Here is the full transcript of Nick Skillicorn’s talk titled “The Science of Improving Your Brain’s Creativity” at TEDxDurhamUniversity conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Introduction to Creativity
So, what I’m going to be talking about is creativity, specifically the fact that the majority of people are actually sabotaging themselves, sabotaging their ability to come up with ideas that are going to help them in their lives, help their businesses succeed, help society, and essentially help move society forward.
So, around enhancing your brain’s creativity, this is going to take into account a lot of psychological work that’s been done, a lot of neuroscience, and a lot of information that’s coming from businesses around what actually helps ideas get implemented as well as being generated. So, I want to start off quickly asking, please raise your hands if you consider yourselves to be creative. Okay, quite a few people.
In that case, please raise your hand if you consider yourselves to not be creative. Okay, quite a few people as well. And as well as that, raise your hand if you want to become more creative, if that’s possible. Oh, good, the vast majority of people.
Everyone Is Creative
So, the answer is, everyone is creative. And one of the first myths that I want to dispel is this idea that there’s this segregation between people who are creative and who aren’t creative. And there’s this myth going around popular culture right now about left-brained people versus right-brained people. It’s this idea that if people get damaged to the left hemisphere of their brain, that the right hemisphere takes over and that makes them more creative.
Essentially, this is all rubbish. I had to stop myself there. It’s all rubbish. What insights around functional brain imaging and structural brain imaging are showing us is that all of the brain is actually used when creative inspiration moments take place. Essentially, what’s happening when an idea is being generated is that new connections are being formed between networks of neurons in the brain, both between the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere.
Now, there are slight differences between what the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere do, but the most important thing to realize is they are both involved. So, there’s no such thing as a left-brained person or a right-brained person. Everyone is a both-hemisphere-brained person, and therefore, everyone actually has the ability to use both hemispheres to generate ideas, even if you don’t necessarily consider yourself to be creative compared to other people.
The True Nature of Creativity
But what exactly is creativity? A lot of people think it’s just generating an idea, or some people even think that it’s producing artwork. Well, the actual definition of creativity is along the lines of producing a new idea which has value to someone. And it’s this aspect of value that I want you to think about. It’s very easy to generate ideas. In fact, generating ideas is one of the easiest things to do if you don’t mind them not being very good ideas. But the only ideas that actually make a difference in the world are the ones that add something. They have a value to someone else.
And this could be monetary value in the form of business ideas. It could be social value in the form of a movement that people consider making society better. It could be artistic value and therefore emotional feelings that people get when they see the results of someone’s creativity. But it’s also the productivity aspect of creativity. Generating an idea isn’t enough to be creative. You actually need to execute on that idea, because ideas are fleeting moments. Ideas happen spontaneously and vanish if you don’t do anything with them. So if you’re just going to think that creativity is all about generating ideas, then you’re going to end up not producing much with your life.
The Creative Process and Misconceptions
But are all ideas good? Well, the answer again is no. In fact, the brain is one of the laziest organs that you’re going to meet, because it’s learned to be so advanced that it can take shortcuts when it recognizes what it needs to do. So if you set someone a creativity challenge, essentially asking them to generate an idea, most people’s brains will follow the following sequence. The first ideas that they come up with are actually just memories. So the brain has been taught through practice and experience that if they set a certain challenge or ask a certain question, certain answers will be correct answers. And these are therefore the right answers to give.
So if you set someone a creativity challenge, the first thing that’s going to come into their mind are memories. If you then push people further and say, look, yeah, we know that works, but how about something a bit more special? Then they’ll come up with ordinary ideas. And ordinary ideas are ideas that they know work because they’re very, very similar to memories. Essentially, this could be someone just tweaking a color or tweaking a size of something or doing the same piece of work but in a different location. But fundamentally, it’s still close enough to the safe memory of what’s working to be assured of being correct.
