For many, the study of neuroscience may be tied to medicine, psychology and biotechnology, but there is so. Much. More. It provides insight into the complex workings of the human mind. From perception to behavior, psychologist and neuroscientist Dr. Anna Abraham is presenting at Concordia College about how creativity works. ~~ And, Melinda Padilla Lynch expresses excitement in connecting and shares about creating a networking and podcast platform aimed at women in North Dakota, especially those who have moved from other states.
The top four highlights from the interview with Dr. Anna Abraham include:
- The Distinction Between Brain and Mind: Dr. Abraham clarifies the often-interchangeable use of the terms "brain" and "mind," emphasizing the brain as the physical organ and the mind as the mental processes influenced by interactions with the world and broader physiological factors.
- Defining Creativity: She discusses the challenge of defining creativity, currently viewing it as the production of something both novel and satisfying. This definition accounts for the subjective nature of creativity, which may vary between individuals and the collective.
- Neuroscience of Creativity: Dr. Abraham explains the complexity of studying creativity through neuroscience, highlighting the use of indirect methods to study the mind and the absence of a single brain region or network responsible for creativity. Instead, creativity involves dynamic use of the brain, influenced by context, tasks, and individual mood.
- Impact of Training and AI on Creativity: She explores the potential for training in one domain to enhance creativity in another, the evidence of brain plasticity and structural changes with training, and the nuanced impact of AI on creativity. Dr. Abraham expresses concern about AI's potential to deskill fundamental expressive abilities, especially for emerging artists and the next generation.
Dr. Anna Abraham - Transcript
Ashley Thornberg
Our first guest today is Dr. Anna Abraham, the director of the Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development at the University of Georgia, where she also holds positions in psychology and neuroscience. She's lecturing at Concordia College this Thursday at 7 p.m. about the truths and myths of the creative brain. Dr. Abraham, thank you so much for your time today.
Dr. Anna Abraham
Thank you for having me.
Ashley Thornberg
I wonder if a good starting point for this conversation, how does a neuroscientist think about the differences between the brain and the mind?
Dr. Anna Abraham
Oh gosh, okay. They are used interchangeably often, even by scientists, but the way we would distinguish it is the brain is the actual organ, the physical thing within our skulls, so it's the physical, whereas the mind, when we refer to it, is really the mental, what we think largely emanates from the brain but involves our interactions with the world around us, involves our larger physiology beyond the brain and so on.
So we use it interchangeably because it's easy to do so, I would say, but it's very clear that we are talking about very different things there.
Ashley Thornberg
So when it comes to studying the neuroscience of creativity, do you find that the studies are more heavily on the brain end because it's obviously easier to measure, or how do you measure things that are happening in the mind?
Dr. Anna Abraham
Yeah, so it's a great question and it's one that is fraught, I think, because we can only study the mind indirectly by looking at people's behavior and so we can infer what they might be thinking, feeling, why they are doing the things that they do. And the other way we can infer this is through the brain. So usually you might look at brain activity patterns or you might infer based on the size of a particular region or how well connected it is to another region.
So these are all indirect metrics to try and find out a little more about the mind. The mind itself is, it's just not, there's no way that we can directly look at it. And so we have, we use methods, whether they're behavioral or physiological in nature, as carefully as possible to derive as sound conclusions as we can.
Ashley Thornberg
So when you are looking for the hallmarks of a creative brain, a creative mindset, what are you looking for? And let's maybe even start that question with including an accepted definition of what creativity is.
Dr. Anna Abraham
Yes, so the definition itself is, again, something that's up for grabs. I mean, it's something that people have thought about for a very long time. And there are many reasons to kind of think about what's lacking from the definitions that we use.
In the way that I use it currently, and this is pretty current, is the way I see it as something is creative in the extent that it is novel and satisfying. And we can look at it in terms of whether it is you've created an idea, you've come up with an idea that is both new and you find is makes sense, feels good, feels right to you. And if it also then resonates with a wider collective as others.
