The Hand that Draws the Future - Part 5 of 10

A 2020 publication entitled The Creative Brain by Roger Beaty from the Cognitive Neuroscience of Creativity Lab at Penn State used brain imaging and behavioral experiments to determine how creative thinking works. Specifically, his article examined the part of the brain that directs creative thought and asks the million dollar question: Can creativity be enhanced?

Beaty references recent psychological and neuroscientific experiments and points out that creative thinking requires cognitive effort to overcome the “distraction and stickiness” of prior knowledge in order to devise new ideas. Beaty says “…we can consider general creative thinking as a dynamic interplay between the brain’s memory and control systems. Without memory, our minds would be a blank slate — not conducive to creativity, which requires knowledge and expertise. But without mental control, we wouldn’t be able to push thinking in new directions,”? to imagine experiences and ideas that have not yet occurred.

This mental control needed to push thinking in new directions is what enables us to imagine the future. And this ability to imagine the future is processed by the same region of the brain that is critical to recalling the past: the hippocampus. Using fMRI technology on research participants, Beaty and his team found that memory, imagination and creative thinking all activated the bilateral hippocampus.?

The hippocampus is part of what scientists call the “default network.” The default network is a set of cortical regions deep inside the brain that activates by default when people are in a relaxed state of mind without any cognitive task to do. “When left to our own devices, we tend to engage in all sorts of spontaneous thinking—sometimes referred to as mind-wandering — much of which involves recalling recent experiences and imagining future ones.”

However, spontaneous thinking alone does not necessarily mean that useful or creative ideas will emerge. Creative thinking requires the proactive engagement in what neuroscientists call constructive episodic simulation. Constructive episodic simulation of both memory and imagination involves intentional and flexible recombination of episodic details, such as people, places, and events that we’ve encountered. Simulating future situations using the building blocks of past experiences. Imagining a future experience or idea requires that we actively engage the default network and the hippocampus.

One way to engage the default network is by using a method known as episodic specificity induction (ESI), which has been shown to improve memory retrieval, solving open-ended problems and thinking creatively. ESI is based on the Cognitive Interview system used by law enforcement to induce detailed memory of crime scenes. ESI typically utilizes an oral or written questionnaire focusing on specific and highly detailed recall of the physical environment, people and actions. ESI methods have known to improve recall by up to 28%. Specifically, Beaty found that the episodic induction process boosted activity in the left anterior hippocampus.

But what has all this got to do with drawing by hand? Next up: groundbreaking studies from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology