Imagine: How Creativity Works Read online

  To Beeman, Schooler’s finding was a revelation. It made perfect sense that the right hemisphere excelled at solving insight puzzles since that side of the brain was better able to see the hidden connections, those remote associations between separate ideas. While the left hemisphere was frantically trying to lift the pyramid into the air — that’s the obvious way to “remove” the money — the right hemisphere was busy thinking about alternative approaches. “I suddenly realized that moments of insight could be a really interesting way to look at all these skills the right hemisphere excelled at,” Beeman says. “It was a rigorous way to study some very mysterious aspects of the mind. I had an insight about insight.”

  2.

  Mark Beeman has a tense smile, a receding hairline, and the wiry build of a long-distance runner. He qualified for the Olympic trials in 1988 and 1992 with a time of 3:41 in the fifteen-hundred-meter race, although he gave up competitive running after, as he puts it, “everything below the hips started to fall apart.” He now subsists on long walks and the manic tapping of feet. When Beeman gets excited about something — whether it’s the cellular properties of pyramidal neurons or his new treadmill — the pace of his speech accelerates and then he starts to draw pictures on whatever scratch paper is nearby.

  In the mid-1990s, when Beeman began studying moments of insight, the standard scientific approach to the subject involved giving people difficult puzzles and asking them questions about how they solved them. “The problem with this method is that everything that leads you to the insight happens unconsciously,” Beeman says. “People have no idea where the insight came from, or what thoughts led them to the solution. They can’t tell you anything about it. The science had hit a wall.” Beeman wanted to extend the research on insight by looking at the phenomenon from the perspective of the brain. He was eager to use the new tools of modern neuroscience, such as PET scans and fMRI machines, to locate the source of epiphanies inside the skull. However, this approach immediately led to a major experimental complication. In order to isolate the brain activity that defined the insight process, Beeman needed to compare moments of insight to answers that arrived by conscious analysis, that is, by people methodically testing ideas one at a time. In conscious analysis, people have a sense of their progress and can accurately explain their thought processes. (The left hemisphere is nothing if not articulate.) The problem is solved through diligence and hard work; when the answer arrives, there is nothing sudden about it.

  Unfortunately, all of the puzzles used by scientists to study insight required insight. Either they were solved in a sudden “Aha!” moment or they weren’t solved at all. Consider this classic problem:

  Marsha and Marjorie were born on the same day of the same month of the same year to the same mother and the same father, yet they are not twins. How is that possible? (They’re triplets.)

  Or what about this one:

  Rearrange the letters n-e-w-d-o-o-r to make one word. (The answer is one word.)

  This was Beeman’s challenge: to come up with a set of puzzles that were often solved by insight, but not always. In theory, this would allow him to isolate the unique neural patterns that defined the insight process, since he could compare the brain activity of subjects having epiphanies with that of those relying on ordinary analysis. The puzzles, though, weren’t easy to invent. “It can get pretty frustrating trying to find an experimentally valid brainteaser,” Beeman says. “The puzzles can’t be too hard or too easy, and you need to be able to generate lots of them.” He eventually settled on a series of verbal puzzles that he named compound remote associate problems, or CRAP. The joke is beginning to get old. “Yes, yes, I’m studying CRAP,” Beeman grumbles.

  In his science papers and PowerPoint presentations, Beeman now leaves off the final P.

  The puzzles go like this: A subject is given three different words, such as age, mile, and sand, and asked to think of a single word that can form a compound word or phrase with each of the three. (In this case, the answer is stone: stone age, milestone, sandstone.) The subject has fifteen seconds to solve the question before a new puzzle appears. If he comes up with an answer, he presses the space bar on the keyboard and says whether the answer arrived via insight or analysis. When I participated in the experiment in Beeman’s lab, I found that it was surprisingly easy to differentiate between these two problem-solving possibilities.

  When I solved puzzles with analysis, I tended to sound out each possible combination, cycling through each of the different words that went with age and then seeing if it also worked with mile and then sand. When I came up with a solution, I always double-checked it before pressing the space bar. An insight, by contrast, was instantaneous: the word felt like a revelation.

  Beeman was now ready to start looking for the neural source of insight. He began by having people solve the puzzles while inside an fMRI machine, a brain scanner that monitors changes in blood flow as a rough correlate for changes in neural activity. (Active brain cells consume more energy and oxygen, which triggers the rush of blood.) While fMRI gives scientists a precise spatial map of the brain, the technique suffers from a time delay of several seconds while the blood diffuses across the cortex. “I soon realized that insights happen too fast for fMRI,” Beeman says. “The data was just too messy.”

  That’s when Beeman teamed up with John Kounios, a psychologist at Drexel University. Kounios’s main experimental tool is EEG, or electroencephalography, which measures the waves of electricity produced by the brain. A subject wears a plastic hat filled with greased electrodes — it looks like a bulky shower cap — each of which monitors a specific frequency of neural activity. Because there is no time delay with EEG, Kounios realized that it could be a useful technique for investigating the instantaneousness of insight. Unfortunately, this speed comes at the cost of spatial resolution: the waves of electricity can’t be traced back to their precise sources.

