Where do imagination and creativity live in the brain – and how can we tap them?
Neuroscientist and author Anna Abraham reveals the three elements of creativity and explores the myths surrounding it.
Phil Stieg: Our guest today is Dr. Anna Abraham, a neuroscientist and renowned expert on one of the most fascinating aspects of the human brain, creativity and imagination. We are here to discuss her most recent book, The Creative Brain: Myths and Truths. She’ll answer some of the most perplexing questions about the creative mind.
Do our brains work differently when creating a poem or painting compared to solving a math problem. What is the relationship between being creative and being intelligent? Why are some people more creative than others? And can we actually improve our own creativity?
Anna, thank you so much for being with us today.
Anna Abraham: Thank you for having me.
Phil Stieg: So when you think of creativity, the word creativity, what does that mean to you and what should the listeners be focusing on?
Anna Abraham: For me, it reflects perhaps the pursuit that we all do, which is to come up with novel or surprising ideas that are in some ways satisfying. And it might be because it satisfies the needs of a particular problem. It might be because, I’m just trying at something and I can see myself getting a little bit better, a little bit better. So the satisfying element, I think, covers all sorts of reasons of why we create in different domains. But it’s really about coming up with ideas and solutions that are novel or surprising, that have some end.
Phil Stieg: And it’s not limited to just the creative arts. It’s creativity in all aspects of life.
Anna Abraham: Absolutely not. Yeah. Creativity is everywhere. It’s just because there’s more degrees of freedom in the arts, that’s why the ubiquitous association is there.
Phil Stieg: Could you tell us what are the two or three main characteristics of a creative individual?
Anna Abraham: From what we know, in terms of internal characteristics, creative people across the sciences and arts, tend to be people who are very curious and open to experience. They’re highly intrinsically motivated, which means they gain a lot of pleasure from doing the creative activity from itself. It’s not like they’re doing it for an external reward of some sort. And the third thing is probably that they’re very dogged, they’re determined, and they’re not averse to risk-taking.
Phil Stieg: Since the creative brain is about myths and truths of creativity, what are the, say, top three myths about creativity?
Anna Abraham: The most widely held myth, is that the right hemisphere of the brain is the seat of creativity and not the left hemisphere. Top held myth number two is that creativity is strongly tied in some way to mental illness. And number three would be a new one that’s all the rage, which is that psychedelic drugs improve creativity.
Phil Stieg: Are there metrics to measure creativity so that we can balance our instinctual feeling with some metric that says, “aha, this is the way it is”?
Anna Abraham: Yes, there are metrics, but they’re all very limited. But the more cognitive type of approach that I’ve been following, is trying to understand the processes that we use when we’re trying to come up with a new idea. How do we use our minds differently when we read a poem, compared to when we recite a poem from memory, compared to when we devise and write a poem? That’s a very different way of looking at things.
Phil Stieg: One of the last chapters in your book is the default mode network. What is that in our brain in terms of creativity?
Anna Abraham: The default mode network has fascinated me for a long time. And it is the network for all of the operations that involve certain aspects of the imagination. The default mode network refers to a cluster of brain regions that are active when we are at rest, or when we’re not really focused on a particular task. Actually, it can even be active when you’re doing something that requires a lot of focus.
So there’s a lot of studies on driving. And when you look at how often people drift away and start to daydream. They’re doing that 70 % of the time when they drive. And we know this from our own experience. Sometimes you drive and think, “how did we get here? I don’t even know what happened.” If you think about it, it’s quite a complicated task, focusing on the road. There’s so much you have to pay attention to. But after years and years of experience, it becomes such an automatic thing, your brain almost has cues that it uses to know when to switch from being almost a conscious focused mode to being a relatively defocused mode.
When it’s in this defocused mode of not particularly being on some goal-directed, very obvious task, it tends to drift away. And it’s the same areas that occur when you’re just taking a break, and that’s why they’re called the default mode networks.
