Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer Read Free Book Online Page B

feeling gloomy performed slightly below random chance. They had no idea which remote associates were real and which were a waste of time.
    More recently, Beeman has demonstrated that people who score high on a standard measure of happiness solve about 25 percent more insight puzzles than people who are feeling angry or upset. In fact, even fleeting feelings of delight can lead to dramatic increases in creativity. After watching a short, humorous video — Beeman uses a clip of Robin Williams doing standup — subjects have significantly more epiphanies, at least when compared with those who were shown scary or boring videos. Because positive moods allow us to relax, we focus less on the troubling world and more on these remote associations. Another ideal moment for insights, according to Beeman and John Kounios, is the early morning, shortly after waking up. The drowsy brain is unwound and disorganized, open to all sorts of unconventional ideas. The right hemisphere is also unusually active. “The problem with the morning, though,” Kounios says, “is that we’re always so rushed. We’ve got to get the kids ready for school, so we leap out of bed, chug the coffee and never give ourselves a chance to think.” If you’re stuck on a difficult problem, Kounios recommends setting the alarm clock a few minutes early so that you have time to lie in bed. We do some of our best thinking when we’re half asleep. (There’s one additional cortical signal that predicts epiphanies. Looking at the data, Beeman and Kounios saw a sharp drop in activity in the visual cortex just before the insight appeared, as if the sensory area were turning itself off. At first, the scientists couldn’t figure out what was going on. But as they were struggling to decipher the data, Beeman watched Kounios cover his eyes with his hand. That’s when it occurred to him: the visual cortex was going quiet so that the brain could better focus on its own obscure associations. “The cortex does this for the same reason we close or cover our eyes when we’re trying to think,” Beeman says. When the outside world becomes distracting, the brain automatically blocks it out.)
    One of the surprising lessons of this research is that trying to force an insight can actually prevent the insight. While it’s commonly assumed that the best way to solve a difficult problem is to relentlessly focus, this clenched state of mind comes with a hidden cost: it inhibits the sort of creative connections that lead to breakthroughs. We suppress the very type of brain activity that should be encouraged. For instance, many stimulants taken to increase attention, such as caffeine, Adderall, and Ritalin, seem to make epiphanies much less likely. (According to a recent online poll conducted by Nature, nearly 20 percent of scientists and researchers regularly take prescription drugs in order to improve mental performance. The most popular reason given was “to enhance concentration.”) Because these stimulants shift attention away from the networks of the right hemisphere, they cause people to ignore those neurons that might provide the solution. “People assume that increased focus is always better,” says Martha Farah, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. “But what they don’t realize is that intense focus comes with real tradeoffs. You might be able to work for eight hours straight [on these drugs], but you’re probably not going to have many big insights.” ( Marijuana, by contrast, seems to make insights more likely. It not only leads to states of relaxation but also increases brain activity in the right hemisphere. A recent paper by scientists at University College, London, looked at a phenomenon called semantic priming. This occurs when the activation of one word allows an individual to react more quickly to related words. For instance, the word dog might lead to faster reaction times for wolf, pet, and Lassie, but it won’t alter how quickly a