I have a confession to make
I’m actually here by mistake I’m a new
barrel system back in I think it was
2001 I was studying to become yet
another ordinary off-the-rack
numerologist
and then something happened I got a
scholarship to study abroad in New
Zealand at the University of Auckland
for one year but when I came there due
to some random computer mistake I was
not enrolled as a Naropa at the student
instead I was enrolled as a psychology
student and last year psychology student
and I’m not sure what I was thinking but
I was thinking it might be interesting
to see what the brain looks like to a
psychologist so I ended up taking all
the psychologists courses I could find
about how the brain functions but from a
psychologist point of view and I didn’t
know it at the time but neuroscience in
psychology even though this is rather
large research field they were not
communicating especially not at that
time
so things we agree such questions in
psychology and and so the long time ago
within neuroscience and vice-versa
and I didn’t know it at the time that
this taking distant knowledge that
hasn’t been combined before when you
combine that into new recombination that
is actually the essence of creativity
and I’m so lucky that’s what I’m doing
today
I get have a job where I get to take
pictures of the brain if my nose haven’t
revealed that this is a picture of my
brain and I have a job where I get to
look inside humans brains and try to
understand the processes that makes us
be creative and ask questions like why
are some people more creative than
others and perhaps a more interesting
one how can we use this knowledge to
make people more creative and and in
this struggle tries to give you an
update of how far I’ve gotten in this
research and let’s see how that goes
so if you want to understand how
creativity looks like in the brain it’s
actually quite simple and you can say
the creativity is rather complex terms
to studying is about many different
things but the underlying neural process
is actually quite simple and all it’s
about is taking something we already
know and combining it in a new way
you have to realize here that the brain
is not capable of producing new material
from scratch we can only take what we
have in our memory system and then
combine that in different fashions you
could think about your memory system
like a bag of LEGO bricks so you can
take this Lego bricks you can combine
them in an infinite number of ways but
if all your Lego bricks are red you can
only create red structures and that
means that creativity is highly
dependent on the type of information we
have in our memory system but that’s
actually not the real key to creativity
because it doesn’t matter if you have
the coolest Lego bricks in your back if
your brain doesn’t make them available –
and we all know the situation there we
hear some really cool new idea and we’re
thinking wow I why didn’t I get this
this idea I had all the information that
I could so that I could have gotten idea
but I didn’t so it’s all about
understanding how the brain gives us
access to our memory system so let’s
take a word like mosquito here whenever
we see this word or hear a mosquito or
think about mosquito the entire concept
of mosquito is activated within our
memory system and then we believe
there’s a spread of activation
throughout our associative Network where
all information we have that’s
associated to mosquito is also activated
and it makes a lot of sense then we can
access information that we need faster
and you need to understand that the way
that this happens the closest
Association we have are activated to a
higher degree than the more remote
associations and of course it makes
sense but it has the consequence and
when we work creatively trying to solve
some kind of problem the brain will give
us information that it used last time we
were in a similar situation and that’s
quite clever from an evolutionary point
of view because it saves energy but the
brain thinks that we want to solve the
problem the same ways as last time and
if the task is to come up with new
solution we want the exact upset and
this effect is quite easy to demonstrate
this is the study we did quite recently
where we took a hundred and fifty
subjects put them through five
brainstorming sessions and they
generated a little more than 7,000 ideas
and then we evaluate each idea blindly
for the creative value and what we found
is and what’s been found many times
before is that when people brainstorm
this first ideas we get all the same
because when we start brains on the
brain gives us the close association and
those who share it’s not until we get
into the more distantly related
information that we can create
completely new ideas and it also
evidently means that creativity takes
time and this brings me to a very
important point and that is that there’s
two pathways to creativity one thing is
to understand these creative skills and
you can think creatively some people
that have that to a high degree than
others but there’s also a pathway that’s
called hard work persistence and you can
achieve almost the same just by working
hard but what does all of this look like
in the brain and this is really true
this is one of the things that I’ve been
working on it’s it really true that how
our memory system activates information
can that really determine how creative
people are so we did a rather last study
that we published
not so long ago well we’ve took a group
of people put them inside a brain
scanner and we gave them a quite
demanding task that required their full