Phil Stieg: It’s the part of the brain that’s active when you’re imagining, when you’re sitting around and going through imaginations, yes?
Anna Abraham: Well yes, but certain types of imagining. To say that the default mode is the imagination network, for instance, is overprescribing-
Phil Stieg: Over simplifying it.
Anna Abraham: Over simplifying the case, exactly.
A lot of the work actually shows us that multiple brain networks are very dynamically working together to come up with a creative response. If you really just think about it, almost like a thought experiment, it makes a lot of sense. Each of these networks are specialized in specific ways. If you’re talking about the cognitive control or central executive network, you use those for goal-directed activities like stopping and going.
The salience network is there to almost code for what is significant in the environment around you or coming up from within you. It’s coding for salience. That’s a different network. And when you’re trying to come up with something new and meaningful, or satisfying to you, which is what creativity is, all of these networks are involved in really dynamic ways.
That makes it really hard to study because one study will show these two networks involved. Another study might show, another couple of networks involved. And actually, even if both of us use the same task, we might approach it differently. I might have some terrible visual imagery, and then my secondary visual cortices aren’t going to be as active as yours. You might have an excellent imagery. We’re doing the same task.
Behaviorally, if you look at it, it may not be very differentiated from each other. But actually, we’ve used our minds differently And that reflects the way in which all of our networks are working together.
We’re trying to come up with something new because it requires going against the known, going beyond the path of least resistance. So then you’re co-opting all of the machinery you have to try and come up with something that’s different from what’s out there.
Phil Stieg: You write a chapter about creativity and madness. Made me think of the movie Amadeus. Is there a link between madness and creativity, or are they two separate channels, and they can cross-talk with each other?
Anna Abraham: There is a link, but that’s not enough for us to make any conclusions because we don’t know much about the why and the how. So the problem with the link is that there seems to be a kind of link. It matters what kind of condition you’re talking about, first of all, and even the kind of artistic professions you might be talking about.
But the main thing there is that even if there is a link, we don’t know the directionality of the link. So we don’t know if something about being an artistic practice is causing mental illness, or something about having a form of mental illness is giving you some positive bias towards the arts. Now, obviously, there’s no case to be made for an all or none effect, because it’s not like all artists have some form of mental insufficiency, or that everyone who is suffering from some form of mental disorder is a renowned creative, eminent person. It’s absolutely not the case.
So the question is, how much should they overlap? What is it exactly? And there’s just wonderfully interesting considerations to think about. All it can tell you is that there is a link
Phil Stieg: So you wouldn’t say that there is a type of psychological difference, like Van Gogh seeing colors in a different way, versus another person, like Steve Jobs, who was extremely creative in computer and AI and all that.
Are there different types of psychological profiles that fit into the different kinds of creative world? Mathematics, engineering, arts, music, things like that.
Anna Abraham: That’s a great question. There’s so few studies that I’ve actually compared-
Phil Stieg
So I can’t pick my madness.
Anna Abraham: Yeah, you can’t pick your madness, the artistic or the scientific. But there are certainly certain artistic groups, if you look at them, they are more vulnerable.
Writers are the most vulnerable. And again, if you just think about why, it makes perfect sense. They do almost everything in isolation. They have to write by themselves. It’s a much more long-drawn process. The reception of the work is not immediate. Somebody else has to open a book and read the whole thing. It’s a much a temporarily drawn-out process.
So it matters what approach are you taking? What is the product that you’re coming up with? What is the value in that? So there’s a lot of effort that goes into it and very little control over the outcome of how it’s received. And so this is something that puts them at risk. The job itself puts them at risk in particular ways.
Phil Stieg: How has the iPad, the cell phone and all that, is there any data on how that has affected creativity?
Anna Abraham: I don’t think there’s any data yet that has looked at it in any really systematic and interesting manner. But if I think about young kids on TikTok and so on, they enter into it as a space where they can express themselves.
