01 EDITION: NEUROSCIENCE

COVER IMAGE: WEIGHTED (2018-2020), BRONZE, ALISON LAM

SEISMA Magazine is published by Parabola Press. For general enquiries: info@seismamagazine.com Editor in Chief: Melissa Evans Guest Neuroscience Editor: Abhrajeet Roy Section Editors: Jenny Wong, Kate Tighe, Piergiorgio Ciarla, Fiona Cuningham, Jen Chau, Ella K Clarke, Paul Carey-Kent Sub Editor: Deborah Burnstone Editorial Contributors: Chrystalina Antoniades, Salil Patel, Lyndsey Winship, Andrew Dickson, Abhrajeet Roy, Dmitry Velmeshev, Catarina Carrao,

In this edition, we invite you to step into the mind of the creative.

EDITORIAL DR ABHRAJEET ROY

Burgeoning interest in the neuroscience of creativity, along with major advances in brain mapping technologies, has resulted in the proliferation of research at the nexus point between psychology, ar ts and cognitive science. The multifaceted nature of this research requires a strong interdisciplinary approach that blurs the lines between fields and challenges conventional paradigms and concepts. Indeed, many of the scientists interviewed in this issue are artists themselves, or artists, scientists, driven by the uniquely human pursuit to understand consciousness and creativity.

Sonia Klug, Erman Misirlisoy, Tsholananga Motuba, Angelica Kaufmann, Daniel Almaguer Buentello, Elizabeth Muehlfeld, Olivia Levine, Dwaynica Greaves, Andrew Curran Creative Direction: Melissa Evans

This drive to understand the neural underpinnings of the creative process is partially motivated by a desire to advance society’s understanding of the human animal in order to improve public health and well-being. However, in many cases, the pursuit is more primal, driven by more fundamental questions regarding consciousness, perception and awareness. Our continued enthusiasm for and pursuit of neurocreativity research will no doubt have implications for both society and the individual.

Art Direction: Jen Chau Video Editor: Aylin Ergeneli Image Editor: Jen Chau, Emma Levin Layout Design: Emma Levin, Toby Matthews (Holywell Press) Logo Design: Willy Lamers Printing: Holywell Press, Oxford Social Media Management: Annabel Cary Website Development: Ben Newton + David Ginn Website Management: David Ginn

Ultimately, this brave new world of research has been defined by major innovations in both methodologies and data analytics. For one thing, functional neuroimaging technologies have become significantly more accessible over the past two decades. Coupled with mind-bending new psychological approaches for studying different modes of creative thought, researchers and artists have been able to collaborate in ways that were never possible in the past. From developing brain-computer interfaces that generate art based on brainwaves, to optimizing the design of buildings and public spaces based on neuroaesthetics, the possibilities are seemingly endless. Indeed, it’s easy to get lost in the creative mind, so spend some time here. Have a look around. What you’ll find is sure to be intriguing …

FE ATU R E S WAVES OF CREATIVITY 'AGE OF ANXIETY' : BARBARA KENDRICK THE METRICS OF MUSE 'GRAFTING THE PUPIL TO THE FINGERTIP' : KYLIE LOCKWOOD

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SO U N D ARTS + M U S I C

SOUND + SYNAPSE SINGING IN THE BRAIN AND ALL THAT JAZZ 'PSYCHOSONIC GEO SOUNDSCAPE: LANDI' : JACKIE NEON

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VI S UAL FI N E ARTS ANGLES OF INTERSECTION THE BEAUTY OF BIOLOGY BAR EUREKA 'REFRACT' : SCOTT LAMBRIDIS

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'NODE 1' : TIM EDGAR 052 LOCUS OF CREATIVITY 053 'HUMAN BRAIN CELLS SILICON' : AUDREY RANGEL AGUIRRE 063

ARC H ITECTU R E + D E S I G N

THE NEUROARCHITECT CEREBRAL STRUCTURES 'THE LIES ARE COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE' : K DAY 'AUTISM, JOURNEY BEFORE DIAGNOSIS' : ALISON LAM 'BRAIN STEM' : CHERYL SAFREN

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LITE R ARY ARTS

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FACTS ABOUT FICTION SCHOOL OF SLEEP A HYBRID COLLISION REASON + RHYME 'HAMLET/STARLET' : PETER BRUNO 'PSEUDOKNOTS' & 'STEMLOOPS' : LILY KOSMICKI

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TH E ATR E + DAN C E 096 099 104 108 109

MIND IN MOTION FOCUS + FLOAT UPONS THE STAGE 'INSTRUMENTAL' : SARAH WESTCOTT 'THOUGHT MRI 3' : JODY RASCH

FAS H I O N + B E AUT Y 110 114 117 120

ENCLOTHED COGNITION BLENDED NOT BROKEN CORTEX COUTURE 'BLIND SPOT' : MATT BRYDEN

121 'KNOWING ME KNOWING ME' : TALINE TEMIZIAN 122 EVOLVING THE CREATIVE 128 'BILL' + 'WILLIAM AND GEORGE' : WILLIAM FILLMORE

SC R E E N ARTS 130 COMEDY CIRCUITS 134 SCREEN SPARKS 137 EUREKA 138 'GENETIC TRACES I & II' : DEBORAH PEARSE 139 YOUR BRAIN ON (VIDEO)GAMES 142 'TRANSIENCE 6' : SUSAN ALDWORTH 143 'BICAMERAL TEEN AT THE MALL' : SUZANNE EDISON 144 'RETRACING MEMORIES' : NIKITA EPHANOV

C U LI NARY ARTS 145 GASTROPHYSICS 148 MADE UNDER THE INFLUENCE 150 HUNGRY EYES 154 MATTERS OF TASTE 157 ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES 162 REFERENCES 172 'COMIC STRIP' KATRIN BOEHM

THE NEUROSCIENCE OF CREATIVITY INTERVIEW

WAVES OF CREATIVITY JOHN KOUNIOS + ANNA ABRAHAM

Can eureka moments be measured? How do musicians improvise? Can we train ourselves to become more creative? And what is creativity, really? Anna Abraham and John Kounios, two leading researchers in the field, talk word puzzles and fMRI experiments, and reveal the burning questions they’d love to answer.

Anna Abraham is the E Paul Torrance Professor in Creativity and Gifted Education and Director of the Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development at the University of Georgia. Her book The Neuroscience of Creativity was published in 2019. John Kounios is the Director of the PhD Program in Applied Cognitive and Brain Sciences at Drexel University, Philadelphia. He is co-author of The Eureka Factor: Creative Insights and the Brain, first published in 2015. We joined Abraham and Kounios to discuss enduring, current, and future trends in the field of neuroscience and creativity. Andrew Dickson: OK, let’s start with a difficult question, but an important one. How do you define creativity? Or, maybe more pertinently, how do neuroscientists define it?