  By combining both techniques — fMRI and EEG — in the same study, Beeman and Kounios were able to deconstruct the epiphany. The first thing they discovered was that, although it seemed like the answer appeared out of nowhere, the brain had been laying the groundwork for the breakthrough. (In his lectures, Beeman likes to quote a dictum of Louis Pasteur: “Chance favors the prepared mind.”) The process began with an intense mental search as the left hemisphere started looking for answers in all the obvious places. Because Beeman and Kounios were giving people word puzzles, they saw additional activation in brain areas related to speech and language. This left-brain thought process, however, quickly got tiring — it took only a few seconds before the subject said he’d reached an impasse and couldn’t think of the right word.

  “Almost all of the possibilities your brain comes up with are going to be wrong,” Beeman says. “There are just so many different connections to consider. And it’s up to you to keep on searching or, if necessary, change strategies and start searching somewhere else.” What happens next is the stumped phase of creativity. Not surprisingly, this phase isn’t very much fun. In the CRA study, for instance, subjects quickly got frustrated by their inability to find the necessary word. They complained to the scientists about the difficulty of the problems and threatened to quit the experiment.

  But these negative feelings are actually an essential part of the process because they signal that it’s time to try a new search strategy. Instead of relying on the literal associations of the left hemisphere, the brain needs to shift activity to the other side, to explore a more unexpected set of associations. It is the struggle that forces us to try something new.

  What’s surprising is that this mental shift often works. Because we feel frustrated, we start to look at problems from a new perspective. “You’ll see people bolt up in their chair and their eyes go all wide,” says Ezra Wegbreit, a graduate student in the Beeman lab who often administers the CRA test. “Sometimes, they even say ‘Aha!’ before they blurt out the answer.” The suddenness of the insight is preceded by an equally sudden burst
of brain activity. Thirty milliseconds before the answer erupts into consciousness, there’s a spike of gamma-wave rhythm, which is the highest electrical frequency generated by the brain. Gamma rhythm is believed to come from the binding of neurons: cells distributed across the cortex draw themselves together into a new network that is then able to enter consciousness.

  Where does this burst of gamma waves come from? To answer this question, Beeman and Kounios went back and analyzed the data from their fMRI experiment. That’s when they discovered the “neural correlate of insight”: the anterior superior temporal gyrus (aSTG). This small fold of tissue, located on the surface of the right hemisphere just above the ear, became unusually active in the seconds before the epiphany. (It remained silent when people solved the word puzzles by analysis.) The activation of the cortical circuit was sudden and intense, a surge of electricity leading to a rush of blood. Although the precise function of the aSTG

  remains unclear, Beeman wasn’t surprised to see it involved in the insight process. A few previous studies had linked it to aspects of language comprehension, such as the detection of literary themes, the interpretation of metaphors, and the comprehension of jokes.

  Beeman argues that these linguistic skills share a substrate with insight because they require the brain to make a set of distant and original connections. Although most of us have probably never used age, mile, and sand in a sentence before, the aSTG is able to discover the one additional word (stone) that works with all of them. And then, just when we’re about to give up, the answer is whispered into consciousness. “An insight is like finding a needle in a haystack,” Beeman says. “There are a trillion possible connections in the brain, and we have to find the exact right one. Just think of the odds!”

  Sometimes, of course, these long odds are beaten. Because we’ve been stumped, we finally start searching in the correct places, rummaging through the obscure file cabinets of the right hemisphere. And then, if we’re lucky, the search will end with a Anterior Superior Temporal Gyrus

  The prefrontal cortex helps direct the spotlight of attention, keeping us focused on the task at hand.

  3.

  It took a few days to adjust to the quiet of Woodstock. After all, Dylan had gone straight from a frantic rock ’n’ roll tour to a remote rural cabin. He was suddenly alone with nothing but an empty notebook. And there was no need to fill this notebook — Dylan had been relieved of his creative burden. For the first time in years, he didn’t need to worry about his next song. Dylan told his manager that he was going to start working on a novel.

  But then, just when Dylan was most determined to stop creating music, he was overcome with a strange feeling. “It’s a hard thing to describe,” Dylan would later remember. “It’s just this sense that you got something to say.” What he felt was the itch of an imminent insight, the tickle of lyrics that needed to be written down. And so Dylan did the only thing he knew how to do: he grabbed a pencil and started to scribble. Once Dylan began, his hand didn’t stop moving for the next several hours. “I found myself writing this song, this story, this long piece of vomit, twenty pages long,” Dylan said. “I’d never written anything like that before and it suddenly came to me that this is what I should do.” Vomit is the essential word here. Dylan was describing, with characteristic vividness, the uncontrollable rush of a creative insight, that flow of associations that can’t be held back. “I don’t know where my songs come from,” Dylan said. “It’s like a ghost is writing a song. It gives you the song and it goes away. You don’t know what it means.” Once the ghost arrived, all Dylan wanted to do was get out of the way.