But it’s only when you say to people, “Look, we know those ideas have worked in the past, but they’re not going to be good enough for the next thing we’re trying to do. We need to think of something that’s different.” And that can be quite uncomfortable for a lot of people when you push them past what their initial ideas are. Because at that point, the brain’s kind of thought, “Yeah, I’ve completed my task. I’ve given you the idea. Therefore, I’m going to shut off again.”
If you push it further, it starts then pushing ideas into new territories. And this is where connections get formed in the brain between ideas and memories that didn’t exist previously.
This is where you start getting special ideas, ideas that actually have real value and impact on society. So if having an ordinary idea is something along the lines of you’re a jazz musician and you’ve got a jazz song that you’ve written previously, but you play it again just with a slightly different tune or in a different key, but it’s fundamentally the same song.
Yeah, it’s a different idea, but it’s very similar to the previous one. If you then try and push it further to turn it into a completely new song, that’s a special idea, something that didn’t exist previously, something that has value that didn’t exist previously. Examples of special ideas aren’t just from the arts. It includes everything from the theory of relativity, which fundamentally changed what came before it, to some artistic concepts like impressionism or postmodernism, jazz, bebop, breakdancing, essentially things that change the art form.
And even in business, ideas like the iPhone, ideas like the internal combustion engine, ideas like the wheel are things that didn’t exist beforehand. And these are the ideas that actually have the most value and push people and society forward. So, if you want to have a special idea, there’s been a lot of research in psychology and neuroscience about what’s actually going on in your brain, and essentially there’s four steps that most people’s brains go through. The first one is preparation.
The Four Steps to Creativity
This is about absorbing knowledge and absorbing and understanding and insight around the challenge that you’re facing. Every idea is based and built on knowledge you already have. It’s impossible for you to write a French sonnet or a French poem if you know no French. So that’s why it’s important to understand that ideas don’t just spontaneously arise. They’re being built on in your brain by combining new connections between what you already know.
The second step is incubation, and a lot of people don’t realize this. The majority of ideas happen when you have prepared your brain, taken on board knowledge, but then step away and give it time to actually form those new connections, because 99% of the activity that’s going on in your brain is what you’re not aware of. Everything you do that you’re conscious of, which includes movement, talking, fantasizing, visualizing, all of that actually only takes up 1% of your mental activity based on some science being done at the University College of London.
The other 99%, some of it goes around regulating heart function and the hormone levels in your body, but a lot of it is also about the brain forming these new connections, and it happens subconsciously without you being aware of it. If your brain then forms a new connection that might solve a challenge, and therefore might be a good idea, this is when, after a while, it might come to you as a moment of eureka, a sort of inspiration or illumination moment. And this is why a lot of artists cannot explain where their best ideas came from, because in reality it was happening subconsciously, and then only when an idea, the brain recognized that it might be a good enough one, did it actually visualize it in the form of an idea that then they could work on.
But after you have this moment where you realize you’ve had an idea, it’s then also important to verify this idea. To a degree, your brain does this automatically, thinking, “Okay, no, that won’t work, ignore that,” and sometimes it requires experimentation and tweaking and refining for it to actually turn into something.
Creativity: Nature Versus Nurture
So then why is it that certain people consider themselves more creative than others? Is there actually a difference between certain people being more creative than others? And so there’s this big debate about nurture versus nature. Is there a genetic basis that some people are just naturally more creative and better able to generate ideas than others, or is it all about how you’re brought up at school?
A very famous study happened in the ’70s where people were set a creativity test and an IQ test, and this was done between sets of twins, which allowed them to see whether or not genetics had a factor in determining abilities in people. When it came to the intelligence, the twin test showed that 80% of your intelligence is hereditary, based on your genetics. But only 30% of your creativity was based on your genetics. This meant that 70% of people’s creativity was actually based on aspects that had been built up by their behavior when they were growing up, and were still happening when they were developing now.
