what are these three people seem to have
in common my almost immediate answer
would be they’re all incredibly creative
and innovative thinkers whose ideas
change the world we have Leonardo da
Vinci who had the original sketches for
a tank and helicopter Albert Einstein
who had the theory of relativity Elan
musk or things such as SpaceX Hyperloop
and Tesla among bunch of other cool
stuff now seeing is how important
creativity is to changing the world
how can we try well follow up questions
soon follow which would be the school’s
help promote creativity in fact enhance
it and the sad answer is actually no and
one of the most popular TED Talks ever
Sir Ken Robinson explains that schools
actually bring students away from
creativity as they go through school
this can hurt them later on as they no
longer have any capacity for creativity
once they’re adults so instead of
letting them be educated how creativity
how can we help promote or in fact
enhance creativity well we first have to
understand creativity itself and by that
I mean where it comes from and how to
measure it so starting off where does
creativity come from seems quite obvious
doesn’t it comes from the brain so and
we want to start measuring creativity we
have to understand how to measure the
brain and its activity to do that we can
measure other brain performance or
neural activity itself so how do we
measure brain performance we can do
these through multiple methods just such
as IQ testing which measures
intelligence guildford measures which
measure diversity and productivity and
ad D and ADHD testing which test
someone’s capability to be focused now
these are all great and they have
correlations to creativity when none of
them give a distinguishable or distinct
measure of creativity let’s say that
this person is more creative than that
one also they don’t really give any data
specifically from the brain itself so
how about brain scanning
we have here f nears or functional ear
near-infrared spectroscopy and fMRI or
functional magnetic resonance imaging
now F nears measures blood to flow
throughout the top surface of the brain
while fMRI measures oxygenated blood
flow throughout the entire bling brain
which gives which give us a good idea of
where where the brain is active during
specific functions now this is a great
you know my problem though is as you can
see the machines used are massive and
not all too accessible so if you want to
measure somebody’s creativity say in a
classroom it’s not gonna work
but then we have eg or
electroencephalography which measures
the distinct electrical frequencies or
electrical signals emitted by the brain
this has much more potential to be
implemented as something portable and
readily available so we talked about a
little more it was created in the early
nineteen hundred’s by Hans Berger and
the most seminal work was also done by
Hans Berger in EEG back in 1924 when he
started to find correlations between
specific brain functions and actual
frequencies that were active this study
was done many more times throughout the
20th century and more correlations were
found such as a delta frequency
correlating to deep sleep the gamma
frequency correlating to deep focus and
the Alpha frequency correlating to
emotions now this type of age analysis
was created in 1924 and still used today
in 2017 even though we’ve had vast
advances in digital signal processing so
why not try something new there’s a lot
taking in this picture so we have a
woman playing cello while her brain
activity is actually being measured
using three EEG sensors on her forehead
which are giving a pinpointed analysis
of her neocortex which has the most
recently evolved part of the human brain
and it correlates the higher brain
functions such as creativity good for me
then
her eg data’s decomposed using a
mathematical method called harmonic
analysis which creates that crazy graph
next to her which gives you over a
hundred functional neural networks
they’re all measured on the activity
level where read would be the most
active and blue would be the least so at
any given time you can see which neural
networks in her brain are actually
active from her neocortex this analysis
then taking a step further as we go as
those channels actually go through a
clustering algorithm to create 80
distinct clusters of concurrent activity
within neural networks it’s a little
tough to see what’s down there right
under the big colorful stuff we’ll have
it on the next slide actually now this
is all created by my father
Nathan trapdoor who is neural researcher
or neuroscience researcher and it’s used
by his company neuro steer to analyze
different brain disorders or
neurological disorders but how can it be
used for creativity how can be used to
help enhance or measure creativity
that’s where I come in this year I
started a project to understand focus
and creativity within the brain using
this technology walked into school saw
some friends asked them to be subjects
pretty simple so them and their parents
gave consent eventually and
yeah they took time and so then I found
specific phone games that when do the
sense of focus or creativity or an
actual when do focus or creativity
within that person so I’d let them sit
there and play phone games while I
recorded their eg dado simple enough but
the idea was to then record that data
and begin to correlate specific clusters
to focus or creativity we only analyzed
the cluster discuss much easier to
analyze one day ad this is active and
that isn’t and not you know activity
levels of over a hundred different
functions so my result so far or I was
also far or not completely there yet
because I’ve had a very small subject
size or sample size and not too much
data but even with that we’re beginning
to see specific correlations which is
what these graphs here show the red bars
show are a number of observations of
each cluster across procrastination and
focus and distribution where
procrastination would be our control
data and so this these two graphs are
actually showing us the difference
between procrastination and focus and
creativity so as I said the red show the
actual number of observations while the
blue on top there show the probability
that that cluster occurred in only
procrastination and not focus or
creativity then on the bottom we have
our statistical significance which are
standard deviations away from a mean of
0.5 where if the probability of each of
these clusters was 0.5 then that cluster
would occur the same amount in both
procrastination and focus on creativity
which means no difference and no
correlations so on the ends here we have
our most statistically significant in
either way which are the channels that
we can actually start to correlate to
other procrastination or focus on
creativity
remember not correlate but actually use
to differentiate the two different
distinct brain functions
we then read did this type of analysis
between focus and creativity themselves
to differentiate those two and we start
seeing
specific channels a specific cluster
sorry that can differentiate whether or
not the person is focused or creative at
any point in time now how can this type
of analysis be used well the idea is
first off and what’s next to keep
collecting data to validate that my
findings are actually correct in some
way you know we only have a few people
it doesn’t work on that well so
afterwards if we can validate I want to
create an application that can help to
enhance creativity altogether this
application would record neural activity
and specific stimuli for any individual
it would then correlate that stimuli to
whether or not the person was creative
or focused throughout the rest of the
day the rest of the week or with the
next hour this could then be used to
help somebody change their lifestyle if
they need to because they see that every
once in a while when they sleep more
they’re more creative throughout the
next day or if they eat chocolate right
before a test helps them focus so it
also be used in a classroom by a teacher
sitting there and seeing which of her
students are not focused or not creative
at any point in time give that specific
stimuli for any student and help induce
that focus or creativity to that student
help them work better or work through a
problem that they’re having trouble with
it could also be used by that teacher to
make sure that their lesson plans are
actually inducing focus or creativity or
helping to enhance creativity within
that student as they see whether or not
it’s doing it based on the application
so hopefully with this type of
technology and research to eventually
bring creativity back into the classroom
and not just let kids keep being
educated out of it thank you [Applause]