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WAVES

IN CONVERSATION WITH ANDREW DICKSON

Anna Abraham: In general, the definition that guides us is that an idea is creative if it contains at least two elements. One is originality: how novel or atypical or unique the response is. The second is some form of appropriateness or relevance. So an idea is said to be creative if it’s both original as well as appropriate to a particular context. Of course, there are lots of debates we can have about who defines what’s ‘original’ and what’s deemed as appropriate. But if you look up any paper in neuroscience, if they start with a definition, it will be that one (Abraham, 2018). Do you agree, John? John Kounios: I agree that’s the way the papers start, but I’m not sure I’m a big fan of that. In terms of defining creativity, you could say there are two approaches. One is philosophical – what is the

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reality or truth about what creativity is? That’s not necessarily useful for scientific research where we want a definition that will carry the research forward, and which suggests avenues of further empirical study and theory-building. So, we need a scientific definition. Let’s start with the appropriateness part, which I don’t really like. I see why it’s there, because if you have a psychotic individual who splurges out wild associations, in one sense that’s creative, but in another sense it’s gibberish. However, there are many instances where, for example, a mathematician may come up with a theorem or proof that seems to have no relevance to anything, but perhaps a hundred years later someone will find an application for it. So, was it appropriate at the time? Furthermore, some ideas can be creative even if they don’t work at all. They can be thought of as ‘brilliant failures’. AD: Do you want to come back on that, Anna? AA: I think John and I are in the same camp in many ways, in that we study brain operations that have some relevance to the creative process. Regarding the definition, I do think it’s important to have one; otherwise we’re talking about all sorts of discrete phenomena that we wouldn’t know how to relate to each other. I think the onus is on researchers to really talk fully about what aspect of the definition they’re getting at in their studies. It is useful to compare the situation to other fields. Let’s take defining what memory is.

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Am I talking about remembering faces? Am I talking about remembering how to ride a bike? Am I talking about a memory I have of my childhood? All of these are different ways in which memory instantiates itself. The working definition of memory – retaining information over time – is the overarching concept that brings it all together. But unless we use it meaningfully to tell us something about the phenomenon itself, it’s not going to be very useful. AD: If I’ve got this right, researchers used to believe that there was one big, solid thing called ‘memory’, but the more work that’s been done over the years, the more we’ve realised that memory can be many different things at once, and works in many different ways. Are there similarities with the neuroscience of creativity, too? How has the field changed over the years you’ve been working in it? JK: The field of neuroscience of creativity is really only perhaps fifteen years old, give or take. It’s still the Wild West in the sense that we don’t all agree on the definitions, the experimental paradigms, or even totally agree on the phenomena. That said, I think it’s starting to gel. Researchers are beginning to home in on standard paradigms and analyses. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole thing is upended in the next five to ten years. It’s very hard to predict at this point. AD: Is that your sense, too, Anna? That there’s still a lot to play for?

Aha moments tend to be more accurate than analytic solutions

AA: Yes, the neuroscientific lens is a relatively new one to apply to creativity. There was always an interest in trying to understand it in relation to some aspect of biology. But the tools only really began to be used in a mass way in the mid-1990s and the early 2000s. The limitations were partly technological. We didn’t really have the facilities to look at creativity until comparatively recently. The other thing that strikes me as having changed is that this research area is so much more popular than it was in the past. We have neuroscience students who are eager to do creativity studies now. Even ten years ago, that was unheard of: we’ve gone from being the freaks in the hallway to being ever more mainstream. I think this is very advantageous, because it means a lot more people are working on a lot more areas of creativity, and there’ll be many more advances. What we’re going to discover over the next twenty years is going to be amazing, I think. Why that matters is because we need to try and figure out new ways of assessing this very complicated phenomenon. We’re only getting at a tiny part of it so far. Creativity in the arts, creativity in the sciences, creativity across people’s lifespan – we need to know a lot more about it all. How do we understand the commonalities and differences between literary creativity, musical creativity, and scientific creativity, say? Should they be viewed as separate disciplines in their own right, or branches of the same tree?

AD: Can you talk a little about the tools you’re using currently? Some neuroscientists use electroencephalography (EEG) to study brain activity, a technique that has been around for decades, but people are now also using functional neuroimaging (fMRI) to look at creativity. Is that correct? JK: Well, the first decision to make about what tools to use depends on what you have access to. I don’t currently have direct access to fMRI, for instance. I started using EEG many years ago when I was working in another field, so I carried that technique over, trying to use it in new ways. EEG is really good at telling you when something’s happening in the brain. It also gives you some information about where things are happening in the brain, but not with the same level of precision as a tool like fMRI. However, EEG can also tell you about the different frequency components of neurons firing across the cortex, which fMRI can’t do. Both EEG and fMRI are very valuable approaches. Ideally you should use a variety of techniques, each of which has different strengths and limitations. AD: How about you, Anna? Have you focused on specific tools, or likewise used whatever you have access to? AA: I’ve used whatever was available in whichever place I was. Like John, I’ve used EEG, but I’ve used it mainly to assess ‘evoked potentials’ or ERPs. These are time-locked neural

responses that are generated in direct response to a specific event. For instance, when I encounter an idea that I experience as being both original and appropriate, a unique neural signature is elicited; an early ERP that indexes that I am processing a conceptual combination that is wholly novel to me (originality), and a later ERP that indexes that I recognise that this new conceptual combination is not nonsense but is viable, and can therefore be integrated into my conceptual knowledge (appropriateness) (Kröger et al., 2013; Rutter et al., 2012). I also use fMRI, which allows you to get a much clearer idea of which parts of the brain are involved in a specific creative operation like conceptual expansion (Abraham et al., 2018). It is a very useful technique, but one that comes hand in hand with real challenges – the fact that creativity cannot be reliably elicited on cue, that subjects have to lie perfectly still and so on, makes it difficult when you’re designing experiments. So there are some tricky trade-offs. I’ve also taken a neuropsychological approach, studying people with certain types of brain injury (Abraham et al., 2012). If their lesions are limited to one or two parts of the brain, you can compare them to people who don’t have injuries, and look at their respective performance on creativity measures. For instance, I found evidence of a ‘double dissociation’ in relation to creative cognition and brain function. Patients with basal ganglia lesions – a clinical group known