So is it all nurture? There was another study that was done asking schoolchildren about whether or not they’re creative. In the second grade, the number of students that answered, “Yes, I am creative,” was 90%. But by the time they reached high school, that had dropped to about 5% to 10%. So there’s something that’s happening between these formative years of preschool and going into your early teens that is essentially drilling out creativity of people. What’s going on?
Well, there’s a lot of theories going around, but one of the main things is that people being taught to give the right answers. And it’s something that you guys are all going through now. A lot of you are doing exams or have just finished exams. And the most important thing is to do things properly to pass the test to move forward in life. A lot of our upbringing is about, well, in schooling, literally testing and giving the right answer and being punished if you give the wrong answer. But it’s also a bit more abstract.
Understanding Creativity and Criticism
Sometimes the fact that when you generate a new idea and you try and explain it, all ideas are still rough when they’re first visualized. And therefore, if you try and explain a new concept to someone and it’s not yet perfect because you haven’t given it the time to refine it, it’s going to sound imperfect. And therefore, the most common response you’re going to get to a new idea is criticism.
People are taught to avoid criticism and to do things properly to succeed in life. So there’s a lot that can be learned from what’s going on in schools that’s essentially drilling people to avoid being creative. So what is the solution? Is art the solution? Should we teach people to all be like artists?
The Role of Art in Creativity
Well, the fact is a lot of artists are some of the most creative people in the world. If you ask a lot of people to name creative people, they would name artists. But not all artists are creative. I know it’s a very controversial statement, especially when I speak to people in my friend group around the opera and within graphic design. But not all art requires creativity.
In fact, a lot of art is actually just copying other people’s art or performing other people’s ideas. Think of the difference between a composer and a violinist performing that person’s music. Think of the difference between a dancer and a choreographer. Or think of this case where you have several people in an Elvis talent show all performing Elvis songs, trying to be as close to Elvis as possible.
Teaching art isn’t the solution. It’s a very, very important aspect of the schooling system, but it’s not the only solution that needs to happen. Countries like China are investing billions of pounds to improve their art education system with the goal of improving their innovativeness as a nation and as a country later on. But if they take the number of artistic pieces as a representation of how innovative their country is actually becoming, it’s a false analogy.
There are other things that relate to creativity more than just being able to perform someone else’s work and being graded that you have the skill and talent to perform it well. So can you actually measure creativity? Can you be objective about it?
Measuring Creativity
And the answer is yes. So everyone who raised their hand saying they want to become more creative earlier, can you just raise your hands again? And can I just have a quick volunteer, someone to jump up? You had your hand up last, so why didn’t you come up quickly?
And essentially, I’m going to give you one of the tests that people in neuroscience and psychology use to judge the creativity rates of someone. And we don’t have that much time left, so I’m going to give you a 30-second version. Here is the razor blade that I used to shave this morning. Can you give me as many uses as you can think of for that razor blade now?
[Audience: You can use it for your hair, you can use it for shaving, you can use it as a decoration. Can use it as a… I’m not creative, am I?] No, you’re actually very creative, so a big hand for her. Essentially, that is a shortened example of a number of creativity tests that set someone a challenge and then measure their responses. She was asked to think of the number of creative uses you can think of for an object, and it’s a standard test to use. And there’s a number of ways you judge people.
First of all, the number of responses you can give in a minute. You gave three in about 20 seconds, which is pretty good. For those of you interested, they’re still working on the average, but it’s looking to be about four individual ideas per minute as being the world average. But as well as the number of ideas, it’s also just important to look at the type of ideas she came up with. If they gave 10 ideas that were all just different colors for the same object, that’s essentially only still one idea.
And then there’s also the ability to look at different responses between different people. So if you take 100 or 1,000 children all doing the same test, you can then see this one child thought of an idea that no one else in that entire group looked at. So you can measure objectively someone’s creativity by a number of different challenges to how many ideas they can generate to a specific challenge. And what’s actually triggering these ideas?
