Imagine: How Creativity Works Read Online Free PDF Page B

of the right hemisphere just above the ear, became unusually active in the seconds before the epiphany. (It remained silent when people solved the word puzzles by analysis.) The activation of the cortical circuit was sudden and intense, a surge of electricity leading to a rush of blood. Although the precise function of the aSTG
    remains unclear, Beeman wasn’t surprised to see it involved in the insight process. A few previous studies had linked it to aspects of language comprehension, such as the detection of literary themes, the interpretation of metaphors, and the comprehension of jokes.
    Beeman argues that these linguistic skills share a substrate with insight because they require the brain to make a set of distant and original connections. Although most of us have probably never used age, mile, and sand in a sentence before, the aSTG is able to discover the one additional word (stone) that works with all of them. And then, just when we’re about to give up, the answer is whispered into consciousness. “An insight is like finding a needle in a haystack,” Beeman says. “There are a trillion possible connections in the brain, and we have to find the exact right one. Just think of the odds!”
    Sometimes, of course, these long odds are beaten. Because we’ve been stumped, we finally start searching in the correct places, rummaging through the obscure file cabinets of the right hemisphere. And then, if we’re lucky, the search will end with a Anterior Superior Temporal Gyrus
    The prefrontal cortex helps direct the spotlight of attention, keeping us focused on the task at hand.
    3.
    It took a few days to adjust to the quiet of Woodstock. After all, Dylan had gone straight from a frantic rock ’n’ roll tour to a remote rural cabin. He was suddenly alone with nothing but an empty notebook. And there was no need to fill this notebook — Dylan had been relieved of his creative burden. For the first time in years, he didn’t need to worry about his next song. Dylan told his manager that he was going to start working on a novel.
    But then, just when Dylan was most determined to stop creating music, he was overcome with a strange feeling. “It’s a hard thing to describe,” Dylan would later remember. “It’s just this sense that you got something to say.” What he felt was the itch of an imminent insight, the tickle of lyrics that needed to be written down. And so Dylan did the only thing he knew how to do: he grabbed a pencil and started to scribble. Once Dylan began, his hand didn’t stop moving for the next several hours. “I found myself writing this song, this story, this long piece of vomit, twenty pages long,” Dylan said. “I’d never written anything like that before and it suddenly came to me that this is what I should do.” Vomit is the essential word here. Dylan was describing, with characteristic vividness, the uncontrollable rush of a creative insight, that flow of associations that can’t be held back. “I don’t know where my songs come from,” Dylan said. “It’s like a ghost is writing a song. It gives you the song and it goes away. You don’t know what it means.” Once the ghost arrived, all Dylan wanted to do was get out of the way.
    The song that Dylan began writing in Woodstock starts like a children’s story — “Once upon a time” — but it’s no fairy tale.Dylan had no idea where this narrative was going or how it was going to end. And so he decided to blindly follow his imagination, as the ghost led him from one evocative image to the next:
    Once upon a time you dressed so fine You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you? People call, say, “Beware, doll, you’re bound to fall.” You thought they were all kiddin’ you.
    What do these words mean? What is Dylan trying to tell us?
    The song is an angry screed — the poetry critic Christopher Ricks called it an “unlove song” — but who is Dylan yelling at? These questions, of course, don’t have easy