Imagine: How Creativity Works Read Online Free PDF

brain cells consume more energy and oxygen, which triggers the rush of blood.) While fMRI gives scientists a precise spatial map of the brain, the technique suffers from a time delay of several seconds while the blood diffuses across the cortex. “I soon realized that insights happen too fast for fMRI,” Beeman says. “The data was just too messy.”
    That’s when Beeman teamed up with John Kounios, a psychologist at Drexel University. Kounios’s main experimental tool is EEG, or electroencephalography, which measures the waves of electricity produced by the brain. A subject wears a plastic hat filled with greased electrodes — it looks like a bulky shower cap — each of which monitors a specific frequency of neural activity. Because there is no time delay with EEG, Kounios realized that it could be a useful technique for investigating the instantaneousness of insight. Unfortunately, this speed comes at the cost of spatial resolution: the waves of electricity can’t be traced back to their precise sources.
    By combining both techniques — fMRI and EEG — in the same study, Beeman and Kounios were able to deconstruct the epiphany. The first thing they discovered was that, although it seemed like the answer appeared out of nowhere, the brain had been laying the groundwork for the breakthrough. (In his lectures, Beeman likes to quote a dictum of Louis Pasteur: “Chance favors the prepared mind.”) The process began with an intense mental search as the left hemisphere started looking for answers in all the obvious places. Because Beeman and Kounios were giving people word puzzles, they saw additional activation in brain areas related to speech and language. This left-brain thought process, however, quickly got tiring — it took only a few seconds before the subject said he’d reached an impasse and couldn’t think of the right word.
    “Almost all of the possibilities your brain comes up with are going to be wrong,” Beeman says. “There are just so many different connections to consider. And it’s up to you to keep on searching or, if necessary, change strategies and start searching somewhere else.” What happens next is the stumped phase of creativity. Not surprisingly, this phase isn’t very much fun. In the CRA study, for instance, subjects quickly got frustrated by their inability to find the necessary word. They complained to the scientists about the difficulty of the problems and threatened to quit the experiment.
    But these negative feelings are actually an essential part of the process because they signal that it’s time to try a new search strategy. Instead of relying on the literal associations of the left hemisphere, the brain needs to shift activity to the other side, to explore a more unexpected set of associations. It is the struggle that forces us to try something new.
    What’s surprising is that this mental shift often works. Because we feel frustrated, we start to look at problems from a new perspective. “You’ll see people bolt up in their chair and their eyes go all wide,” says Ezra Wegbreit, a graduate student in the Beeman lab who often administers the CRA test. “Sometimes, they even say ‘Aha!’ before they blurt out the answer.” The suddenness of the insight is preceded by an equally sudden burst of brain activity. Thirty milliseconds before the answer erupts into consciousness, there’s a spike of gamma-wave rhythm, which is the highest electrical frequency generated by the brain. Gamma rhythm is believed to come from the binding of neurons: cells distributed across the cortex draw themselves together into a new network that is then able to enter consciousness.
    Where does this burst of gamma waves come from? To answer this question, Beeman and Kounios went back and analyzed the data from their fMRI experiment. That’s when they discovered the “neural correlate of insight”: the anterior superior temporal gyrus (aSTG). This small fold of tissue, located on the surface