Who’s afraid of a cognitive neuroscience of creativity?
Introduction
In response to “Hey Yogi, I think we are lost”, Yogi Berra, former player and general manager of the New York Yankees and one of the best sources for meaningless quotes that side of the Atlantic, once reportedly said: “Yeah, but we are making great time.” This, until quite recently, would have described well the state of the experimental study of creativity. To clarify, there has been, no doubt, considerable progress in many areas of creativity research—social, psychological, developmental, historical, and so on—but laboratory-based science aimed at uncovering the fundamental processes, cognitive or neural, that give rise to creative information-processing in the brain has, after leaving port in a rather promising start some 50 years ago, run fully aground. From a perspective of a few steps back, this is stunning. Given the importance of creative thinking in all aspects of society, one would have thought that psychologists attack this research question with much greater resolve.
For one reason or another, the search for the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms of creativity did not develop over the past 50 years like other areas of the psychological sciences—relentlessly forwards and upwards, that is. Following a flurry of activity in the 1960s, work that saw the introduction of several useful theoretical and methodological advances—split brain research, the concepts of divergent thinking or remote associations in a semantic network—creativity has been stuck in a rut. As cognitive psychology, joined by neuroscience some time later, delved into the meat-and-potatoes business of higher mental processes, devising new theories and methods at an ever accelerating rate, the experimental study of creativity, even if we allow for some breathers, held on like grim death to the few ideas and methods it developed in the early days of cognitive psychology. One can readily see this in today’s original research articles. They routinely begin, in 2007 no less, by describing the work of Guilford or Mednik from the 1960s, not as a historical background for the benefit of the reader, but as part of the rationale that sets up the upcoming experiments. In which area of psychology, I ask you, can you still find this on a regular basis? It is ironic that the field of creativity, of all topics, has seen so much perseverance. It is not that this early work is all wrong, oh no; the trouble is that this very respectable first attempt at tackling the problem experimentally has not been developed further, broadly along the same lines as other areas within the domain of cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
This assessment needs to be qualified, as it overstates the case in one critical aspect. It is not strictly true that progress has not been made—it has! But, to add insult to injury, this body of work—the creative cognition approach most prominently among them—has not been adopted widely. Whatever the reason for this oversight by psychologists in general, the result comes out to be nearly the same. That is, after 50 years of exploring only one direction, a direction—divergent thinking—which, to make matters worse, is looking more and more like a cul-de-sac, we have neither a clear conception of the fundamental properties of creative mentation nor a toolkit of methods to get at them.
All this, or so is the hope, is about to change. This precipitates, in my view, that we make use, in a systematic manner, of the extensive knowledge base of cognitive psychology. A solid start here is the creative cognition approach [1]. In its basic conception, it stops the deadly error of seeing creativity as either a monolithic entity or as exclusively one thing but not another, say, the result of defocused but not focused attention. The approach breaks down creativity into its cognitive subcomponents and distributes them, right at the outset, throughout the information-processing system. Only when creativity is parceled out into its various operations can neuroscience get a handle on the issue. If this is not done, we are left with an amorphous monster, such as divergent thinking, that is so broad a construct that it will remain forever intractable by the methods of neuroscience, no matter how high the spatial or temporal resolution of future imaging gizmos. If done properly, however, neuroscience can look for those processes that might differentiate creative from noncreative information-processing at the neural level, which, in turn, can inform explanatory mechanisms at the cognitive level. This, at any rate, is what has made cognitive neuroscience so powerful. There is no reason why this approach shouldn’t work for creativity.
To help this research program along and prevent it from derailing prematurely—or anywhere along the way, really—it is useful, perhaps even necessary, to give a few deep-seated and cherished but ultimately misbegotten and mistaken notions their proper neuroscientific funeral. They must be identified and consciously abandoned because they are not benign crutches for the imagination but pernicious fallacies of thinking that, as long as we keep them, seduce us into taking paths that lead nowhere good. The targets scheduled for demolition in this article are four nested ideas that have long outlived their usefulness.
Section snippets
Four targets scheduled for demolition
Let’s start with outdated idea number 1: Creativity is divergent thinking. People in the field of creativity know, of course, that it isn’t, but the seductive danger of thinking of creativity as a monolithic entity comes nicely into focus here as this mistake somehow keeps on creeping in. The underlying error arises when we, as part of our attempts to operationalize creativity, construct psychometric measures of divergent thinking that we then come to equate, perhaps for lack of alternatives,
Conclusion
In the hope of carving out a niche for the field of creativity, researchers have advanced a number of ideas designed, for the most part, to delineate creativity from ‘ordinary’ cognition. Creative thinking is obviously special in some way and there must be something that makes it so. All in all, those proposed demarcation lines have largely turned out to be theoretical non-starters. Contrasted with their opposites, creativity cannot be identified with divergent thinking, right brains, defocused
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