RAINN WILSON: Creativity is absolutely for everyone.
I firmly believe this.
I think if you're the driest accountant with the plastic pocket pen protector it's in how
you interact with the world.
There's artistry in everything that we do.
ANTHONY BRANDT: The fact of the matter is we all are born with a creative license.
We have this software running in our brains.
DAVID EAGLEMAN: What is it that's special about the human brain that allows creativity
to happen?
Because when you look at us compared to all the other species on the earth we have very
similar brains.
I mean obviously we're cousins with our nearest neighbors and all throughout the animal kingdom,
it's a continuous family tree, but we're running around the planet doing something unbelievable.
You don't have squirrels going to the moon or dogs inventing the Internet or cows doing
theater plays for one another or any of the gajillion things that we do.
What is below all of that?
What is the basic cognitive software that's running in the human brain that takes ideas
in and smushes them up and crunches them.
It's like a food processor that's constantly spitting out new ideas.
SCOTT BARRY KAUFMAN: So, many of you might have heard of the left brain right brain myth
about creativity, that the left brain is not related to creativity much at all because
it's really boring and logical and super serious and analytical, and that the right brain is
where all the artistic beauty comes out and it's very poetic.
Well, the reality is that creativity involves an interaction of lots of different brain
networks that rely on both the left side and the right side of the brain.
WENDY SUZUKI: It really is the most creative people are using both sides of the brain together.
So, this is an important concept that the brain is subdivided into two major hemispheres.
We have two of each structure, almost all the structures of our brain are paired.
So, the idea is well one side of the brain is for certain things and the other side of
the brain is important for other things and the one thing we can say for sure is yes language
is on the left side of the brain.
But for creativity it actually makes more sense to me that with a function so broad
as that you would benefit from having the most crosstalk possible between all parts
of your brain, in fact that's what the neuroscience is showing.
KAUFMAN: When you have lots of different parts of the brain that are communicating with each
other to solve a certain task then it's called a brain network.
And you find that creativity draws on multiple interacting brain networks.
In particular it draws on three brain networks that seem to be absolutely essential to creativity
across whatever field it is, whether it's science or its art.
One of those brain networks that is important is what's called the executive attention network.
And the executive attention network allows you to integrate lots of information in your
head at one time, hold stuff in your working memory, maintain strategies that you're currently
working on at one time so you don't forget what your strategy is or forget what you already
did and then redo it.
The executive attention network it's also helpful for inhibiting the obvious responses
or the first things that comes to your mind.
And so, creativity is important to access remote associations so the executive attention
network is going to be helpful to inhibit the most immediate obvious things that come
to mind.
People who are very good improv artists, for instance, the first thing that comes to their
mind is usually not the most creative so they tend to like wait for the second or third
thing and that's one of the improv activities.
So, the second major brain network that's important is the default mode network, but
I like to call it the imagination network because it's highly active every time we turn
our attention our focus of attention inward and we focus on our daydreams, we focus on
our future goals, on whenever we're trying to take the perspective of someone else.
So, it's very important for having compassion for someone else because it allows us to imagine
what someone else is thinking or feeling and so that's the imagination brain network.
And then the third major brain network that's important for creativity that I think is a
very underrated brain network it's called the salience brain network.
And that's associated with what is most salient in our environment?
What is most interesting to us?
Before we think through consciously about a creative activity and even before we activate
our imagination there's a process before both of that where we have a subconscious process
where the salient brain network tags things as interesting or not interesting in our environment
and it either feeds it to our imagination network or to our executive attention network
to pay attention to.
Creativity involves the interaction of all three, it's when we're captivated by the moment,
we're mindful, but we're also imaginative and we're also motivated and passionate to
engage in the creative activity.
EAGLEMAN: What's special about the human brain is that during the evolution of the cortex
got a lot more space between input and output.
So, other animals have these much closer together so when they get some stimulus they make essentially
a reflexive response.
In humans as the cortex expanded there's a lot more room there which means that inputs
can come in and sort of percolate around and get stored and get thought about and then
maybe you make an output or maybe you don't.
And there's one other thing that happened with the expansion of the cortex, which is
that we got a much bigger prefrontal cortex, that's the part right behind the forehead,
and that is what allows us to simulate what if's, to separate ourselves from our location
in space and time and think about possibilities.
What if I did that?
What if I had done that?
What if I could do that?
