Nature or nurture? Whatever causes creativity, keep it coming

Though a lot of people who never thought much about it before have begun realizing that creativity is essential to every kind of human success – including the money part that Americans value so much – nobody has a real grasp yet on where creativity comes from.

All over the nation, government leaders, business people and school adminstrators have been moved by their desire to develop a smarter, more capable work force and boost economies. They’ve gotten behind efforts to promote imaginative thinking, seek out and fund innovators and involve artists in teaching and neighborhood redevelopment projects.

They see a use for creativity the way early humans saw a use for fire, without understanding what it is. 

But that’s not their fault, because not even scientists are sure yet. Some, such as V.S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California-San Diego, have postulated that creativity began 20,000-30,000 years ago when neurological structures in the brain finally developed enough to make physical contact with each other, suddenly allowing humans to, in effect, cross-reference their thoughts. Humans could then compare one experience or perception to another and discover likenesses or patterns that helped them understand what they saw more deeply. Using real experiences as a starting point, they could imagine experiences that weren’t real. They could recognize that one thing – an object or image – might represent another quite different thing – an idea. 

 Source credit: www.mindpowerzone.com/article1.htm

They were no longer limited to the literal – they understood metaphor. And so, quite abruptly by evolutionary standards, humans developed religion and art.

But postulating that creativity was the result of brain development is not the same as knowing exactly what the development was and how it works. The scientific theories seem contradictory, to say the least, with some camps scoffing at common lore such as the idea that creative people are right-brained, while others find evidence that seems to support it.

For instance, here’s a story about a study of schizotypy from about three years ago. People with schizotypal personalities – such as Albert Einstein and Emily Dickinson – are somewhat like schizophrenics in their oddities of perceiving, thinking and communicating, but not actually schizophrenic. They also tend to be highly creative. In the study, though all participants showed activity in both brain lobes while creatively engaged, the schizotypes showed much more intense right-brain activity when performing a creative task than both normal people and schizophrenics.

“In the scientific community, the popular idea that creativity exists in the right side of the brain is thought to be ridiculous, because you need both hemispheres of your brain to make novel associations and to perform other creative tasks,” Brad Folley, a Vanderbilt University psychologist who took part in the study, said in a news release. “We found that all three groups, schizotypes, schizophrenics and normal controls, did use both hemispheres when performing creative tasks. But the brain scans of the schizotypes showed a hugely increased activation of the right hemisphere compared to the schizophrenics and the normal controls.”

Interesting. Yet, just today, Peter Chaban , a teacher-researcher at the Hospital for Sick Kids in Toronto, called the idea of right-brain specialization one of the “widely held misconceptions” and ”outdated myths” about creativity.

Chaban does credit cognition in both halves of the brain with some responsibility for creativity, but he gives equal weight to personality and environment – nature and nurture – as well. In his blog, he mildly takes issue with Malcolm Gladwell’s buzzed-about new book, Outliers: The Story of Success, in which Gladwell tries to make the case that creativity is more the result of environmental influences and constant practice than the luck of the wiring in a person’s head. Chaban agrees that external factors have an effect on creative ability. But he asserts that, together, cognition (how your brain functions), personality (high motivation) and environment (outside encouragement) form the three-legged stool on which creativity stands and that without any one of those legs, a person’s creativity will not flourish.   

I’m inclined to suppose that personality is directly related to cognition and that it also affects environment (if you’re disagreeable, are people apt to support and encourage you?), but that’s a topic for someone with actual psychological and sociological chops to pursue. 

What I can say with some authority is that creative people care a great deal less about the cognition and personality sides of it than about the environment. They want and need support and encouragement. So whether or not science catches up to the current economic and educational fascination with the benefits of creativity and proves either that all of us can be extremely creative or that only a few special people can, the ones who are talented right now are just fine with the increasing appreciation and resources they’re getting.