  The song that Dylan began writing in Woodstock starts like a children’s story — “Once upon a time” — but it’s no fairy tale.Dylan had no idea where this narrative was going or how it was going to end. And so he decided to blindly follow his imagination, as the ghost led him from one evocative image to the next:

  Once upon a time you dressed so fine

  You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?

  People call, say, “Beware, doll, you’re bound to fall.”

  You thought they were all kiddin’ you.

  What do these words mean? What is Dylan trying to tell us?

  The song is an angry screed — the poetry critic Christopher Ricks called it an “unlove song” — but who is Dylan yelling at? These questions, of course, don’t have easy answers. This was the thrilling discovery that saved Dylan’s career: he could write vivid lines filled with possibility without knowing exactly what those possibilities were. He didn’t need to know. He just needed to trust the ghost.

  This was a staggeringly strange way to create a piece of pop music. At the time, there were two basic ways to write a song. The first was to be like the Bob Dylan that Dylan was trying to escape: compose serious lyrics on a serious topic. One had to sing of injustice or a broken heart, chant wordy lines over a bare-bones melody. There could be an acoustic guitar and a harmonica but not much else.

  The second way was essentially the opposite. Instead of wallowing in melancholy and complexity, one could imitate those cynical geniuses on Tin Pan Alley and compose an irresistible jin-gle full of major chords. Take, for instance, this number-one Bill-board single from 1965, “I Can’t Help Myself,” made famous by the Four Tops:

  Sugar pie, honeybunch

  You know that I love you

  These lyrics have a deliberate clarity. As soon as the first couplet is heard, the listener knows exactly what kind of song it will be. (In this sense, it’s not so different from those somber folk songs.) Such predictability is precisely what Dylan wanted to avoid; he couldn’t stand the clichéd constraints of pop music. And this is why that “vomitific” writing was so important: Dylan suddenly realized that it was possible to celebrate vagueness, to write lines that didn’t insist on making sense, that existed outside the categories of FM radio. He would later say that this was his first “completely free song . . . the one that opened it up for me.” But what did it open up? In retrospect, we can see that the composition — it would become the debut single on Highway 61 Revisited — allowed Dylan to fully express, for the first time, the diversity of his influences. Listening to these ambiguous lyrics, we can hear his mental blender at work as he effortlessly mixes together scraps of Arthur Rimbaud, Fellini, Bertolt Brecht, and Robert Johnson. There’s some Delta blues and “La Bamba” but also plenty of Beat poetry, Ledbetter, and the Beatles. The song is modernist and premodern, avant-garde and country-western.

  What Dylan did — and this is why he’s Bob Dylan — was find the strange thread connecting those disparate voices. During those frantic first minutes of writing, his right hemisphere found a way to make something new out of this incongruous list of in-fluences, drawing them together into a catchy song. He didn’t yet know what he was doing — the ghost was still in control — but he felt the excitement of an insight, the subliminal thrill of something new. (“I don’t think a song like ‘Rolling Stone’ could have been done any other way,” Dylan insisted. “You can’t sit down and write that consciously . . . What are you gonna do, chart it out?”) When Dylan gets to the chorus — and he knows this is the chorus as soon as he commits it to paper — the visceral power of the song becomes obvious:

  How does it feel

  To be without a home

  Like a complete unknown

  Like a rolling stone?

  The following week, on June 15, 1965, Dylan brought his sheaf of papers into the cramped space of Studio A at Columbia Records in New York City. After just four takes — the musicians were only beginning to learn their parts — “Like a Rolling Stone” was cut on acetate. Those six minutes of raw music would revolutionize rock ’n’ roll. Bruce Springsteen would later describe the experience of hearing the single on AM radio as one of the most important moments of his life. Even John Lennon was in awe of the achievement.

  The constant need for insights has shaped the creative process. These radical breakthroughs are s
o valuable that we’ve invented traditions and rituals that increase the probability of an epiphany, making us more likely to hear those remote associations coming from the right hemisphere. Just look at poets, who often rely on literary forms with strict requirements, such as haikus and sonnets. At first glance, this writing method makes little sense, since the creative act then becomes much more difficult. Instead of composing freely, poets frustrate themselves with structural constraints.

  But that’s precisely the point. Unless poets are stumped by the form, unless they are forced to look beyond the obvious associations, they’ll never invent an original line. They’ll be stuck with clichés and conventions, with predictable adjectives and boring verbs. And this is why poetic forms are so important. When a poet needs to find a rhyming word with exactly three syllables or an adjective that fits the iambic scheme, he ends up uncovering all sorts of unexpected connections; the difficulty of the task accelerates the insight process. Just look at Dylan’s verb choice in the second stanza of “Like a Rolling Stone,” which contains one of the most memorable lines in the song:

  You’ve gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely