Jump-starting creativity

How many times have you heard the statements "I’m just not very creative" or "He always thinks outside the box"? People often think of creativity as a trait—a static quality that a lucky few possess and others do not.

But creativity is not only a trait, it’s also a state, points out Adam Green, PhD, an associate professor of psychology at Georgetown University. The same person can be more creative, or less so, depending on the hour of the day, the task at hand or simply whether he or she wants to put in extra effort. Green and his colleagues have even found that if you simply ask people to think more creatively, they’re often able to do so. Now, they are seeking to understand what’s happening in the brain when those "creative juices start flowing"—and whether researchers can tap that knowledge to help people maximize their creative potential.

Green does this work as head of the university’s Laboratory for Relational Cognition, which he founded in 2010 after completing a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at Dartmouth and a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale. He and his students study many aspects of relational thinking—how the human brain makes connections among seemingly unrelated concepts. In recent years, though, they’ve focused increasingly on creativity. At first glance, the two might not seem closely related, but in fact, Green says, relational thinking and analogy-making are key aspects of creativity. For example, when physicist Niels Bohr first depicted the atom as a miniature solar system in 1913, it was both a creative analogy and a brilliant scientific innovation.

Studying creativity is particularly timely, Green believes. "Creative intelligence is increasingly important now—and into the future—because many other aspects of human intelligence are done very well by computers," he says. "If you had a phenomenal memory 200 years ago, that alone would make you intelligent. But today, being an idea generator is what distinguishes the smartest folks."

Creative connections

In his lab, Green measures creativity by looking at the "semantic distance" between the words in an analogy—that is, how closely the words are related in meaning. Semantic distance is complicated to compute—it’s done by computers analyzing vast amounts of English texts to see how words are related to one another. But, Green points out, the idea is relatively intuitive. The words in the analogy "Nose is to scent as tongue is to taste" are not very semantically distant, and so the analogy is not particularly creative. The words in "Nose is to scent as antenna is to signal," on the other hand, are more semantically distant, and thus the analogy is more creative.

In a series of studies over the past decade—funded by the National Science Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation, among others—Green and his colleagues have used fMRI to explore what happens in the brain when people try to make and recognize creative analogies. In one study, they found that when people work with analogies, the process activates a part of the brain called the frontopolar cortex. Green has focused his research on this area ever since (Brain Researchopens in new window, Vol. 1096, No. 1, 2006).

Concurrently, he’s explored the idea of creativity as a state rather than a trait, and whether it’s possible to increase people’s creativity level. In one study, Green and his colleagues showed participants a series of analogies—some valid, with a true relationship between the words (e.g., "nose" is to "scent" as "antenna" is to "signal") and some invalid, with no relationship between the words (e.g., "nose" is to "scent" as "eyelash" is to "mascara"). Then, they asked the participants to identify the valid ones. In some trials, the participants were cued to "think creatively" about the analogies, while in others, they were not. The researchers found that when asked to think creatively, participants were more likely to recognize more creative, semantically distant valid analogies (Intelligenceopens in new window, Vol. 40, No. 6, 2012).

More recently, Green has used fMRI to look at what ­happens in the frontopolar cortex when people consciously bump up their effort to be creative. In one study, he asked people to create as many analogies as possible using a set of words in a word grid. He found that when people were cued to think creatively on the analogy-making task, brain activity in the frontopolar cortex increased compared with when they did the same task but were not asked to think creatively. What’s more, participants whose frontopolar cortex activity increased the most between the two trials also showed the most improvement in making creative analogies (Human Brain Mappingopens in new window, Vol. 36, No. 3, 2015).

And in a study that might seem like science fiction, Green and his colleagues have shown that they can make people more creative by using electromagnetic stimulation (transcranial direct current stimulation, or tDCS) to excite a targeted area of the frontopolar cortex. They asked 31 participants to think creatively while working on two tasks. One was the analogy-making task in which they had to create analogies from a word grid; in the other, they were shown a cue word and given a short time to think of as many other words as possible related to it.

Half the participants received tDCS stimulation while they performed the tasks; the other half wore a sham electrode helmet but did not receive any stimulation. The researchers found that, on average, participants who received tDCS produced more creative analogies, and thought of more semantically distant words related to the cue word, than did the non-tDCS participants (Cerebral Cortexopens in new window, Vol. 27, No. 4, 2017).

The research is fascinating, but Green cautions that it is also early—consumers should not expect to see a scientifically valid tDCS-based "creativity-­enhancing machine" on the market any time soon, he says. But that hasn’t stopped some commercial companies from trying to capitalize on the broader idea that tDCS can enhance human cognition. A growing field of research has linked it to attention, working memory and other aspects of cognition, as well as creativity. Now, commercial companies are marketing tDCS headset systems to video-game players who want to improve their performance and other consumers who are looking for a cognitive boost. But the companies doing so are getting ahead of the science.

"It worries me a lot, because to do tDCS well, there’s a lot of modeling of where the electrical current is going in the different tissues in the head. And without that, it’s almost impossible to know that you’re doing what you think you’re doing."

Mentoring students

Green and his students have begun extending their creativity research in several new directions. Graduate student Rich Daker and undergraduate Rob Cortes, for example, are exploring "creativity anxiety"—the idea that some people feel that they are not good at being creative and that this anxiety may affect their performance. The three have developed a scale to measure creativity anxiety and plan to use it in future research.

Another grad student, Adam Weinberger, is looking at creativity in groups of people. "In the real world, many creative things are done with other people, not in a little bubble," Weinberger says. In a pilot study, he’s observing groups of three to four people as they work on creative tasks, and he’s looking at how the personalities and communication styles of individual group members affect the group’s success.

Undergraduate Paola Mendez, meanwhile, is examining how having a growth versus fixed mindset—how much people believe that their intelligence and other basic traits are malleable versus inflexible—affects performance on creativity tasks.

Ideally, students spend about half of their time working on their own ideas and projects and half contributing to larger, ongoing research. "It’s a good mix. I’ve benefited incredibly from the ideas that have come from students," Green says. "I think that every lab does."

He also tries to stay personally involved in all work going on in the lab. Right now, the lab includes one postdoc, three graduate students and five undergraduate research assistants, as well as a lab manager and a research coordinator. "A huge lab has never been for me—the appeal for me is about really knowing what people are doing and getting directly involved in all the projects," he says.

The lab’s work also extends beyond creativity to other topics under the umbrella of "relational cognition"—how people connect different pieces of information and learn to reason, and to form new concepts and ideas. For instance, lab members are conducting two large interdisciplinary studies in which they are following high school students taking a year-long geoscience course that focuses on developing spatial thinking skills. They’re using fMRI and cognitive tests to assess how the class affected the students’ broader spatial and reasoning abilities.

In another line of research, the lab members are looking at an international sample of participants—from the United States and Afghanistan—to study how performance on basic tests of cognition and perception correlates with religious belief.

They’ve found some intriguing—though preliminary—evidence that in both cultures, people who are more likely to implicitly or subconsciously recognize patterns in tests of basic pattern recognition are also more likely to believe in an "interventionist" God.

If those research subjects seem far-flung, they are. Green says he feels lucky he’s been able to follow his interests where they lead.

"I always expected I would narrow my focus down, but so far I haven’t had to," he says. "If pressed, it might be harder to say what relational cognition isn’t rather than what it is." 

In addition to work within his lab, Green is a co-founder of the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity (SfNCopens in new window), which held its fourth annual convention in March. SfNC seeks to foster research on how creative thinking works by joining the energies of researchers, educators and industry innovators. For more on the society’s work, visit www.tsfnc.orgopens in new window.