Creativity enthusiasts: Birds of a feather?

Creativity has an image problem: So many people who promote it appear to be wackos.

I hope I’m not writing an autobiography here.

Whether I personally fit the description or not, I’ve discovered in the course of normal journalistic research about creativity and the brain science behind it that the subject tends to attract two kinds of people. On one side – in orderly lines – I find sober scientists and policy people for whom creativity is a skill to be deconstructed and analyzed, or a tool/asset to be fostered for its beneficial effects on education, economic activity and emotional health.  On the other side drifts and flits an aviary of colorful mystics and visionaries for whom creativity is the warm updraft beneath their ecstatic wings. To them, it’s the stuff of elaborate belief and thought systems that they want to use, either to set themselves free (probably in the desert with a supply of fingerpaints that they can smear on nearby geographic features while rapturously trance-dancing to old John Tesh tapes), or to recruit armies of followers for their motivational 12-step programs that offer the keys to self-actualization and financial success (only $79.95 for the book and 10-DVD home-instruction course, free T-shirt included!).

Then there’s Allan Snyder.

Snyder heads the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney in Australia. A graduate of  Harvard, MIT and the College of London, he’s also been a Guggenheim Fellow at Yale University’s School of Medicine and a Royal Society Research Fellow at Cambridge University’s Physiology Labratories. He’s hilariously laureled: winner of the 1997 Australia Prize and the 2001 Marconi International Prize for communication and information technology, a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and recipient of its Clifford Patterson Prize for contributions that benefit mankind, a scientific pioneer whose groundbreaking discoveries involve a range of fields – visual neurobiology and optical physics, communications and mind sciences – usually addressed by whole colleges of scholars. In recent years, creativity has become his particular specialty.

He’s evidently a highly respected scientist. And brilliant. But his real genius seems to be for self-promotion.

Take a look at his site. It’s crammed – even  in the video – with color pictures of all the magazines and and news shows that have covered him, pictures of himself with Sir Richard Branson, Nelson Mandela, Baz Luhrmann, Tony Blair, the founders of Google, the Dalai Lama. There’s a celebrity picture gallery, a long list of books and articles with more celebrity pictures. The video says it’s about what the Centre for the Mind does, but it’s also just a series of promotional images of Snyder. In nearly every one of them, he wears what is clearly his current trademark, a fisherman’s cap. It looks consciously eccentric.

 Snyder, right, with Tony Blair

More than a decade ago, Snyder’s studies of the effect of light on the retina, and how the brain processes the incoming images and information, got him interested in autism. Autistic people don’t process information in the same way the rest of us do; in some ways, their brains seem less functional than normal people’s, but certain rare autistic people can exhibit extraordinary, superhuman mental skills of a very specific kind. Called savants, they are the kinds of mathematical and artistic geniuses about whom movies such as “Rain Man” are made. 

What Snyder started wondering, based on both natural and injury-induced brain function, was whether these fantastic creative and mathematical skills were latent in all of us, but appeared only in a very few people because the parts of their brains that would normally block the skills weren’t working.

So Snyder tested his idea by … applying magnets to the left sides of people’s brains to see if they would temporarily become savants.

“Snyder’s ideas sound very New Age. That is why people are skeptical,” said eminent neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, head of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California-San Diego, in the February 2002 issue of Discovery. “I have a more open mind than most of my colleagues simply because I have seen [sudden-onset savant cases] happen.”        

Snyder wanted to see if the magnets would temporarily deactivate a particular brain area and so allow people to more accurately guess the number of objects in a large group.

Apparently, it worked. Since then, Snyder has been making a career out of  the idea that more of us could become what he calls creative “champions” by tapping our inner savants. He’s written a book called ”What Makes a Champion!” about the success secrets of highly accomplished people, held huge celebrity-laden “champion” events – billed as the Olympic Mind Games – before the 2000 and 2008 Olympics in Sydney and Beijing,  and become a fixture on the celebrity circuit, a one-odd-man media phenomenon touting a discovery that sounds about as believable as cold fusion. Or Uri Geller’s bent spoons.

Now, is this good or bad for creativity?

Creativity needs real champions. But while Snyder’s professional credentials ought to silence all cynics, his magical magnets and apparent self-obsession practically hand those cynics lie detectors and public-address systems.

I guess if his discovery ends up making us all geniuses, no one will care how flamboyantly shallow Snyder’s public persona seems. In the meantime, he seems to be enjoying the aviary.

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.