Looking for inspiration

People have speculated about their own creativity for centuries — perhaps ever since we became able to think about thinking. Whatever creativity is, it is thinking that results in new ideas and new ways of doing things. The only bit of the creative process we actually know about is the moment of insight, yet creative ideas and projects may incubate beyond our awareness for months. It is not surprising, then, that creativity has long evaded scientific study.

In the early 1970s, it was still seen as a type of intelligence. But when more subtle tests of IQ and creative skills were developed in the 1970s, particularly by the father of creativity testing, Paul Torrance, it became clear that the link was not so simple. Creative people are intelligent — in terms of IQ tests, at least — but only averagely or just above. While it depends on the discipline, in general, having an IQ beyond a certain level does not help boost creativity.

Because of the difficulty of studying the actual process, most early attempts to study creativity concentrated on personality. According to creativity specialist Mark Runco of California State University, the creative personality tends to place a high value on aesthetic qualities and to have broad interests, providing many resources to draw on and knowledge to recombine into novel solutions. “Creatives” have an attraction to complexity and an ability to handle conflict. They are also highly self-motivated — perhaps even a little obsessive — when it comes to realising their ambitions.

But there may be a price to pay for having a creative personality. For centuries, a link has been made between creativity and mental illness. Psychiatrist and author Kay Redfield Jamison of Johns Hopkins University, who herself has bipolar disorder, found that established artists are significantly more likely to have mood disorders. But she also suggests that a switch of mood state might be the key to triggering a creative event, rather than the negative mood itself.

Jordan Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, has carried out work suggesting that the brains of creative people are more open to incoming stimuli than those of less creative types. Our senses are continuously feeding a mass of data into our brains, which have to block most of it to save us from being snowed under. Peterson calls this process latent inhibition and argues that people who have less of it — and who also have a reasonably high IQ — can juggle more of the data, and so may be open to more ideas.

But what of the creative act itself? One of the first studies of the creative brain at work was by Colin Martindale, a psychologist from the University of Maine. Back in 1978, he used a network of scalp electrodes to record the pattern of brain waves as people made up stories. Creativity, he showed, has two stages: inspiration and elaboration, each characterised by very different states of mind. While people were dreaming up their stories, he found their brains were surprisingly quiet. The dominant activity was alpha waves, which is the same sort of brain activity seen in some stages of dreaming or rest. This could explain why sleep and relaxation can help people be creative.

However, when these quiet-minded people were asked to work on their stories, the alpha wave activity dropped off and the brain became busier, revealing increased cortical arousal and more organised thinking. Strikingly, it was the people who showed the biggest difference in brain activity between the two stages who produced the most creative storylines. Nothing in their background brain activity marked them as creative or uncreative. It is as if the less creative person cannot move up a gear. Creativity requires different kinds of thinking, and very creative people move between these states intuitively.

Researchers are now trying to identify some of the specific anatomy of creativity. Brain studies of people with particular types of creativity show, perhaps not surprisingly, that active areas are determined by the specialist knowledge being used. Imagery, spatial awareness, language and so on — whatever the skill, it is localised to some extent to a particular brain part or parts. But it is not just these speciality areas that are active. Using information creatively requires coordination. Creative synthesis demands a new pattern that puts the brain in a state where many areas are simultaneously active. When we concentrate in a less creative way — such as when reading the gas bill — there are fewer active centres and less synthesis.

But to be truly creative needs more than just the right personality and the right brain areas and networks. It is about using them effectively. Skills, situations and our social setting can shape our creativity just as dramatically as the brain resources we are born with. The most creative people also use the different rhythms of the day, the weekends and the holidays to help alter focus and brain state. They may spend two hours at their desk, then go for a walk, because they know that pattern works for them.

Another often-forgotten aspect of creativity is social. Vera John-Steiner of the University of New Mexico says that to be really creative you need strong social networks and trusting relationships, not just active neural networks. One vital characteristic of a “creative”, she says, is that they have at least one other person in their life who does not think they are completely mad.