.org/2016/04/its-time-to-bury-the-idea-of-the-lone-genius-innovator

  The Science of Great Ideas – How to Train your Creative Brain, https://www.fastcompany.com/3022519/work-smart/the-science-of-great-ideas-how-to-train-your-creative-brains

  How much sleep do you really need, http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1812420,00.html

  Do creative people have more bad ideas than average?, https://www.quora.com/Do-creative-people-have-more-bad-ideas-than-average

https://www.quora.com/Why-are-some-people-more-creative-than-others

https://www.fastcodesign.com/3062292/evidence/brainstorming-is-dumb

http://creativesomething.net/post/104671882899/john-cleese-nobody-has-any-idea-at-first

Books

  Orbiting the Giant Hairball – A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace, Gordon MacKenzie

  A Whack on the Side of the Head – How You Can be More Creative, Roger Von Oech

  The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  A Technique for Producing Ideas: the simple five-step formula anyone can use to be more creative in business & in life!, James Webb Young