In the case of creativity, we have to think about how things start. So let’s say, I am not a sculptor, and I’m going to start today to sculpt actively. Two, three times a week, I’m going to develop my practice. Before the age of phones, for instance, I didn’t have to prove to anybody what I was doing with my time or anything. It’s just a private practice that I did.
A lot of focus now in younger people is that if you don’t show it, it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t work. It’s not even just younger people. It’s even older people, even people my age group. If it’s not out there on the internet, it didn’t really happen. You have to have some footprint out there. And then people comment on it.
And depending on how confident you are, you have a lot of people who can be unnecessarily cruel. And it might stunt your willingness to engage much further. So that’s one danger. The other danger is you could be actually really good at what you do, but it began from a place of intrinsic motivation drive that gave you personal joy. And then you put it out there, and then it becomes a joy about getting recognition.
For a substantial number of people, they know that they want to create things that will generate that external frame. And of course, some people are able to wed their internal and external perfectly well. But for most part, what happens is this homogenization of taste, which is you just do things that everyone will like. So then you flip into this world that’s not particularly creative anymore, it’s about being popular or engaging or all of those things, and less about standing out in a way that points out that, oh, my gosh, there’s some originality here. There’s something novel here.
Interstitial theme music
Narrator: Researchers have been drawn to many aspects of the creative process. Long-time listeners of This Is Your Brain may remember this episode from Season 2, where we asked Dr. Ori Amir the eternal question—what’s so funny?
Phil Stieg: So you’re fundamentally looking at a person’s process of writing a joke? Is what you’re looking at?
Ori Amir: Yes, sir. So I looked into professional comedians, their brain activation during the process of coming up with a funny idea.
Phil Stieg: So what parts of the brain are activated when a comedian is creating a joke?
Ori Amir: The short answer is pretty much everything. But there are areas where the unique things that have to do with writing jokes happen.
So in our experiment what we did was, we shove those comedians into this tube, the MRI machine.
(Voice Inside Comedian’s Head)
“So this is an MRI Machine? Man! Who knew it was going to be so cramped…(MRI machine whirs)
… cramped and really noisy! This would be a bad time to learn I’m claustrophobic…
Ori Amir: So basically they’re lying there, and they’re looking through some mirror where New Yorker cartoons are being displayed. And they basically have to come up with captions in 15 seconds to those cartoons.
(Voice Inside Comedian’s Head)
Ok, so what have we got? A psychiatrist’s office, and there’s an elephant on the couch. Um…“Geez Doc, I wish I could forget sometimes?” No, no. How ‘bout “I’m in the middle of the room and NOBODY will acknowledge that I’m here!”
(rim shot sound effect) Yeah!
Ori Amir So, this is the task.
Phil Stieg: Are your subjects willing? Is this a happy time for them to work with you?
Ori Amir: It beats the alternative to some of the other experiments they could have done.
Phil Stieg: (laughs)
Narrator: Looking for more laughs? You can find a link to the complete comedy episode on our website, www.thisisyourbrain.com
Interstitial closing music.
Phil Stieg: So let’s flip over to psychedelic drugs. There’s a lot of talk about how it enhances your creativity, enhances your insight. What are your thoughts?
Anna Abraham: I think it really depends on the individual, because when we take such drugs, the impact of these drugs is very varied. You and I can take something today, and we will have a very different response to it. There will be aspects of our experience that are similar, but many aspects of it that are dissimilar.
In terms of the way we make sense of the world and so on, we have the same machinery, but we have very different worldviews. The way we see things is very different. And so any drug that is going to get in there to distort your perception of your reality, your meaning making, is therefore going to have quite an individual effect on how you use that information, how it can influence you later.
In fact, there’s great studies of artists on drugs trying to draw and stuff, and it’s hilarious what comes out of there, right? In the moment of the experience, you’re not actually interested in doing anything because it’s this profound perceptual meaningful experience. But if it changes the way you see the world, or you engage with the world, it can have an indirect effect on your creativity. But this is individual.
