Yesterday's Redwood Neuroscience Institute's Stanford Theoretical Neuroscience Lecture featured William Calvin from the University of Washington.
The general theme of his talk was creativity. "How you do something youve never done exactly that way before, yet get it right the first time?"
His answer: You can have competitions between categories, between movement programs, between relations, between analogies. Thats what a Darwin Machine in neocortex could buy you: a general process for quality creativity at various levels.
Some of the most interesting work on the neurobiology of creativity is being conducted by Dr. Rosa-Aurora Chavez from the National Institute of Psychiatry in Mexico City. To determine if there was a genetic component to creativity, she took blood samples from 100 recognized artists and scientists. Her findings showed that highly creative individuals had increased expression of specific serotonin transporter and dopamine receptor genes.
She then performed functional neuroimaging experiments on a dozen of these creative minds, concluding that creative individuals had significantly higher activation in the right and left cerebellum, frontal and temporal lobes, while they performed creative tasks.
Creativity research has important implications for business innovation and investment. While standard IQ tests and college entrance exams focus on convergent thinking, i.e. finding the right answer, creative individuals excel at divergent thinking, i.e. discovering multiple potential solutions. The typical behaviors of creative individuals, such as novelty seeking and harm avoidance, as well as, high emotional, sensual and physical over-excitability, often result in the abandonment of projects.
In todays rushed corporate world focused on quenching the financial markets thirst for efficiency, there is little room for individuals who do not predictably meet deadlines. Further research might validate that sustained financial support of think tanks could produce more innovations. Imagine if the Medici family had not backed Michelangelo, a creative genius who is known to have left over half of his sculptures unfinished.
How many cures for diseases and market opportunities have been missed as a result of short-circuiting the creative process?