Imagine: How Creativity Works Read Online Free PDF Page A

the mid-1990s, when Beeman began studying moments of insight, the standard scientific approach to the subject involved giving people difficult puzzles and asking them questions about how they solved them. “The problem with this method is that everything that leads you to the insight happens unconsciously,” Beeman says. “People have no idea where the insight came from, or what thoughts led them to the solution. They can’t tell you anything about it. The science had hit a wall.” Beeman wanted to extend the research on insight by looking at the phenomenon from the perspective of the brain. He was eager to use the new tools of modern neuroscience, such as PET scans and fMRI machines, to locate the source of epiphanies inside the skull. However, this approach immediately led to a major experimental complication. In order to isolate the brain activity that defined the insight process, Beeman needed to compare moments of insight to answers that arrived by conscious analysis, that is, by people methodically testing ideas one at a time. In conscious analysis, people have a sense of their progress and can accurately explain their thought processes. (The left hemisphere is nothing if not articulate.) The problem is solved through diligence and hard work; when the answer arrives, there is nothing sudden about it.
    Unfortunately, all of the puzzles used by scientists to study insight required insight. Either they were solved in a sudden “Aha!” moment or they weren’t solved at all. Consider this classic problem:
    Marsha and Marjorie were born on the same day of the same month of the same year to the same mother and the same father, yet they are not twins. How is that possible? ( They’re triplets.)
    Or what about this one:
    Rearrange the letters n-e-w-d-o-o-r to make one word. ( The answer is one word.)
    This was Beeman’s challenge: to come up with a set of puzzles that were often solved by insight, but not always. In theory, this would allow him to isolate the unique neural patterns that defined the insight process, since he could compare the brain activity of subjects having epiphanies with that of those relying on ordinary analysis. The puzzles, though, weren’t easy to invent. “It can get pretty frustrating trying to find an experimentally valid brainteaser,” Beeman says. “The puzzles can’t be too hard or too easy, and you need to be able to generate lots of them.” He eventually settled on a series of verbal puzzles that he named compound remote associate problems, or CRAP. The joke is beginning to get old. “Yes, yes, I’m studying CRAP,” Beeman grumbles.
    In his science papers and PowerPoint presentations, Beeman now leaves off the final P.
    The puzzles go like this: A subject is given three different words, such as age, mile, and sand, and asked to think of a single word that can form a compound word or phrase with each of the three. (In this case, the answer is stone: stone age, milestone, sandstone.) The subject has fifteen seconds to solve the question before a new puzzle appears. If he comes up with an answer, he presses the space bar on the keyboard and says whether the answer arrived via insight or analysis. When I participated in the experiment in Beeman’s lab, I found that it was surprisingly easy to differentiate between these two problem-solving possibilities.
    When I solved puzzles with analysis, I tended to sound out each possible combination, cycling through each of the different words that went with age and then seeing if it also worked with mile and then sand. When I came up with a solution, I always double-checked it before pressing the space bar. An insight, by contrast, was instantaneous: the word felt like a revelation.
    Beeman was now ready to start looking for the neural source of insight. He began by having people solve the puzzles while inside an fMRI machine, a brain scanner that monitors changes in blood flow as a rough correlate for changes in neural activity. (Active