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Some ideas can be creative even if they don’t work at all. They can be thought of as ‘brilliant failures’

to have distractibility as one of their core symptoms – were actually better than control neurotypical participants in overcoming the constraining influence of prior knowledge when generating new ideas. The opposite pattern of worse performance was found in patients with lesions in the parietal and temporal lobe regions, a clinical group known to have perseverative or repetitive responding as one of their core symptoms. Ultimately, it is worth noting that when you’re assessing creativity, the assumptions you make about which parts of the brain you’re interested in – whether you’re looking at individual areas, or networks of interests and how those work together dynamically – is not only limited by the neuroscientific methodology but also by the behavioural indices that you’re using. AD: As you were hinting there, Anna, one challenge for neuroscientists interested in creativity is the difficulty of designing experiments. Creativity isn’t just something we can switch on in the lab; it’s not on tap. John, could you talk us through some of the experiments you’ve set up? You’ve done some really fascinating research into so-called eureka or insight moments – the aha moments when a problem is solved or we suddenly work something out. How did you go about measuring these? JK: There are two main approaches. One is the standard lab approach: designing a task that a person can solve either creatively or analytically. You give a person little verbal puzzles, such as

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anagrams. A person can solve these puzzles by working out the answer in a very conscious, deliberate way or they can short-circuit that process by having an aha or eureka moment in which the solution pops into awareness, seemingly from nowhere. For example, in our first neuroimaging study we presented people with a series of verbal puzzles (Jung-Beeman et al., 2004). Each consisted of three words, such ‘pine/crab/sauce’. The subject’s job is to think of a fourth word that makes a compound or familiar phrase with each of the three problem words. In this case, the solution is ‘apple’, as in pineapple, crab apple, and apple sauce. If a subject is able to think of this solution, it could be because they deliberately tried out a variety of potential answers, such as ‘cone’ or ‘shell’, until they found the right answer. Alternatively, the solution may just pop into awareness as an aha moment. We asked them to tell us, problem by problem, which answers they derived consciously and deliberately and which just popped into awareness. That enabled us to analyse the brain activity for these two types of solutions separately. This revealed that aha moments were associated with a sudden burst of high-frequency brainwave activity in the brain’s right hemisphere. This worked well, but one limitation of the approach is that it relies on subjective reports: you have to assume that the person is able to distinguish between these two types of solution processes. Carola Salvi, a colleague at the University of Texas, has recently published research showing that a person’s eye activity can help differentiate this (Salvi et al., 2015, 2020). When a person has an insight, their pupils suddenly dilate, which you don’t find when they solve a problem consciously and deliberately. That’s a really exciting finding because it looks like an easily observed ‘biomarker’ of insight. Another approach which we’ve taken is not to try to produce creativity in the laboratory but to record ‘resting-state brain activity’ – what people are doing when they sit, relax, think about whatever they want. We then correlate that brain activity with their behaviour on a different day when they are performing a task (Kounios et al., 2008; Kounios & Beeman, 2009, 2014). So far, we found that a person’s resting-state brain activity can predict weeks in advance whether he or she will solve verbal puzzles either analytically, or by insight.

This resting-state activity is very consistent from session to session, suggesting that this is a cognitive trait: some people tend to be insightful thinkers, others tend to be analytical thinkers. We can predict that. I’m looking forward to extending that research to look at resting-state brain activity as a predictor of all kinds of creative behaviour outside the laboratory, whether it’s musical, literary, mathematical, and so forth. AD: John, the research you’ve done into eureka moments also showed something surprising – that relying on those sorts of intuitive moments, rather than slowly working a problem out, often generates more accurate results. Do we know why that is? JK: That’s true. People are generally more accurate when they have an aha moment, rather than working out the answer – at least in laboratory research that has used four different types of tests. I think the reason is that when people work things out in a slow, conscious, deliberate way, they make errors – they get sloppy, they become tired, or they just don’t want to bother checking what they’ve done. However, when you have an aha moment, the unconscious mental processes that produced it don’t care about your deadlines or whether you are tired. Your brain processes that information and produces the solution, and when those unconscious mental processes run to completion, they dump the solution into awareness. This can certainly produce errors or false insights, but in the kinds of tests we’ve looked at, aha moments tend to be more accurate than analytic solutions. AD: Anna, what’s your perspective on that? Does it resonate with anything you’ve studied? I saw you nodding as John was speaking… AA: The reason why I was nodding is because I was thinking about problem-solving and gestalt perspectives, an approach which encourages us to examine how we perceive the world in terms of general principles. Gestalt psychologists were the first ones to really look at problem-solving and consider the phenomenological side of that experience, everything coming together suddenly – seemingly from nowhere. The whole is made up of more than its parts, in effect. One of the reasons that those solutions are more accurate, it seems to me, is also because of that feeling of elegance. That sense one gets when everything just clicks into place: the puzzle is unexpectedly completed in an instant. That’s a phenomenological, aesthetic experience, which is part of the insight moment. These are the emotive aspects of the creative experience that we’re only starting to get to terms with. AD: There seems to be a link to improvisation here: that sense we have of responding in the moment, not always knowing why. That reminds me of another piece of research you’ve done, John, into the way that jazz musicians improvise (Rosen et al., 2020). You studied 32 musicians divided into two groups – one cohort comprised relative novices with limited experience of improvising, while the other cohort was much more experienced. Then you hooked them up to an EEG as they improvised, and discovered that quite different parts of the brain became active in each group: the experienced players tended to rely on the left side of their brain, while the less experienced ones used the right brain more. Why was that, do you think? JK: Less experienced jazz musicians work things out while performing – ‘I’ll try this now, I’ll do that, that didn’t work, I’ll correct it.’ Whereas for musicians who have been doing this for decades, all that becomes baked in – it becomes internalised, largely unconscious. They can just turn on the tap and let it flow.

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There are different parts of the brain that subserve those two different types of creativity. In the novices, we find more frontal activity – specifically in the right frontal lobe. In people who are very experienced at jazz improvisation, it’s more of the left posterior area of the brain. This fits with an idea by a neuropsychologist named Elkhonon Goldberg, who has argued that the difference between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere is that the right hemisphere processes novelty – situations with which you don’t have a lot of experience (Goldberg & Costa, 1981). With practice, those processes gradually move to the left hemisphere. That theory has largely been ignored in neuroscience of creativity research. But I think that these new findings suggest we dust it off and have a closer look at it. The idea that the right hemisphere of the brain plays a special role in creativity goes back decades and became cemented in the popular mind with the phrases ‘right-brain thinker’, which refers to people who are supposedly creative, and ‘left-brain thinker’, referring to those who are supposedly analytical thinkers. The reality has proven to be more complicated and harder to pin down scientifically. A substantial amount of research supports the idea that the right hemisphere is specialised for processing ‘remote associations’ – that is, associations between ideas that are not strongly connected – and that the left hemisphere is specialised for ‘close associations’, which are strong links between ideas. For example, if I say the word ‘water’, the first words that spring to mind (the close associations) are words like ‘drink’, ‘glass’, and so forth. These associations are processed primarily in the left hemisphere. But the right hemisphere would produce remote associations such as ‘water table’ and ‘heavy water’.

