Hi, My name is Beth Nam. I am a Ph.D. student at Texas A&M University.
Today, I will be presenting about my research called: Hacking the creative mind —
an insight priming tool to facilitate creative problem-solving.
This research stemmed from my own personal interest
after a long struggle with my creative process.
This is my creative process timeline. I’ve been feeling exhausted
by this unnecessary process of “searching” for creativity.
And the critical part of this process is that it does not guarantee
that I will have good outcome at the end after a long search.
I wanted something that was immediate
and scientifically proven to facilitate my creativity.
Creativity is defined as the production of effective novelty
that helps adapting to changes and to solve real-world problems .
If creativity is the whole process of how we
come up with new ideas. During the process,
we might experience an aha moment like a strong feeling of knowing
that comes unexpectedly and suddenly.
This experience is what we call insight, a step along the way of creativity,
but an important one that determines the novelty and the quality of outcomes.
So we don’t want to have just any creativity, we want one with insight.
Given the recent advances in neuroscience, a number of papers have
examined the facilitation of insight through non-invasive brain stimulation
using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS).
The basic concept is that you use electrical charge to stimulate a certain part of the brain.
Based on the evidence that the activation of the right anterior temporal lobe (rATL)
is associated with insight and novel meaning,
the anodal stimulation was applied to the area of the right anterior temporal lobe
and resulted in a significant enhancement in performance with insight problems.
These studies suggest that such tasks benefit from
the release of cognitive control, yet the specificity
of tDCS remains somewhat controversial in the research community.
Studies using tDCS are proven to be most
effective in a lab setting, but it is difficult to apply
such techniques in real-life. It is also challenging
to investigate insight systematically due to its
unexpected and generally unpredictable occurrence.
Taking these into consideration, I wanted to explore the possibility
of cognitive stimulation enhancing insight, not electrical stimulation.
I came up with the following research question.
How can insight be reliably induced by cognitively activating
the purported neural areas that support insight processing?
An exploratory study was set up with a within-subjects design
consists of priming tasks such as types of problems that
are conventionally used in the insight research.
Each priming task was set up to see how it affects the main task.
This indicates a brain and the right anterior temporal lobe
which is a neural correlate of insight. Brain activation wise,
there is no activation in a control condition called "Neutral"
where there is going to be no priming tasks.
And for the treatment conditions, a global and non-affective
perceptual task will be given. It stimulates a broad activation in brain
but not particular, and it will not involve emotions.
For this, number counting task is assigned to
participants with a 21-digit string and a target number to count as a priming task.
Another one is a global affective semantic processing task
which has a broad activation in brain and also affective.
A joke and a punch line will appear on the screen
with a slight time interval.
Lastly, there is local affective perceptual task
where it’s specific to the right anterior temporal lobe and affective.
A picture of a face with a different
facial emotion will be presented on the screen
and participants will be asked to identify the emotions.
Overall, participants are asked to do the priming tasks
and then provide answers to 120 CRA problems.
CRA problems are randomized into
4 blocks of 30 trials each throughout the study.
At the end of each set, the question will be given whether
the solution was reached with insight or with analysis.
I have conducted the experiment with 47 participants so far.
It shows that there is a priming effect as
all the treatment conditions are scored higher than the Neutral condition.
Despite the fact that the FER task was set up to stimulate right anterior temporal lobe,
the Joke condition came in the highest, then NC, and FER.
For the correct answers with insight report,
still the Joke condition was the highest,
then FER, Neutral, and NC was the lowest.
I also saw the gender difference among conditions especially with FER
where female participants did significantly better than male participants.
The significance of the study is that it addresses a novel way to
facilitate insight which there is not much research done in the area
to cognitively induce insight.
Also, this is a non-invasive way to facilitate creativity
where it can be done in a remote setting.
The ultimate goal of this research is to create a real-world application
that users can easily utilize to enhance their creative problem-solving ability
before the main tasks.
Thank you for listening.