The Neuroscience of Creativity
So a bit of interesting news from neuroscience is that they’re starting to understand what’s going on in your brain when you have ideas. Essentially, just like your heartbeat, your brain has a different frequency depending on how active it is. So when you’re asleep, you’re at what’s called a theta level, where you’re having dreams and your brain’s going a bit haywire. But there’s a natural rhythm.
And as you wake up, you move into what’s called an alpha state. So this is where you’re still quite relaxed. Traditionally, when you’ve just woken up or you’re doing something relaxing like you’re in the shower, you’re exercising, you’re walking, you’re daydreaming, etc. And then when you start to need to focus, especially when you start going to work or studying, your brain becomes really quite active and it moves into this beta state.
And what studies have shown is that different aspects of creativity require different brain activity, and they actually cancel each other out. If you want to generate ideas and have these inspiration moments and allow your brain to form these subconscious new connections, generating ideas actually happens at this low alpha level. But if you want to then be able to focus on those ideas, refine them, and turn them into something that’s valuable and putting them out there to the rest of the world, then you need to have the focusing ability of a beta level.
So what this means is you can’t just stay in one brain activity level forever and assume that you’re going to have the best ideas. You actually need to oscillate between relaxation and focus in order to be able to be creative. But there’s another thing that you probably didn’t realize your brain’s doing, and that’s actually inhibiting your ability to come up with ideas in the first place. There’s a famous study done by Charles Lim in America where he took freestyle rappers and freestyle jazz pianists and put them in an MRI scanner to see what parts of the brain were being activated once they started improvising, essentially coming up with a stream of ideas on the fly.
And what they found is there’s actually a part of the brain that gets deactivated called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. It’s just here in your forehead behind your eyes, and it’s one of the most advanced parts of the human brain. And this part of the brain is essentially controlling impulse control. It’s the sort of brain part that prevents you from doing rash things. And it’s especially important when you’re meeting your in-laws for the first time or you’re in a job interview, but it’s actually filtering everything that’s going on in your brain and therefore preventing ideas from surfacing.
So if you can learn to control your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, it’ll be a lot easier for you to be able to visualize ideas essentially on demand. So when it comes to enhancing your creativity, what can you actually do? Well, there’s temporary solutions, and then there’s long-term solutions. Temporary solutions include getting yourself into an alpha mental state.
Enhancing Creativity: Strategies and Solutions
Things like taking a walk, daydreaming, essentially things that you find relaxing. Different people have different things they like to do. The other thing is changing your surroundings. Some people essentially get stuck in a rut when they have been focusing on the same challenge day after day. It’s actually important to give your brain variety in order for it to be able to re-trigger the ability to form new connections, because otherwise it gets stuck in the focused state and doesn’t allow the subconscious work to happen.
And changing your routine as well. Something as simple as being told to make a sandwich in a new way, studies have shown that can instantly raise your creativity in the short term by about 14%. So walking to school a different way, walking to work a different way, going to different places for lunch, all of these things are changes to your routine.
There’s also long-term changes that you can make if you want to actually get your brain structured to change so it becomes easier for you to become creative on command. So regular creativity challenges. A lot of people do Sudokus. There’s actually creativity aspects challenges that you can do every day in order for you to start forming those new connections more easily in your subconscious.
You can also do improvisation training, or essentially any training that helps you shut off or able to focus your ability to stop your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, to be able to control that inhibition in your brain. And finally, gathering new knowledge and experiences. All ideas and all special ideas are based on knowledge you already have. If you increase the variety of your knowledge outside of your field of specialty, even going and trying things that might scare you a bit, and essentially being curious about other things in the world, that’s going to give you a much larger breadth of knowledge and experience that can form new connections.
So these are all ways that you can enhance your creativity based on what scientists told us. But there’s one last thing I want you to think about. Ideas are worthless unless you actually go and do something with them. So one of the most important parts of creativity is once you actually have an idea, go and actually do something about it. Go and make the world a better place with it. Thank you.