One limitation of this view is that not all types of creativity spring from remote associations between separate ideas. A eureka moment that provides the solution to an anagram is one example. Another limitation is that, although there’s evidence for the idea that people differ in the extent to which they rely on one hemisphere or the other, this hasn’t yet been clearly demonstrated to be related to individual differences in creativity. Finally, getting back to Elkhonon Goldberg’s idea about the hemispheres, it may be that the difference between remote and close associations may be reducible to familiarity. Perhaps the left hemisphere processes very familiar associations (the ones we call close associations), and the right hemisphere processes less familiar ones (the ones we call remote associations). With regard to our work on jazz improvisation, the novices relied primarily on the right hemisphere, presumably because improvisation was not yet familiar to them. The experienced performers relied on the left hemisphere because of their many years of experience as performers. There is much work to be done here. AD: Anna, to ask you a question you probably get asked about 25 times a week – is there anything in your research that suggests how to improve your creativity? Any hints or ideas for how we can sharpen our own creative skills? What should we be doing, or not doing? AA: I do get asked this a lot! And just as there are many different kinds of creativity, there are many different approaches one can take. First, there’s the boring answer no one wants to hear, but which is unfortunately true: anyone who works in the creative arts will tell you point-blank that the more

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Creativity isn’t something that only a few people need or have. It’s in all of us

you work at your craft, the better you will be. It’s like any muscle: you have to exercise it to strengthen it. Getting better at being creative in any domain necessarily involves discipline and applying yourself. We know that from any kind of training, cognitive training as well as physical training. If you want to be a writer, you have to start writing. Regularly. The more you exercise that part of your mind, the better you will get. But I also think it’s really important to reflect on what people mean when they use the word ‘creativity’, because it means different things in different contexts. It’s not necessarily about improving longterm creativity; for someone working in an office job, they might be trying to boost their creativity in the moment to solve a specific problem. There are lots of strategies there. One is to get into what people sometimes call an ‘incubation’ phase, to allow generativity to take root. There’s some work that shows that walking can be useful, for instance: there’s something about temporarily moving away from the problem. Letting your mind work, unimpeded by your own conscious cogitations, seemingly like static at the back of your mind – that seems to help reach insights and solutions. This idea is very old; people have been talking about it at least since Henri Poincaré in 1904, if not longer (Ghiselin, 1985). Other people have suggested that disrupting the way you normally think is a good way to try and generate creativity. There’s some work by Rémi Radel that shows that if you push people, overburden their attentional systems, and then you make them apply themselves to creative tasks, they get better (Radel et al., 2015). It seems to be the case that putting yourself in a position in which you will be pushed to do something different from the usual tends to abet creativity. It doesn’t necessarily help you to reach very original responses, but it does seem to influence the number of ideas you will have – your fluency, so to speak.

There are other methods that people have used to improve creativity, like ingesting drugs and alcohol. But all of the empirical work in this area to date has shown very limited and mixed effects. JK: Could I add something to that? I remember years ago, a US government agency solicited grant proposals for techniques to make their intelligence analysts more creative. OK , that makes sense. But there’s another approach to take: instead of trying to squeeze more creativity out of the same people, why not just hire really creative people? People laud creativity, but they tend to be afraid of creative people, or don’t trust them. That’s why they often hire less creative people and then try to push them to produce creative ideas. A lot of people fear creativity and don’t give it the respect that it deserves. AA: I think what people need to know is that there’s no shortcut, no silver bullet to being creative, whatever we mean by that. Because creativity is typically seen as so mystical and magical, the idea is that if you push the right button, all your creativity is going to be unleashed. Unfortunately it’s not like that. That is not the way our minds work. Really, it’s like any other ability: if you want to improve your ability to shoot, you have to keep going to the shooting range and practising your aim. AD: Can we turn to the future? What sort of things would you each like to see happening in the field during the next ten or fifteen years? Is there a specific question you would really love to see answered, or a mystery you’d love to solve? JK: I’ll toss off a few things that are outside my current expertise. One is the genetics of creativity. To what extent is the ability to be creative inherited, and to what extent is it something that you develop from experience and training? What’s the boundary between nature and nurture here? Another is psychopharmacology: to what extent do

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drugs, chemicals, even food, influence creativity? There are a lot of anecdotal reports, but very little rigorous research. One area that I’m just starting to look into is the brain’s reward system. We just published a paper in which we found that, while everyone has aha moments, a subset of people also have an extra brain response – we see activity in the brain’s reward system, the same system that responds when you eat delicious foods or take addictive drugs (Oh et al., 2020). It appears that some people experience these neural rewards, and that this motivates them to select creative tasks and creative occupations. Over time, this builds experience. It’s an intrinsic motivation to be creative, which leads to greater and greater creativity. That’s an area that I’m going to be focusing a lot of my research on.

What are the factors that impede generativity? How can we protect and improve our own creative capacities throughout our lives? What are the predictors of creative ability over a person’s life? We are already starting to get insights in this direction. For instance, a new study that will be published soon (Asquith et al., in press) shows that when examining multiple individual and environmental predictors of creativity in adolescents, the personality trait of openness to experience as well as the level of engagement in creative hobbies were strong predictors of the capacity to generate highly original ideas. So I’d like to push for an agenda that’s a bit broader. If we focus mainly on people who are extremely ‘creative’, at the top of their game, the middle ground gets lost. I would love to see the study of creativity develop from something that’s seen aaQs niche or specialist. In actuality it is quite fundamental to the way we design education curricula, think about government policy, everything. Creativity isn’t something that only a few people need or have. It’s in all of us. And the fact that it’s often stifled or unexplored or unrecognised means that we’re left with a lot of problems, both on an individual and at a societal level. Only by nurturing this ability – by getting people to figure out what’s unique about their own creativity and in what ways they can contribute and realise their creative potential – will we really break new ground. Not just for individuals, but for the whole of society.

There’s no shortcut, no silver bullet to being creative

AD: How about you, Anna? What would you love to see happen in the next decade or so? AA: For me, there are a couple of things I want to get a deeper grasp of. I think the distinction between ‘creative’ and ‘uncreative’ people isn’t a useful one; I see creativity as a very fundamental capacity that all of us possess to a lesser or greater extent. I want to look at this more closely developmentally and across lifespan, starting from a very young age all the way to late adulthood. What’s the trajectory of this immensely valuable capacity? What drives individual differences in creativity?

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AGE OF ANXIETY (2020), DIGITAL COLLAGE, 14X11”

BARBARA KENDRICK

GRAFTING THE PUPIL TO THE FINGERTIP (DETAIL) (2016) KYLIE LOCKWOOD

EYE STYLUS (2016) DRAWINGS MADE USING EYE-TRACKING TECHNOLOGY BY DARYN R BLANC-GOLDHAMMER AND KYLIE LOCKWOOD

GRAFTING THE PUPIL TO THE FINGERTIP (2016) KYLIE LOCKWOOD

STUDIO AT CALDERA ARTS RESIDENCY IN SISTERS, OREGON (2016) KYLIE LOCKWOOD

KYLIE LOCKWOOD

D aniel L evitin © D avid L ivingston

What we found was songs that were in the same key evoke similar representations. Songs that had the same starting note on the bass guitar had similar brain activations.’ It took some getting there to work out the connection. ‘I remember looking at a pair of songs and thinking, why am I getting similar activation from these two? They don’t sound anything alike to me. The tempos were different, the styles were different, they were harmonically very different. I actually printed out the scores and stared at them and after a few days I realised: the starting note is an open E! He’s a bass player, it makes sense. Now I’m not claiming that anybody else’s brain is organised that way. I only studied one person. There’s so much individual variability, no two brains are architecturally the same.’ Levitin’s popular success comes from his abilities as a communicator, and his thoughts on evolutionary psychology and neurochemistry interweave with anecdotes and musical insights. We discuss varied musical topics, including absolute pitch – also known as perfect pitch – the ability to hear a note, whether car horn or piano,

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and name it. It seems like a rare gift, but research shows it’s actually a learned skill, developed in early childhood, like learning a native language (there’s no evidence of any adult developing it). ‘There might be genetic factors, there’s certainly neuroanatomical structures that predispose someone towards acquiring it, but it’s not a guarantee,’ says Levitin. People with absolute pitch tend to have a larger left planum temporale, but most people who display that characteristic don’t

No two brains are architecturally the same

have absolute pitch (Keenan et al., 2001; Patterson et al., 2002). ‘The interesting thing is that we all have it, in effect, for colour,’ says Levitin. We have no trouble identifying frequencies on the colour spectrum as red or blue, because we practice from babyhood. What if we did the same for frequencies of sound? We talk about what makes people dance to music, the notion of ‘groove’, which is an interesting area of research. Music being ‘groovy’ seems to rely on small changes in rhythm and syncopation, the right balance of predictability and surprise to snag your attention. And yet, I say, electronic dance music, programmed to a rigid repetitive beat, gets people dancing for hours. What might be happening there? Levitin throws out a few ideas. ‘In EDM and trance music there are layers of changes evolving slowly in the upper registers, the higher frequencies,’ – that’s what keeps your interest – ‘and we know that your neurons synchronise to the beat of the music, they’re locked into it, and that can lower your heart rate,’ he says – hence the mesmerism of trance music. By contrast, studies show listening to techno increases norepinephrine and cortisol, which would take your heart rate in the other direction. You could think about evolutionary responses, he says, like booming bass notes which grab hold of your attention, ‘probably invoking an ancient warning symbol for stampeding elephants or avalanches’. And dancing as a communal experience has to be a factor, I suggest. ‘What we’ve shown in our lab is that when people listen to music together, their brainwaves synchronise,’ says Levitin (Abrams et al., 2013). ‘I don’t know what the practical implications of that are yet. Maybe it causes you to be more empathetic towards others... thousands of micro expressions and body language movements might be synchronised in a subliminally pleasing way.’ But alongside all of these things, he reminds us that musical taste is highly subjective. ‘I can’t say, if you put on this song by Diplo, this is how people are going to react.’

It’s been fifteen years since Levitin started writing This is Your Brain on Music (Levitin, 2006). The follow-up, The World in Six Songs, came three years later (Levitin, 2009). So what’s exciting him in the field now? ‘I’d like to see other labs pick up on this neurochemical theme,’ he says. ‘Doing that naltrexone study of blocking new opioids was very costly and that took three years to get approvals to do it – giving drugs to people who don’t need them. There are labs better set up for that kind of thing, so I’d like to see other people get involved in that. And I’d like to see some ways of studying other neurochemicals come to light through the development of radio tracers or pharmaceutical blockades.’ As well as continuing to write books beyond music that fulfil his mission to popularise neuroscience (the most recent, The Changing Mind, looks at some surprising findings about the ageing brain), Levitin himself is currently focused on mathematical modelling (Levitin, 2020). ‘We have a series of papers on mathematical equations that model and characterise 400 years of music (Levitin et al., 2012). I’d say most of my efforts right now are in that direction, partly because of lockdown. I can run all the experiments on the computer.’ Levitin and Menon found that rhythms in music from Bach to Scott Joplin conformed to the 1/f law, most simply that the most common event happens twice as often as the second most common, three times as often as the third most common, etc. They went on to examine the same formula in harmony (Wu et al., 2015). For those outside the field, the tight focus of individual experiments can sometimes feel like frustratingly tiny steps towards understanding this magnificent art form. How are we getting on with big questions, like where musical inspiration comes from? Is that just too complex to tackle? ‘It’s not too complex,’ says Levitin, adding, ‘I don’t know how I would go about studying it, but you may get there. Some of my work points to it a bit,’ he says. ‘Vinod Menon and I had a very productive collaboration for many years doing neuroimaging studies. We

When people listen to music together, their brainwaves synchronise

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I ndre V iskontas + V ocallective E nsemble © V ocallective E nsemble

AD: In your 2019 TED talk ‘How Music Makes Me a Better Neuroscientist’, you give an example of setting musical intention, and mention that there are other techniques which can be used to intensify a performance. Could you give some examples? IV: There are two elements that need to be mastered to produce an effective performance. The first is that the performer needs to understand what universal truth speaks to them with regards to that piece of music; the second is how to convey that truth to the audience. Just knowing the truth isn’t enough, as I learned early on when I was criticised for performing ‘unmusically’. If you’re a singer, conveying that truth means embodying the character that you’re portraying, such that the audience understands it. There are a myriad of ways to do this, and techniques would be case-specific. But I will say one thing. Often when we’re familiar with something – an idea, a piece, a role – our minds take shortcuts. Performers have to remember that their audience is not as familiar with their music as they are, so they need to slow down, in a way. They need to incorporate time for the audience to process – to think, to breathe, to sit with the idea – before moving on.