So you could create something that you quite enjoy and you find very creative, but it's not necessarily the case that I will find that to be creative as well. So, right. So the problem in studying the creative mind is that we have largely looked at the creative mind, not wholly, but largely looked at the creative brain in terms of this external frame of reference.
You do something and then I look at it and think, hmm, is that creative or not? And based on that, I might say, oh, let me look at her brain activity patterns while she's doing this task. So we've missed out a lot of what's the internal frame of reference, what you are going through.
So you could be actually being quite creative. And I'm not really aware of it because I'm using a different yardstick. But that's how we would define it.
And some people would call it novel and effective, novel and valuable, novel and appropriate. But I think the word satisfying sort of captures all of that because we know when we've come up with something that makes sense to us, that feels right to us, that hits what we want it to hit.
Ashley Thornberg
So do you end up looking a lot at sort of creative people's different processes? And I'm wondering, you know, if you go into a study and you want to know the absorption rate of a pharmaceutical on an empty stomach, you can tell someone you cannot eat for six hours. If you came up to me and said, hey, girl, be creative, I would, well, I'd probably freeze in there by showcasing I'm not that creative.
But, you know, some people might need to be creative after a workout. For some people, it's meditation. For some people, it's making tea.
So how can you even set up a study when the creative process can differ so greatly?
Dr. Anna Abraham
I mean, you're absolutely right. Studies can be quite flawed. You can't prompt creativity in a manner that's reliable or even valid.
Right. So one of the approaches you can still try and a lot of people do, as have I, that's one way to say, OK, let me at least try to push a person to be creative. And I see the responses they come up with.
I evaluate them based on what I think is creative or not. And then I look at what happened in their brain then. But another way to do it is to do it kind of obliquely, which is another approach that I've taken and many others have, where you get people to do a variety of different tasks.
And some of the tasks are more generative and others are less so. They're more sort of recollective. And by looking at their brain activity patterns, for instance, when they're doing this generative, imaginative activity compared to something that doesn't require it, you can get a step closer to understanding the creative brain.
So it's not it's not running at it directly. It's getting to it obliquely, so to speak.
Ashley Thornberg
What parts of the brain tend to be most active? And is there a big difference between the male brain and the female brain in your studies?
Dr. Anna Abraham
Oh, in terms of creativity? Well, I think it's the thing about creativity that we know from a couple of decades now of neuroscientific research is that there is no single brain region, no single brain network or single brain activity pattern, so to speak, that is exclusively in place for creativity. What is the case is that we use our minds that are developed for, you know, to receive the word and predict what's going to happen next.
The sort of receptive, perceptive, predictive loop that the brain is constantly engaged in, and we use it for a completely different end when we're trying to be creative, we're using it to generate and explore ideas. And so we're using the mechanics that we have in a very open ended context. So there's no one brain region or brain network.
We use all of our, if anything, what we see is that we use our minds in very dynamic ways, depending on the context, depending on the task, depending on, like you said, what your mood is like, what you're feeling blocked, whether, you know, where you are in the work that you're kind of doing and so on. So there is no easy answer to that because it really depends on what you're trying to do. So you're trying to do something that's more literary in nature, something that's more imagery based and so on and so forth.
And so you can come to specific, a clearer idea of the specifics once you zone in on the specifics of creativity, very much like in the case of memory, when you focus on explicit versus implicit memory. But, yeah, when it comes to gender differences, there are none that we can really show in terms of brain activity patterns. So there's very little work on it.
And some of my own work has shown that there's no real behavioral difference among adults. You know, it's not like women are better than men or men are better than women and so on. But the brain activity patterns look different.
So they're using their networks differently. And this is a very small study. We'll have to see whether it bears out.
But we're just starting to get into the idea of, well, the way I mean, you're trying to come up with a creative idea and I'm trying to come up with a creative idea. We could get the same task, but we're going to approach it quite differently. Right.
Because of our backgrounds and our histories and our unique abilities and so on and so forth. And so our brain activity patterns will look very different depending on the kind of strategies that you are using to come up with a poem about a well and that I might use, for instance. Right.
