Brain a 'creativity machine,' if you use it right

Karen Weintraub | Special for USA TODAY

Scientists have long wanted to understand exactly how our brain allows us to be creative.

Although there is still a lot left to learn, one thing has become clear in recent years: Creativity doesn't live in one spot.

There are sites in the brain dedicated to recognizing faces, moving your left index finger and recoiling from a snake, but having original ideas is a process not a place.

"There is a very high level of cooperation between different parts, different systems of the brain so that they orchestrate this process," said Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist and director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California.

Damasio is leading a panel today on creativity and the brain to launch the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting in San Diego.

There are differences, of course, between creating a painting and creating a new business strategy, writing a symphony or coming up with new ways to comfort a distraught child. But Damasio says they all share the same underpinnings.

Imagination is the cornerstone of creativity. "It's pretty hard to conceive that anyone could be creative without a rich imagination," he says.

Yet imagination depends on memory. Imagining what a new piece of music might sound like requires you to play with bits of music that you carry in your head, to have an understanding of and memory for music so that you can manipulate notes to create something new.

Memory is also required to recognize when something is original, which is an essential, and particularly rewarding, part of creativity.

Emotions are intimately involved in creativity, too, Damasio says. And if the creativity involves finding a new way to get the football across the field or recite a monologue, then many areas of the brain that move the muscles are activated, too.

"All those are different aspects of creativity," he says.

Some people are inherently more creative than others. Very large studies have shown that people with mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder and their close relatives are more likely to be creative than the general population, says Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who is speaking on Damasio's panel.

"I'd be very reluctant to romanticize (mental illness)," she says, but "it has this very interesting relationship to creativity."

People have long sought creativity in drugs and alcohol, but there's no indication, Jamison says, that mood-altering substances can promote creativity.

Some aspects of creativity can be taught or at least exercised, though. "The brain is a creativity machine. You just need to know how to manipulate your software to make it work for you," says Shelley Carson, a researcher and lecturer in psychology at Harvard University and author of Your Creative Brain.

Schools often get blamed for drumming the creativity out of kids. Sometimes that blame is deserved, Carson says, particularly in places where rote memorization is crucial to success. But sometimes kids give up on imagination themselves, around grades three to five, when they naturally become more interested in rules. The trick to keeping creativity going, she says, is helping kids see that rules and imagination are not at odds.

When composer and musician Bruce Adolphe visits schools, he says he often tells children to start a story with an ordinary moment from their everyday lives — and then add a twist that's never happened before. They'll write about brushing their teeth, perhaps, and then a dragon will squeeze out of the toothpaste tube, with the drama taking off from there.

Testing can shut down this creative process, while engaging methods of teaching can spark it, says Adolphe, another panelist, and composer-in-residence Damasio's Brain and Creativity Institute.

The more we understand about the neuroscience of creativity, the better we will be able to teach people to be more creative, Damasio says. "I think people are getting more and more aware that creativity can be strengthened, fostered and encouraged."

TIPS:

•To enhance your creativity, exercise your imagination. One way to do that is to engage in "what-if" games, imagining some difference in the world — like grass turning red or walls learning to talk — and the consequence of that difference.

•Give yourself time every day to think, daydream and turn off the critical, self-censoring parts of your brain — especially by turning off electronic devices. This allows the brain time to digest and synthesize what you've seen and experienced and to process your internal thoughts.

•Cultivate your ability to be in a dreamlike state. To write a piece of music, for instance, you need to think in the music, composer Bruce Adolphe says, rather than thinking about it.

•Practice turning down the critic in your brain — the judgmental side of you that is likely to knock down a new idea the second you have it.

•Get enough sleep. Studies show that creativity declines with lack of sleep.

Sources: Shelley Carson, lecturer at Harvard University and author of Your Creative Brain; Bruce Adolphe, composer-in-residence at the Brain and Creativity Institute.