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AD: This example of intentionality appears to relate to Berlyne (1971), who writes that ‘the hedonic value of music is related to optimal levels of arousal. Specifically, the music listener is rewarded or feels pleasure as a result of reduced arousal through the relief of an unpleasant curiosity or, alternatively, of moderate increments in arousal by exploration’ (Berlyne, 1971). Could you explain what is going on in the brain as the listener experiences ‘reduced arousal’? IV: I suspect what Berlyne is referring to here is psychological rather than physiological arousal, though the two are linked. What I think he means is that music can give us pleasure by reducing tension that it creates and builds – either by proposing a question (hence the ‘unpleasant curiosity’), by building up to an expected climax, or by taking us on a journey on which layers of meaning are slowly revealed. What’s going on in the brain is tied to the psychological experience, and will be different with each different situation. But we do have pathways that track the anticipation of rewards, and which induce different mental and emotional states.

I’ve been thinking about how music can serve to give meaning to our experiences

We see activation of these pathways during the build-up of tension in music, and then an autonomic nervous system response when the climax is reached or the tension is released. We often feel this as ‘chills’ – a physical sensation that in this context can be pleasurable. AD: You have referred to Bjork (1994) and his concept of ‘desirable difficulty’ with respect to the learning process, and spoken about how this concept has helped you to develop more effectively as a singer (Bjork, 1994). Is ‘difficulty’ also desirable in music for a listener, in that it may allow higher retention and deeper cognitive resonance as a result of the ‘struggle’? IV: The more ‘work’ you put into learning, the more likely you are to retain it in the long term. ‘Desirable difficulties’ slow the rate of learning so that the information sticks. Struggle can be good – though not all difficulties are desirable. AD: Why do a singer’s high notes draw out an emotional response from a listener? Is it related to the release of tension, or do high notes mimic a cry for help? How do dynamics play into this effect (for instance ‘floating’ a high note very quietly)? Is this an example of ‘a heightening of vocal or verbal expression’, as described by the musicologist Nicholas Mathew in your podcast, Cadence? IV: I think it’s all of those things – we respond to high notes viscerally because they tap into

our evolutionarily ancient response to hearing a child in distress, but also because they signal heightened emotional states such as joy and fear. High notes also cut through sonic landscapes, so they’re effective at seizing our attention. And they represent a kind of vocal acrobatics that we recognise as challenging, which perhaps increases our appreciation. High notes do often follow a build-up of tension, but that just enhances a prepotent response. ‘Floating’ a high note is an interesting phenomenon. We usually associate high pitches with fear or joy – emotions that involve loud sounds – so a soft high note perhaps draws us in, and makes us wonder about the emotion the person is expressing. It’s an intimate effect, since soft dynamics indicate that the emitter’s goal isn’t to communicate across large distances but to release deep personal feelings. It is absolutely an example of a heightened vocal expression, I’d say. AD: Which scientific or creative questions or ideas are you most excited to explore in the future? IV: I’ve been thinking about how music can serve to give meaning to our experiences, to make us feel connected and alive. As I’ve moved from being a singer to a director of operas, I’ve become more and more interested in crafting the overall audience experience. I’m also fascinated with the conditions that enable singers to thrive and perform at their best, and how a director can give them what they need to succeed. In the lab, I’ve been exploring how anxiety interfaces with creativity, and how a person’s mindset might be ‘massaged’ to enhance creativity. In one project, I’m investigating how brain stimulation might impact the creative process and mitigate doubts about one’s own creativity. Finally, I’m really interested in how technology is shaping our behaviour and how we think, particularly when it comes to creative work. How do we find meaning in life, as we enter an increasingly digital future?

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Scientists now agree some degree of both novelty and quality are necessary to further creative endeavours. However, it may take days, months or years for an artist to complete a creation. As a result, science has often leveraged musical improvisation to examine the creative mind. Improvisation allows us to receive a real-time generation of novel musical ideas, under relatively sterile conditions. As such, jazz is perfect for this role. Many studies of creativity in jazz musicians compare the musicians against themselves. For instance, one recent study looked at differences in brain activity in musicians while either improvising or simply playing sheet music (Lopata, Nowicki, & Joanisse, 2017). This study went even further, comparing musicians who regularly improvised to those who did not. The investigators found that EEG alpha-band activity, a well known indicator of creativity, was not only higher during improvisation, but was highest in musicians who regularly improvised. Heightened alpha-band activity was also correlated with ‘objective’ ratings of individual performances. Here, correlate is an important word, as it cannot be definitively said that improvisational training improves creativity. It is possible creative brains are simply attracted to improvisation. Studies which attempt to localise the brain activity necessary for creativity have emerged. Using EEG measurements, it has been shown that jazz-improvising pianists possess increased beta-band power, while classical pianists show stronger theta waves (Bianco et al., 2018). The researchers used a unique strategy to assess creativity: unexpected chords. People usually have expectations of musical direction, such as chord progressions standard within pop songs and one tends to notice incongruent chord progressions. And jazz musicians and improvisers were able to notice chord incongruences earlier and more strongly compared with classical musicians. Another challenge for creativity analysis is that over the course of improvisation, a musician could be performing any number of mental tasks, from active listening to motor planning or even working-memory recall. At which moment is the musician demonstrating creativity? As a result, scientists often use task-independent anatomical comparisons, especially in fMRI studies. To resolve this, researchers have used fMRI to study trained musicians of varied improvisational

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ability during improvisation (Arkin et al., 2019). A short piece of music was played for the subject, following which the subject improvised some further notes. Through the use of non-magnetic digital keyboards these exercises were performed in an MRI, while experts, who were either experienced improvising jazz musicians or instructors, measured creativity. The researchers found that grey matter volume was highly correlated with subjective creativity ratings. Grey matter is often linked to information processing within the brain, suggesting that, in this case, the observed increased grey matter volume supports, rather than leads causatively to, creativity. While one jazz improviser can demonstrate creativity, can two demonstrate it better? A common form of improvisation in jazz is to ‘trade fours’, where two improvisers alternate turns. Each musician attempts to build upon what the other plays. Doing so requires a multitude of skills and focus. Each individual must understand the musical language of the other while adapting and injecting their own ideas. To investigate the neural correlates of this communal improvisation, researchers recruited jazz pianists to trade fours during fMRI acquisition (Donnay et al., 2014). Language centres of the brain were found to be strongly activated during the trading fours exercise, supporting the hypothesis that these brain regions are critical for both communication and creative cognition. To estimate the degree of creativity induced during the task, the scientists examined ‘melodic complexity’, a measure of how predictable the improvisations were. Ultimately, the studies discussed are limited to measuring neural or behavioural correlates of creativity. Future research will be critical for unveiling the causal origins of musical creativity from a neural perspective. For now, we depart the realm of science and return to our jazz artists in their smoky room. While we explore the neuroscientific underpinnings of their musical creativity, these musicians are consumed by music. So, enough about neurons for now. Time has passed from day to dusk and the club spits patrons out on the street. Lights dim and the band leaves the stage. But the night is young and there is another bar with a band nearby. The neural symphony plays on.