So so we would see a lot of variances and we're not really anywhere close to understanding how these strategies bear out in terms of differences at the level of neural activity patterns.
Ashley Thornberg
I mean, it sounds like you're trying to take a cloud and turn it into a solid object. Yes.
Dr. Anna Abraham
That's a good description. Exactly.
Ashley Thornberg
We're visiting today with Dr. Anna Abraham. She will be delivering a lecture at Concordia College on February 15th at 7 p.m. on the truths and myths of the creative brain. She is the author of The Neuroscience of Creativity.
Have you seen a difference, Dr. Abraham, in creative brain? And are there ways to strengthen it with creative pursuits? If I take a poem writing class, will it make me more creative, even if it's outside the field of poetry?
Dr. Anna Abraham
Oh, that's a good question. There's very little work that looks at that. So how you're training in one domain improves your capacity in another domain.
There's some limited work to show that in the case of music, that that kind of works. But again, I'm talking like one study that has shown that. And so very few people have looked at that.
Certainly when you are undertaking any kind of training, you see differences and improvements, both behaviorally as well as in terms of brain structure and function. Things change over time. So that's been shown as well in artistic domains as well.
But very few people have ever looked at whether it transfers to another domain.
Ashley Thornberg
You just said brain structure and function and how those change. Are you talking just sort of normal aging or what do you mean by that? Well, I mean, I'm thinking of one study.
Dr. Anna Abraham
I think it was led by Alexander Schlegel. And he this was a couple of years ago. And he compared a group of students who went through a sort of a semester long sort of drawing course compared to those who didn't and looked at, you know, the behavioral lots of metrics.
What did they you know, what was their creativity levels like before they started? What were their brain metrics like when they were doing particular tasks? What was the structural what were their brain structures like before they did these tasks?
And then they followed up three months, I think, later when after they'd gone through weeks and weeks and weeks of training and they showed specific differences in terms of brain structure. They showed, I think, white matter differences in certain parts of the brain, such as the frontal lobe. So even with just three months of training, there were structural differences to be seen, not just, you know.
And of course, that was accompanied by behavioral differences in terms of obviously the drawings got better. Also, their creativity in non-domain related, non-drawing related tasks seem to have improved as well in terms of practical problem solving and so on. So there are studies that show that.
And you would expect that anything that you train, you know, there's a lot of plasticity in the brain, even at the level of adulthood. We can, you know, you can always you can tomorrow learn to do a new task. And it's because, you know, you have neuroplasticity and you can learn new things and you and your brain will change accordingly, you know, in small but very clear ways.
Ashley Thornberg
Would the lecture that you are delivering at Concordia, a small liberal arts four year college, be different at a tech school, for example? Oh, gosh.
Dr. Anna Abraham
No, I don't think so. Well, I mean, I might make it for a four year. I mean, I haven't I don't really tailor it like that unless it's asked for.
So sometimes I get people saying we're in a tech school. We want you to talk about AI then. And then I'll get that in.
But it may not be something that's super interesting for someone, for students in an art school. So I wouldn't bombard them with things that they may not be interested in. But I would I'm very receptive to it.
Well, people say, oh, we're wondering about this. Could you talk about this? And then I would add it on for sure.
Ashley Thornberg
Well, you brought up AI and there are there's so many threads a person could pull with AI. But two of the big camps are, you know, AI is going to take away our ability to to think and to be creative. And then the other people saying AI is just another tool.
I can use it to automate more tasks and then save space for creativity. Is this a is this a both and is that creative people will use it creatively and non creative people won't?
Dr. Anna Abraham
Gosh, it's a big question. And I think there's truth to both things. I'm actually more of a skeptic about these things, but it is just a technology.
But it's a very different kind of technology compared to anything that we've seen before. And it's going to radically alter and is already radically altering our world. It's and I think people like us adults in the world, we maybe find a little bit hard to understand or even think about the effects it's going to have on younger people who come in with this technology.
Right. Because, you know, when I went to school, we had just blackboards. We didn't have computers.