attention and while they were performing
this task we were showing different kind
of objects in the background this task
was so difficult that this the subjects
they had no idea why they were viewing
these objects they were completely
irrelevant for the task that they were
doing and most of the cyber couldn’t
even remember having seen them
afterwards and then we took the servers
out of the brains camera we gave them a
lot of a battery of creativity tests
where the hats were creatively with
these objects and then we asked what for
me is the ultimate research question is
it possible for this automatic reflexive
way that the brain just perceives an
object coming from this activity predict
creativity and it turned out that we can
to a much higher degree that I would
ever have anticipated in these two areas
of the brain which is part of the
associative memory system we could
predict both quite accurately how many
ideas a person can get with a certain
object and also how creative that person
is and now I know many of you are
thinking
hopefully you’re thinking this is quite
interesting yeah I think it’s
fascinating and you think this this is
some nice pictures of the brain but so
what I can tell you these different
colors that we see in the brain we call
these blobs so you’ll be thinking some
nice blobs he has there but so what what
can we use this information for and the
good news is that is actually kinda
quite easy to mimic what the creative
brain is doing we can do that in many
different ways we can do it with
exercises but what I’ve found is the far
most effective way is by telling people
how the brain functions so we did a
rather last study with 200 students
trying to give them thorough information
about how the memory system work how
they retrieve information how we filter
this information how it works in terms
of creativity and we could see within
two six weeks the people’s creative
ability rose with almost 30 percent and
it seems that once you become aware of
all this how it functions in your brain
you can easily adapt it to the way that
you work and this was in students natan
will try it in professional companies
where people have worked in the same
areas for perhaps a decade working on
the same type of problem once you tell
them how the brain is sometimes working
against them when we once were
creatively the increase of massive up to
70% so now I’ve told you about how we
retrieve information but I’ve also said
the creativity is also about
reconnecting this information and that
brings me to the next point and this is
axis one of the first things I studied
in my career and if you can’t see that’s
me up there not so long ago just a few
years and this is actually one of the
favorite periods in my life because at
the time I was writing music and playing
heavy metal concerts in the evenings to
make a living and during the daytime I
was studying how my brain was enabling
me to do so and you can ask the question
why music impress improvise station why
is this important and to me I think that
music improvisation is one of the best
windows we have into understanding the
creating process in creativity when you
improvise it’s difficult to really
prepare and there’s no time to evaluate
your ideas the only choice you have is
to just play whatever comes to
and this is what it looks like if you
take professional magicians and put them
inside a brain scanner and ask them to
improvise we see activity that’s
particularly related to improvisation in
this frontal part of the brain called
the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex and
compared to control you can see here
that there’s more activity in this area
but that’s actually not completely so
this area is not more activated compared
to control it is less deactivated I know
that’s a little bit complicated to
understand that I will try to share it
here so the neural patterns we found in
professional musicians whenever
improvising were all part of what we
call the brain’s default Network and
this is a network of areas in the brain
that’s active when we’re not doing
anything so when you go home tonight the
line in the couch and do absolutely
nothing this is the areas in the brain
ER will be activated and we all know
this mental state that we’re in that’s
when your mind starts to wander you go
in all different kinds of directions and
seemingly uncontrollable and we know in
normal individuals when we focus on a
task we turn off or turn down all these
spontaneous thoughts so that we can
focus on the task at hand and what we
found with this vision is that somehow
they forget to turn off the spontaneous
thoughts even though they’re focusing on
performing a specific task and the
important thing is that it’s not just
something we saw in professional
musicians we’ve also seen this in absent
an all-night studies of creativity you
see repeatedly creative people somehow
forget to turn off the spontaneous
system while they’re working on a task
and this is much more difficult
challenge so how can we mimic this in
normal people and you can think wouldn’t
it be nice if we could have some kind of
volume control button where we could
churn up the spontaneous thoughts or we
could turn them down even go into focus
mode and this is actually possible
together with my colleague Val de una I
was sitting right down here we spend the
last few years trying to figure out can
we take the neural patterns we have
served in highly creative individuals
and move those over to normal
individuals here we are using a
technology called tes which is
transcranial electrical stimulation and
it’s a sight quite simple technology as