PSYCHO SONIC GEO SOUNDSCAPES: LANDI

JACKIE NEON HTTPS://SEISMAMAG.COM/STUDIOLAB-JACKIE-NEON

VISUAL FINE ARTS BRIEF LOOK

ANGLES OF INTERSECTION DR SALIL PATEL + PROFESSOR CHRYSTALINA ANTONIADES

Can art enrich neuroscientific research? A collaborative project between The Ashmolean Museum and the University of Oxford NeuroMetrology Research Group, aims to find out.

To develop a complete mind: study the science of art; study the art of science. Learn how to see. Realise that everything connects to everything else. - Leonardo Da Vinci The relatively new field of neuroaesthetics mirrors this belief - using neuroscientific research to decipher how we create and perceive aesthetics. It is a field which has been rapidly growing in interest, thanks to recent advances in functional neuroimaging and other neurotechnologies which enable us to see which areas of the brain are activated on contemplating paintings and film, phrases and melodies. In turn, these discoveries have both clinical and societal relevance. The clinical importance of neuroaesthetics is clear. Mapping out functional areas of the brain can inform us how to diagnose and treat neurological conditions that may impact aesthetics perception and related cognition. The

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ANGLES

NEUROMETROLOGY RESEARCH GROUP, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

societal implications of neuroaesthetics are slightly less well publicised. Art is sometimes seen as a luxury – at least some forms of it. But neuroaesthetics studies are showing how our minds are primed to seek out art, how art influences our behaviours and how art can gradually come to define us. Neuroscience, it seems, is not tainting art but instead showcasing its intrinsic universality. Brilliant work from colleagues such as Professors Semir Zeki and Vilayanur S. Ramachandran has shown that the two areas, art and science, are highly linked in the context of brain function. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is approaching its 350th anniversary. A university institution housing Turner paintings, an original Stradivarius violin and swathes of ancient papyri is hardly the first place that comes to mind when thinking of the intersection between art and neuroscience. However, a collaboration between the Ashmolean Museum

P icturing P arkinson ’ s 2019

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T he A shmolean M useum ,

and the University of Oxford NeuroMetrology Research Group, which researches Parkinson’s Disease, resulted in a series of unique art and neuroscience projects, the most recent of which was called Picturing Parkinson’s. The idea was to flip the premise of neuroaesthetics. Instead of using neuroscience to shed light on art, art was used as a prism through which to view neuroscience and, in particular, the common but often devastating neurological disorder Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative disease affecting areas of the brain responsible for movement and cognitive functions such as memory, decision-making, and attention. Chemical highways, mediated by dopamine, are gradually impaired, leading to Parkinson’s characteristic tremors, rigidity, and slowing of movement. This ‘irremediable diminution of the nervous influence’ was first described by the British physician James Parkinson in 1817 in his famous essay on the ‘shaking palsy’, the disorder that would later come to be known as Parkinson’s disease. The visual nature of disease, often defined by impromptu movements, lends itself to aesthetic interpretation. The ability to capture action and universalise the unique is a special virtue of artistic expression. It is no coincidence that the first monthly scientific journal published in the United Kingdom, to which James Parkinson contributed, was entitled Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and the Arts.

Each Picturing Parkinson’s day involved a variety of roundtable discussions and interview panels. Scientists, often confined to laboratories, were able to interact with patients. This dialogue had the dual benefit of 1) helping scientists understand how patients living with Parkinson’s felt and 2) educating patients about new scientific discoveries and shedding light on the potential of future, more effective treatments. The medium of art was used to illustrate both feelings and the complexity of underlying neuroscience. During one of these Picturing Parkinson’s events, the artist Yejeong Mutter used three-dimensional drawings fashioned from wire, which popped out from the confines of the canvas, to illustrate how our perceptions can be influenced by angles. Mutter cleverly used lights to cast and animate a multitude of different shadows, allowing for a variety of emotions and movements to emanate from a single object. This parallel realm – whereby people with Parkinson’s disease simultaneously act and mean to act in different ways – was beautifully rendered as a metaphor by the ever-changing nature of Mutter’s visual pieces. Many have disagreed with Da Vinci on the benefits of science and arts: according to the English Romantic poet, John Keats, science ‘destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism’. At the time, this was not an uncommon opinion. How antiquated such a view now seems.

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© J ulia H oel

pre-neuroscience, and as a technique which is still used today by many. It was when I was cleaning out some drawers that I happened upon a scientific paper I printed out years ago – the paper ‘Place Cells, Grid Cells, and Memory’ (Moser et al., 2007). I print things out when I find them interesting, even if I don’t know what I’m going to do with them … sometimes it takes years to figure out, as was the case this time. So I found this paper again around the same time that I had been thinking about Bruno and the art of memory, and realized the connection; place cells and grid cells live in the memory centers of the brain, and hold ‘maps’ of familiar environments. The study was on rat brains, but there is good reason to think similar processes occur in the human brain. Do place cells and grid cells contain the mechanisms through which the art of memory functions? I think so. And this got my artistic brain ticking. Girodano Bruno was a 16th century champion of the art of memory – and took the idea a step further by positing that there were a set of geometries which could encapsulate all knowledge. He simplified the idea of a memory palace down to geometric designs, or ‘seals.’ According to Bruno, these seals encapsulate the physical geometries necessary for any memory palace task or technique. Each seal has a name which refers to its function, and like a wax seal, is designed to bear the impressions of specific content. I was intrigued by Bruno’s notion that visualizations could be so powerful, and had to see them for myself. But when I got a copy of his book on the topic, 30 Seals, I found the book to be mostly text descriptions. There were a few drawings of the seals he describes, but many visualizations were missing. That’s when I realized my entry point as an artist – to give life to the seals Bruno believed in, but never brought to light. So, my piece is the set of seals as Bruno describes them – from his illustrations, it was easy for me to discern Bruno’s aesthetic style, which I let act as a guiding force. He loved four-way symmetry the most, but would also use two-way symmetry when necessary. His lines would always meet another line or circle or square, never hanging out in mid-air. He loved concentric circles, shapes within shapes, and had no limits on the complexity of the design. Additionally, as each seal has a name which indicated its thematic function, the seals’ geometry would often visually allude to the name.