We were writing by hand. When I went to university, it was the same thing. And so we've used all of the hardwired skills that are required when you came to, you know, attending to potentially really boring lectures and taking notes and all of that.
Those skills are very different from, you know, because I had to there was no nothing else there, as did all of my peers. And now it's sort of, you know, you're teaching in very different ways. We have a lot of multimedia at our fingertips.
We have to be entertainers in class a lot. You can't just sit and, you know, lecture on it. Like the kind.
But, you know, I think the thing is we can make things more stimulating. But in some ways we can, I think, push interest. But in other ways, we can take away pretty important capacities that are required to be able to persevere at very hard tasks.
And so when what my fear for AI is, is that by automating a lot, we will stop doing those things that we our brains were basically trained up to do. And then the hard part, the hard part is the creative part, which is coming up with a new idea is not easy. You know, doing creative things takes effort and energy.
And why would you, you know, and if you've not trained up those muscles to really, let's say, persevere, persist, keep trying, getting things wrong, figuring out your unique way of looking at the world, try and articulate something in a way that expresses what you are really feeling or thinking about. If you don't do that and don't spend years trying to perfect that, I don't see how you're going to write that book or write that poetry in a way that is, you know, that captures something about the human condition that no one has before. So my fear for AI is that it will de-skill us in very fundamental ways in expressing ourselves and people who are adults now.
We don't, I don't think we have much to fear there because it's hardwired in us. That's how we, you know, that's how we were brought up. Whereas if you're you start very young and you've never had to construct your own sentences, then, you know, I think it's the de-skilling that is the problem.
And so I think there are ways in which to safeguard against that and to think about when to introduce such techniques, you know, and so on. But it's like saying if you've never learned to sew, do you know how to make your own clothes? You don't, of course.
Ashley Thornberg
Right. But there was a time when... You have to learn the straight stitch first.
Dr. Anna Abraham
Exactly. So but yeah, if you didn't. So those are the things where I think there is, I think, a real worry with regard to creative people.
I know that some people are embracing it and other people are shunning it. And both have their reasons, I imagine, good reasons for doing so. I'm not really that bothered about people who are sort of very...
It's a personal choice, but people are very established creative artists. I worry more about, you know, the new up and coming artists who now there'll be less a need to commission local artists to make the little artworks in libraries and schools or in public playgrounds or whatever it is. You can just get an AI to do that for much cheaper.
So the fact, the cost effectiveness of it will mean that, you know, people who are less eminent will struggle more. And they've always been a struggling profession in terms of the, you know, sheer precariousness of being in artistic professions. And I think that's going to increase.
And that's not a good thing. So I worry for people early on in the profession, the starting off in the professional sphere there and what this might mean for the capability of supporting themselves.
Ashley Thornberg
We're visiting today with Dr. Anna Abraham, the director of the Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development at the University of Georgia. She's coming to Concordia College this coming Thursday to deliver a keynote address at 7 p.m. called The Truths and Myths of the Creative Brain. Dr. Abraham, another thing that can be very difficult to study is emotions. And yet emotions can have a profound impact on someone's creativity. How many times have people been really, really angry? And then somehow that prompted them to finally get to the meat of what they're trying to say.
Yes. Yes. What are you seeing there?
Dr. Anna Abraham
Oh, gosh, I don't see much there, to be honest. I think the I mean, I think it's really, really important, but it's one of the more neglected areas of of creativity. I mean, the people who speak the most about I think the kind of emotionality that you're talking about is drive.
And the person who's spoken very eloquently about that for many years has been Alice Flaherty, who I think is at Harvard and she's a physician there. And she talks about how, you know, at a sort of neurochemical level, what drives creativity and how different emotions can be used to channel creativity. But that's not really been followed up as much in empirical work.
So that's and I think partly it's because it's very hard to study. So the emotional side of things, I think in empirical work on creativity from psychology and neuroscience, the kind of work that I do, we've neglected the emotional side of things quite a bit because we focused on the more, you know, as on the more, let's say, the cerebral side of thinking, creative thinking, you know, as opposed to the and the feeling component gets really all but ignored. And so it's and that's because a lot of creativity research when it comes to how it was started, it grew as an offshoot of intelligence research.