you can see this picture the whole thing
is driven by an
volt battery this is very mild current
that that we put to the brain and is so
mad that it doesn’t actually change how
the neurons fire in the brain as such
but we changed the threshold for when
and your own can fire and that means
that we can preserve the natural
patterns that the neurons are firing we
can preserve people’s natural activity
but we can turn it up or down in the
areas that will stimulate so it does
actually function more or less like a
volume button here’s a picture of a
later prototype we’ll be combining it
with EEG to verify that we can actually
change activity in the brain this is
what it looks like today it’s called
play to work and the company making is
called title science you just open it
and it turns on and you adjust the head
size so I have a rather nice latch if
you put it on make sure you have a good
connection then you check out of your
smartphone turn on and the app that goes
along with it yeah then you’re ready to
stimulate and the device will
automatically take what or not it has a
good connection to the skin and you can
choose the mental note that you want to
be in now this shouldn’t be
misunderstood this is not a magical the
headset that you put it on it will not
make you the new Einstein okay although
not yet but right now what we can do is
we can take people’s natural activity
and we can turn it up or down in these
areas this is a quite old technology
within neuroscience was fairly well
tested and we know that that it changed
brain function is well tested technology
and we can show within laboratories that
we can stimulate people we can make them
better in different kind of tasks we can
even use it to treat depression and this
technologies is rather used in in these
situations but the real question the one
that we are asking is so what about in
real life can people use this in their
daily work so right now we have around
200 people around the world that’s
testing this for us so but we’re doing
this a little bit differently than
normally done so instead of us telling
them how they should use it we’re just
giving it to them and asking them to
tell us how it works in which situation
it works because we think that is
quite a big chance that there will be a
lot of individual of course there will
be many individual differences depending
on what kind of job people do and for
some people work and for some people it
won’t work we develop an online platform
where people can test this and tell us
how it works so this is extremely
exciting times ahead of us I hope that I
have inspired you with this talk and
next time you experience something
random like I did I hope that you will
embrace it and perhaps it will change the life like it did mine thank you
I’m actually here by mistake I’m a new
barrel system back in I think it was
2001 I was studying to become yet
another ordinary off-the-rack
numerologist
and then something happened I got a
scholarship to study abroad in New
Zealand at the University of Auckland
for one year but when I came there due
to some random computer mistake I was
not enrolled as a Naropa at the student
instead I was enrolled as a psychology
student and last year psychology student
and I’m not sure what I was thinking but
I was thinking it might be interesting
to see what the brain looks like to a
psychologist so I ended up taking all
the psychologists courses I could find
about how the brain functions but from a
psychologist point of view and I didn’t
know it at the time but neuroscience in
psychology even though this is rather
large research field they were not
communicating especially not at that
time
so things we agree such questions in
psychology and and so the long time ago
within neuroscience and vice-versa
and I didn’t know it at the time that
this taking distant knowledge that
hasn’t been combined before when you
combine that into new recombination that
is actually the essence of creativity
and I’m so lucky that’s what I’m doing
today
I get have a job where I get to take
pictures of the brain if my nose haven’t
revealed that this is a picture of my
brain and I have a job where I get to
look inside humans brains and try to
understand the processes that makes us
be creative and ask questions like why
are some people more creative than
others and perhaps a more interesting
one how can we use this knowledge to
make people more creative and and in
this struggle tries to give you an
update of how far I’ve gotten in this
research and let’s see how that goes
so if you want to understand how
creativity looks like in the brain it’s
actually quite simple and you can say
the creativity is rather complex terms
to studying is about many different
things but the underlying neural process
is actually quite simple and all it’s
about is taking something we already
know and combining it in a new way
you have to realize here that the brain
is not capable of producing new material
from scratch we can only take what we
have in our memory system and then
combine that in different fashions you
could think about your memory system
like a bag of LEGO bricks so you can
take this Lego bricks you can combine
them in an infinite number of ways but
if all your Lego bricks are red you can
only create red structures and that
means that creativity is highly
dependent on the type of information we
have in our memory system but that’s
actually not the real key to creativity
because it doesn’t matter if you have
the coolest Lego bricks in your back if
your brain doesn’t make them available –
and we all know the situation there we