Phil Stieg: But the specific thing, I think I picked up from your book, is the individual who has an openness to the possibility that the drug will have a positive effect, versus a control freak who won’t respond as positively. That’s true?
Anna Abraham: I’m glad you said that because there’s not really any studies that assess people’s openness in real-time. So openness to experience is a singular personality trait that is strongly predictive of creativity, creative potential, creative achievement across age groups, from the youngest to the oldest person. And of course, open people are open to experience, including taking psychedelic drugs.
You sign in for these experiments, which means you’re actually open. So what you need to factor out is, if there are improvements, how much of this improvement can be attributed to the drug taking, versus the openness, versus an interaction between the two. And really, there’s not really been a study to do that, which is so surprising, but that would-
Phil Stieg: That’s your next study. You got to do that!
Anna Abraham: Yeah, give me some psychedelics.
Phil Stieg: Some grant money (laughs).
With all the conversation about artificial intelligence, are we learning anything about creativity by studying AI, or in making AI creative? Because it has to be creative in terms of the large language models and being able to beat us now in chess regularly?
Anna Abraham: Yeah. Well, I look at AI as an alien, really. So, there are things that it can do really well, way better than us. And I don’t argue against the possibility of AI being creative. I think it’s clear in a few instances that it has been. At the moment, there’s so much hype about it all being creative.
If you take the definition of creativity to be what is called a standard definition, the production of responses that are novel and effective, then you can’t deny it. It’s there. Not all of what we see is, absolutely not, but there are enough indications. But what’s important is it doesn’t do things like we do.
Phil Stieg: So there’s no way with current science that we’re going to learn about our creativity by creating a creative computer?
Anna Abraham: No, because our machinery, if you want to talk about our bodies as machinery, is fundamentally different. And the analogy I like to give is that of hot water, a cup of hot water. Let’s say we want a cup of hot water, we look at it and we think of an AI system made that cup of hot water, and Anna Abraham made this cup of hot water. But perhaps if I’m a hunter-gatherer, I had to rub sticks together and create a container that would heat that water. And all of that, that’s what my mind did. Whereas the AI is more like a kettle. It’s been designed to do that.
Just because the outcome looks similar, it doesn’t mean the process is similar. The process is completely different. It has absolutely no relation to each other. And so this is a conflation of process and product that we constantly do. And again, because we’re storytellers, because we’re story listeners, we look at that and we assume, we reflect backwards, we assume the same intentionality, the same agency, and we are mesmerized by AI at the moment. There’s good reason to be. It is spectacular what achievements there are. But it’s an error to think of it as…just because we use the word intelligence or imagination, sometimes you have artificial consciousness. It doesn’t mean it’s the same thing. It’s very, very different.
Phil Stieg: It’s a myth in development. Tell me about the creative mind in terms of slowing down the aging process, maintaining plasticity and maintaining memory, is it important?
Anna Abraham: I think so, yes.
Phil Stieg: What’s the evidence for that?
Anna Abraham: There’s so much evidence to show us that creativity is both really fundamental to our brain and psychological makeup and can be used to keep us on our toes, so to speak, as we age.
The evidence comes from very differing pockets. Let’s say music and music making. So let’s say melodic intonation therapy to treat certain forms of aphasia, which is a disruption of language production. So speech therapy doesn’t work in those cases because their speech networks are broken. But because the speech networks and music networks partially overlap, you can facilitate some degree of function in that broken network using music therapy. So the rehabilitative part is protective, is enhancing. That speaks to one aspect of it.
The second aspect is to look at artists who develop some form of neurological disorders. It’s clear that even if artists suffer from different forms of disorders, barring something seriously going wrong with their capacity to get out of bed, move at all, they continue to create. Their styles might change, their productivity might reduce, but they create.
There’s something about creativity that is much deeper.