And so its roots are in the thought, the cognitive, the thought aspect of it in terms of problem solving and so on. And I think there's now an emergence of the consideration of emotions and creativity to be to take it more center stage. There's a recent handbook that looks at that.
I think we're just starting to explore that in great in great depth. And that's only because we have chosen to focus on the thinking and not the emotions. And there's very few people who do that in tandem, you know, and this is true of all of psychology.
So you might look at people who are looking at, you know, emotion, emotions, researchers and psychology, and they're not necessarily tying it in with much of what happens in the cognitive sphere. For many people, these are still studied quite separately. And but now it's it's still a growing body now that you see people are sort of, let's say, all of these classical divisions between perception, action, emotion, cognition.
More and more of us are treating them as more fluid.
Ashley Thornberg
Yeah.
Dr. Anna Abraham
And so the future will see a lot of this less sort of separation among these obviously intricately related aspects of our human psychology.
Ashley Thornberg
Is that a natural consequence of more women being involved in science? We're a bit more known for thinking holistically.
Dr. Anna Abraham
Gosh, that's a great question. I have no idea. Suddenly more more women are coming into science.
More women are coming into creativity research as well. It could be a result of that. I have no way of knowing.
Or it could be or it could be a result of some things just take just take some time to get to to get recognized as a need. And sometimes it happens all at once. Some an idea becomes idea gets it's a time for a particular idea.
And then it takes root. And I think for emotions, it's been seen the way it's been studied has been for a long time really rooted in basic emotionality, like fear and sadness and happiness. So the sorts of emotions that we would be thinking about in the creative context, aesthetic emotions, just interest and awe and wonder.
These have been, of course, been explored in the context of aesthetics, but less so the context of the creation of those aesthetic elements. And so slowly it's it's coming full circle, I think. So these things have been studied, but not in the context of creative ideation.
But it will be I for one, I'm getting into that sphere as a as a several others.
Ashley Thornberg
Do you have tips for students or employees to advocate for how to have their creative needs met in either a classroom or a work setting? Sure.
Dr. Anna Abraham
Well, a lot of that a lot of excellent work actually comes from the workplace in terms of what are the conditions that you need in order to be creative? And so one is essentially just the opportunity to explore and to express yourself. That's that's one thing.
A lot of curriculum, a lot of classrooms are not really set up for that. And of course, it can't be in every single classroom, but there's great examinations of the literature of different curricula across colleges and what kinds of courses allow for a more creative engagement in their courses and what don't. So any courses that ask for a more self-reflection get you to have some autonomy in what you choose as a topic to write on, for instance, maybe not complete autonomy, but some choice, something that allows you to learn over the like, get good at something.
So mastery is another factor. But also like what I do in my classes is to really just push for self-reflection. And I mean, not just about oneself, but about everything one is reading, you know, and to to get it to be written.
And so it doesn't have to be super formal because getting it on, you know, getting it out there is what causes you to think deeper. And I think it was I think it was the poet Cecil Day Lewis who said, you know, thinking is writing is thinking or something along those lines like it to to write down something helps you think. And so really giving them the chance to a lot of courses are just focused on multiple choice assessments and stuff like that.
So it's just do you know this or not? And if you move to the kind of classrooms and assessments that say, what do you think about this? Why do you think this way?
Beyond navel gazing, let's say. So that's important to sort of and also to cultivate your unique voice. You know, when you are thinking you are thinking about why am I thinking this or why does it interest me?
And so there's a lot that I don't know how much control students have over over the assessments that they have. But if they look at syllabi, they could look at different courses that they plan to take. They can make informed choices there.
Ashley Thornberg
Dr. Anna Abraham, the author of The Neuroscience of Creativity, speaking this Thursday about the truths and myths of the creative brain at Concordia College at 7 p.m. You can find out more at Anna-Abraham.com. Thank you so much for your time today.
Dr. Anna Abraham
Thank you.
NOTE – AI was used to generate this transcript. That audio of the show is the official record.