hear some really cool new idea and we’re
thinking wow I why didn’t I get this
this idea I had all the information that
I could so that I could have gotten idea
but I didn’t so it’s all about
understanding how the brain gives us
access to our memory system so let’s
take a word like mosquito here whenever
we see this word or hear a mosquito or
think about mosquito the entire concept
of mosquito is activated within our
memory system and then we believe
there’s a spread of activation
throughout our associative Network where
all information we have that’s
associated to mosquito is also activated
and it makes a lot of sense then we can
access information that we need faster
and you need to understand that the way
that this happens the closest
Association we have are activated to a
higher degree than the more remote
associations and of course it makes
sense but it has the consequence and
when we work creatively trying to solve
some kind of problem the brain will give
us information that it used last time we
were in a similar situation and that’s
quite clever from an evolutionary point
of view because it saves energy but the
brain thinks that we want to solve the
problem the same ways as last time and
if the task is to come up with new
solution we want the exact upset and
this effect is quite easy to demonstrate
this is the study we did quite recently
where we took a hundred and fifty
subjects put them through five
brainstorming sessions and they
generated a little more than 7,000 ideas
and then we evaluate each idea blindly
for the creative value and what we found
is and what’s been found many times
before is that when people brainstorm
this first ideas we get all the same
because when we start brains on the
brain gives us the close association and
those who share it’s not until we get
into the more distantly related
information that we can create
completely new ideas and it also
evidently means that creativity takes
time and this brings me to a very
important point and that is that there’s
two pathways to creativity one thing is
to understand these creative skills and
you can think creatively some people
that have that to a high degree than
others but there’s also a pathway that’s
called hard work persistence and you can
achieve almost the same just by working
hard but what does all of this look like
in the brain and this is really true
this is one of the things that I’ve been
working on it’s it really true that how
our memory system activates information
can that really determine how creative
people are so we did a rather last study
that we published
not so long ago well we’ve took a group
of people put them inside a brain
scanner and we gave them a quite
demanding task that required their full
attention and while they were performing
this task we were showing different kind
of objects in the background this task
was so difficult that this the subjects
they had no idea why they were viewing
these objects they were completely
irrelevant for the task that they were
doing and most of the cyber couldn’t
even remember having seen them
afterwards and then we took the servers
out of the brains camera we gave them a
lot of a battery of creativity tests
where the hats were creatively with
these objects and then we asked what for
me is the ultimate research question is
it possible for this automatic reflexive
way that the brain just perceives an
object coming from this activity predict
creativity and it turned out that we can
to a much higher degree that I would
ever have anticipated in these two areas
of the brain which is part of the
associative memory system we could
predict both quite accurately how many
ideas a person can get with a certain
object and also how creative that person
is and now I know many of you are
thinking
hopefully you’re thinking this is quite
interesting yeah I think it’s
fascinating and you think this this is
some nice pictures of the brain but so
what I can tell you these different
colors that we see in the brain we call
these blobs so you’ll be thinking some
nice blobs he has there but so what what
can we use this information for and the
good news is that is actually kinda
quite easy to mimic what the creative
brain is doing we can do that in many
different ways we can do it with
exercises but what I’ve found is the far
most effective way is by telling people
how the brain functions so we did a
rather last study with 200 students
trying to give them thorough information
about how the memory system work how
they retrieve information how we filter
this information how it works in terms
of creativity and we could see within
two six weeks the people’s creative
ability rose with almost 30 percent and
it seems that once you become aware of
all this how it functions in your brain
you can easily adapt it to the way that
you work and this was in students natan
will try it in professional companies
where people have worked in the same
areas for perhaps a decade working on
the same type of problem once you tell
them how the brain is sometimes working
against them when we once were
creatively the increase of massive up to
70% so now I’ve told you about how we
retrieve information but I’ve also said
the creativity is also about
reconnecting this information and that
brings me to the next point and this is
axis one of the first things I studied
in my career and if you can’t see that’s
me up there not so long ago just a few
years and this is actually one of the
favorite periods in my life because at
the time I was writing music and playing
heavy metal concerts in the evenings to
make a living and during the daytime I