And so, we do this all of the time and the amazing part is now there are almost 8 billion
brains running around the planet and as a result creativity, I mean the creativity of
our species has gone up in this mad, amazing way because there's so much raw material to
draw on and there are so many of us that are constantly saying what if this, what if that?
BRANDT: When I look at my heroes in composition they are all incredible risk-takers.
And it's a constant reminder that you can introduce something new to the world and be
certain of the results.
And so, tolerating the risks, living with the risk, even enjoying it is, again, part
of being a creative person.
KAUFMAN: Creativity requires both intelligence and imagination.
Creativity requires our ability to know what has come before so we can stand on the shoulders
of giants, it also requires the ability to have great foresight and vision to imagine
the world the way that it could be and when we combined the two I think that makes us
much more likely we'll have creativity.
ETHAN HAWKE: The beauty of jazz music is that there's no plan.
There's a plan, there's an architecture.
Let's take something obvious like my favorite things, John Coltrane is my favorite things.
If people know one jazz thing often they'll know that one.
And he takes this famous song and they all start riffing on it and the musicians start
riffing on it and they find a new melody inside it and it changes and it changes and then
mysteriously comes back around again.
And spontaneity mixed with discipline and intelligence it evolves into something you
cannot plan that is more sophisticated and more interesting than something the intellectual
mind can plan.
When you're really being creative at your best you've used your discipline to open up
your subconscious.
WILSON: If it's a pure expression of yourself no matter what it is or what medium, it's
going to shine.
It's going to resonate.
You could look inside of yourself and you can have a canvas and you can paint a dot
in it, but if that's where your creative purpose is taking you then it needs to be that dot.
EAGLEMAN: We are vessels of our own space and time so the particular things we create
have to do with what we have absorbed.
So, if you compare 19th century Japanese music to 19th century French music to 19th century
Kenyon music and so on, you'll see these are extremely different but it's not that a composer
over here couldn't have done what a composer over here was doing, it's simply that it wouldn't
have stuck in their culture, it would have been strange and wouldn't make sense.
Why?
Because what we're doing is building on the foundations of what has come before us.
HAWKE: In a way you're channeling yourself and you're channeling your own questions and
your own seeking, which is deeply connected to your own.
We all have it.
We all have an essence, a center that is us.
We have it the day we're born and when you can access it then you can access the subconscious
and that's going to be more powerful and more true than anything your intellectual mind
has to say.
BEAU LOTTO: Because nothing interesting begins with knowing, it begins with not knowing.
Uncertainty is such a difficult dangerous thing that evolution has created a brain that
tries to avoid it all together to the extent that we have things like conformational bias.
Well, we'll start looking for evidence to confirm what we assume to be true already,
that we would rather hold onto assumptions that we know don't work because that is safer
we think than questioning them and stepping to a place that we don't actually know.
We do almost everything to avoid uncertainty and yet the irony is that that's the only
place we can go if we're ever going to see it differently.
And that's why creativity, seeing differently, always begins in the same way it begins with
a question, it begins with not knowing, it begins with a why, it begins with a what if.
EAGLEMAN: What good creators do is they cover the spectrum, this is as true of individuals
as it is for companies, they cover the spectrum where they're doing some things that are sort
of nearby and some things that are wackier and wackier and this is how they feel out
the border of the possible, this is how they figure out what's going to stick with their
society.
Because the thing about any sort of creative act is that you never know what's going to
stick, what will actually make a difference in your society.
SUZUKI: Then the question is, well, how do I up my creativity?
That's what everybody is interested in.
EAGLEMAN: The key is that humans are really different from one another and for one person
taking a hot shower might work and for another person a cold shower, one person works well
in the morning and another person at night, for one writer they should go and sit in the
coffee shop where it's loud and another writer it works better for them to sit alone in their
quiet office and write.
So, I suspect there's no single piece of advice that's going to apply to everyone.
WILSON: When people have ""creative blocks"", and I know my share of friends do as well
if they're at some stuck point they're not sure what to do with their lives or their
writing or their photography or their filmmaking or whatever it is that they're doing I think
the best advice is you have to change your life up completely, to go on a trip, go spend
a year being of service, be willing to take some major drastic action to get you out of
your comfort zone and go inside not outside.
I think our society is all about focusing on the externals, oh these people like me,
I'm successful because of these people, they view me as being good and we need to take
that vision and instead of expanding it outwards we need to look inside ourselves.