We think of it as the highest order process. That’s actually not the way to think about it. We have to think about it as a really fundamental drive that begins with our instinct to explore the world that we have as newborns, to make sense of and explore. That’s where it begins. It’s not something that maps on to something bigger. It uses everything we develop in order to strengthen itself and grow and become what it is. But it starts from this, capacity that we have, which is to explore. And so it’s very hard to break. It’s very hard to break. That’s one thing.
And secondly, especially the artists who are the least vulnerable, are usually the ones who have a lot of practice. If you look at musicians, they are the least vulnerable. And that’s because of the amount of training they have to do on a daily basis to just keep up, just maintain their level, really strengthens their networks. And because music is so multimodal, it impacts the auditory system, the visual system, the tactile system, the semantic system, the emotional, everything. It is very protective because of that. It influences everything. It’s not just one little thing.
And the fourth line of evidence is if you look at aging and its impact on creativity. Now, most things go, sadly, into cognitive decline. We’re slower, certain aspects of our memory function start to decline and so on. Creativity, though, is really resilient. There’s not enough evidence at all to suggest that we decline. It looks like it can be maintained.
Some of my own work has shown that older participants, if you’re looking at practical creative problem solving, they’re way better than younger adults in coming up with lots of uses and highly original uses.
My next step is to think, oh, you know what they did with music therapy and aphasia? Could we make a bigger argument for using creative tools to rehabilitate memory functions? Because we tend to see a lot of work on creativity and well-being supporting that. In the art therapy world or music therapy world.
All sorts of practices stabilize all aspects of well-being, physical, intellectual, and emotional well-being across populations, clinical or un-clinical.
Phil Stieg: Based on that answer, I think it’s safe for me to assume that you believe that all of us can be creative. But creativity, as you said, comes with hard work and practice. Is that correct?
Anna Abraham: Yes. we are all creative, and it is a practice. The best work on this that I’ve seen is Twylla Tharp’s The Creative Habit. Everyone looks at people who achieved eminent things. And you mentioned Steve Jobs, Mozart, all these people. And even Mozart, the amount of practice and exposure and training and just diligence a person has to put in to get to those levels, we just don’t see that. So it’s not part of the story that we tell ourselves. We don’t see them struggle.
Phil Stieg: So is there any link between the creative spirit and the diligence or perseverance of the creative person? Are they co-linked?
Anna Abraham: You would be amazed that there’s almost no work on that, right? Because we have these ideas about geniuses who have God whispering to them in their ears. And there are certainly people who are very talented and take immediately to a specific task. No question. But they have to work on their craft. And what really sets them apart is this perseverance side, this incredible drive and interest in what they do. And you can see this really well in the case of much older people as well.
So Grandma Moses is a great example. She started to paint at the age of 78 and became an acclaimed artist in her own right. I don’t know how many American museums and so on. Seventy-eight. And before that, she didn’t really do anything in the arts. She did a lot of embroidery. The reason she turned to the arts was because she wasn’t able to embroider anymore because of arthritic conditions and so on. And my gosh, look what she made of herself.
We don’t like that story as much because there’s something about creativity we want it to seem incredibly magical. There’s something about creativity because it looks as immensely impressive as it is, what we want is an impressive, magical story to go with it. And this is just completely untenable.
Phil Stieg: I’m glad I hear that I have something to look forward to in my life. Drawing upon the quote from Thomas Edison, that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. I presume you would agree with that?
Anna Abraham: Absolutely. I think they’re so intertwined. Genius, I think, partly has to do with what you’re drawn to and what you can do, what you’re capable of. And the other thing is just the level of investment you’re able to put in is enormous. And that part of genius doesn’t get talked about, which is the perspiration bit.
Phil Stieg: Dr. Dr. Anna Abraham, thank you for spending this time with us and reviewing your book, The Creative Brain: Myths and Truths.
I’ve learned we all have it. It takes perseverance, but most of all, and most importantly, it’s achievable for every one of us and makes us feel good about ourselves and makes people happy to be around us.
Thank you so much for spending time with us.
Anna Abraham: Thank you for having me. It’s been delightful.
Additional Resources