was studying how my brain was enabling
me to do so and you can ask the question
why music impress improvise station why
is this important and to me I think that
music improvisation is one of the best
windows we have into understanding the
creating process in creativity when you
improvise it’s difficult to really
prepare and there’s no time to evaluate
your ideas the only choice you have is
to just play whatever comes to
and this is what it looks like if you
take professional magicians and put them
inside a brain scanner and ask them to
improvise we see activity that’s
particularly related to improvisation in
this frontal part of the brain called
the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex and
compared to control you can see here
that there’s more activity in this area
but that’s actually not completely so
this area is not more activated compared
to control it is less deactivated I know
that’s a little bit complicated to
understand that I will try to share it
here so the neural patterns we found in
professional musicians whenever
improvising were all part of what we
call the brain’s default Network and
this is a network of areas in the brain
that’s active when we’re not doing
anything so when you go home tonight the
line in the couch and do absolutely
nothing this is the areas in the brain
ER will be activated and we all know
this mental state that we’re in that’s
when your mind starts to wander you go
in all different kinds of directions and
seemingly uncontrollable and we know in
normal individuals when we focus on a
task we turn off or turn down all these
spontaneous thoughts so that we can
focus on the task at hand and what we
found with this vision is that somehow
they forget to turn off the spontaneous
thoughts even though they’re focusing on
performing a specific task and the
important thing is that it’s not just
something we saw in professional
musicians we’ve also seen this in absent
an all-night studies of creativity you
see repeatedly creative people somehow
forget to turn off the spontaneous
system while they’re working on a task
and this is much more difficult
challenge so how can we mimic this in
normal people and you can think wouldn’t
it be nice if we could have some kind of
volume control button where we could
churn up the spontaneous thoughts or we
could turn them down even go into focus
mode and this is actually possible
together with my colleague Val de una I
was sitting right down here we spend the
last few years trying to figure out can
we take the neural patterns we have
served in highly creative individuals
and move those over to normal
individuals here we are using a
technology called tes which is
transcranial electrical stimulation and
it’s a sight quite simple technology as
you can see this picture the whole thing
is driven by an
volt battery this is very mild current
that that we put to the brain and is so
mad that it doesn’t actually change how
the neurons fire in the brain as such
but we changed the threshold for when
and your own can fire and that means
that we can preserve the natural
patterns that the neurons are firing we
can preserve people’s natural activity
but we can turn it up or down in the
areas that will stimulate so it does
actually function more or less like a
volume button here’s a picture of a
later prototype we’ll be combining it
with EEG to verify that we can actually
change activity in the brain this is
what it looks like today it’s called
play to work and the company making is
called title science you just open it
and it turns on and you adjust the head
size so I have a rather nice latch if
you put it on make sure you have a good
connection then you check out of your
smartphone turn on and the app that goes
along with it yeah then you’re ready to
stimulate and the device will
automatically take what or not it has a
good connection to the skin and you can
choose the mental note that you want to
be in now this shouldn’t be
misunderstood this is not a magical the
headset that you put it on it will not
make you the new Einstein okay although
not yet but right now what we can do is
we can take people’s natural activity
and we can turn it up or down in these
areas this is a quite old technology
within neuroscience was fairly well
tested and we know that that it changed
brain function is well tested technology
and we can show within laboratories that
we can stimulate people we can make them
better in different kind of tasks we can
even use it to treat depression and this
technologies is rather used in in these
situations but the real question the one
that we are asking is so what about in
real life can people use this in their
daily work so right now we have around
200 people around the world that’s
testing this for us so but we’re doing
this a little bit differently than
normally done so instead of us telling
them how they should use it we’re just
giving it to them and asking them to
tell us how it works in which situation
it works because we think that is
quite a big chance that there will be a
lot of individual of course there will
be many individual differences depending
on what kind of job people do and for
some people work and for some people it
won’t work we develop an online platform
where people can test this and tell us
how it works so this is extremely
exciting times ahead of us I hope that I
have inspired you with this talk and
next time you experience something
random like I did I hope that you will
embrace it and perhaps it will change the life like it did mine thank you
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