Do I think these designs actually encapsulate all knowledge? Probably not, but as a conceptual artist, it’s the idea that that could be possible is what interests me. As for part two – that’s still very much in the conceptual development stage. I know a few things I’d like to include in this memory palace, such as a variety of objects, possibly arranged in the design of the neural circuitry which underlies a specific memory. The more I think about this project, the more I want it to be created in virtual reality, so perhaps that is my next tech hurdle to overcome! ME: Could you tell us a bit about Territories? JBH: The map is not the territory, as Alfred Korzybski said. While this piece does one thing – celebrate the beauty of the brain and neurons through pure aesthetics – it also speaks to the worldwide initiatives to map the brain, and questions the methods and purpose of such an enormous and probably impossible endeavour. Already, we have learned things we did not know about the brain due to mapping, so as with mapping our genome, any amount of mapping has the potential to help us enormously in advancing knowledge of the specific variety. I’m in full support of that. However, like any map, there is a bias or motivation which shapes the content within. A map of the restaurants in your town is helpful when you’re hungry, a map of the nature trails is helpful when you’re looking to take a hike. But neither are true maps of the town The scale of the map determines the amount of information included. With something like a town, a 100% accurate map would be the size of the town, and the map would cease to be functional. With something like the brain, there are 86 billion neurons and just about as many glial cells. We will never be able to see this map as a whole, so where does that leave us? No matter our efforts, the brain may remain our most intimate, yet most unknown world. Furthermore, if we create a digital map of a brain, are we not creating a digital brain? And what responsibility do we have to this digital entity, that mimics our construction, and perhaps consciousness, in bits and bytes? So rather than create a brain map, I’ve created ‘brainscapes’ using images from different parts of the brain, which are meant to look like world maps of unknown lands. No city names, no ocean names, no information whatsoever. I created these

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REFRACT

SCOTT LAMBRIDIS “How cool is this?” she asks, but what registers is the packet of light passing through his left cornea. It refracts forty diopters past his iris, twenty more past his lens, flecking potassium ions off a cluster of cones in his fovea. Having spent hours in the colorless world of an airplane’s night, all five million cones shake like naked girls in a humid rain. Positive ions shimmy down the depolarized receptor and spray proteins into the synapse that are snatched up by other hungry proteins on the waiting bipolar neuron, their digestion taking 0.002 seconds before they are hungry again. Bipolar to ganglion, down the optic nerve, across the chiasm, then to his thalamus, passing the depolarization into the third layer of the first optic tract in his right visual cortex on wires firing always and only at 520nm. Elapsed time: ~0.12 seconds. The dust is weightless as the train platform, as the building, as her hand. Other cells fire too, triggered by unsteady light movement. Distant, alternate pathways converge on the signal with predictive possibility. Successive patterns. Synchronous patterns. Attempts to keep the signal down, to know it, to ignore it. Of the many possible unsteady 520nm greens, this one is the lime-colored tail of her wool jacket snapping forward with the gust from the train. The signal passes, up, up, up, into deeper connections where inputs from other pathways intersect. The green is also her luggage, collected in the airport a few minutes ago. And the envelope of her birthday card, with tickets for this trip, her first to Manhattan. And the pillowcase at his mother’s house, a train-ride away. And the company logo he was creating when he first saw her enter his office building to pick up one of his coworkers, her old boyfriend. And the fliers for his band’s show that she snuck out to see. And her underwear in the hotel room after. And the apple he was eating when that old boyfriend threatened to kill him, and her, for their betrayal. And the gum he was chewing when he told her he didn’t have time for a relationship back then. And a kite on the beach in a wind that would snap her wedding dress some time in the future when he can see himself holding her and repeating words that bind. All over his brain now, nerves chatter in the following proportions: 42% the green of her flapping coat, 31% the sound of the incoming train, 12% the smell of body odor, 8% the advertisement on the wall, 6% the stiffness of his back, and 1% the feel of clothing on his skin and the pace of his breathing and the movement of his hair and the temperature and the voices around him that are all muffled and insignificant yet monitored and measured still by that little linking organ between the nervous and endocrine systems, the hypothalamus. Master gland. It watches all, reuptaking and releasing its chemical messengers into the blood, triggering the sympathetic and parasympathetic paths of stress and sweat, attentive hairs and thumping heart, calm, hunger, thirst, relief. Up and down, and up and down.

Elapsed time: ~0.24 seconds. He still feels nothing discernable. More nerves signal the presence of these internal messengers back up in a feedback loop, pairing them in a causality he feels as stimulus plus good, and stimulus plus bad, matched to the past, present, or future. Hope that he will see her coat flapping like this again. Fear of her jacket pulling her into the tracks. Pride that she agreed to this trip at all. Terror that she will say “no” when he tells her in the dark of his mother’s house how much he has thought of her these past couple years. Elapsed time: ~0.32 seconds. At twenty-five, he’s had 157,680,000,000 times ten to the power of 9 thoughts. And his brain holds the notion of other brains too. He knows that in hers there are people and buildings and careers and mountains and pancakes and arguments and bicycles and gnats and healthcare and a million other wonderful and horrible tidbits of life, but to him in this moment there is only the black edge of the end of the world and the white expanse between him and her, and so his brain shoots an efferent signal down his spine, a bullet train connecting to a smaller train leading to his wrist’s flexor muscles that pump calcium ions across the divide to the skeletal muscles whose fibers slide over each other and his hand contracts and squeezes hers so that she looks up. “Isn’t it?” she repeats. “Beautiful,” he says and the dust falls and their dead skin cells fly from their hands, sucked into the wind behind the passing train.

NODE 1 (2020), PEN AND COLLAGE ON CARTRIDGE PAPER, 59CMS X 59CMS

TIM EDGAR

TECHNICAL LOOK

THE NEUROSCIENCE OF CREATIVITY

THE CREATIVE LOCUS DR ABHRAJEET ROY

LOCUS

In this overview article we go in search of the creative locus, exploring recent advances in the neuroscience of creativity. How might neuroscience define and measure creativity and how might we stimulate creative thought?

I. Introduction to the Neuroscience of Creativity What is creativity? A standard definition is that creativity is the ability to generate new ideas. However, from a neuroscientific perspective, this seems to be a gross oversimplification. Indeed, different modes of creative thought exist, and under each creative mode lies a highly complex neural infrastructure. These numerous types of creativity generally fall under two types of thinking: convergent and divergent. Convergent thinking refers to the process of finding a single correct solution to a problem. In contrast, divergent thinking refers to the process of idea generation: conceptualising numerous potential solutions for a given problem that can be evaluated later. Though these two modes of thinking are generally thought of as opposites, both are essential for creative problem-solving and often work in tandem. Over the last decade there has been an explosion in the use of pharmacological approaches,

functional neuroimaging techniques and cognitive science for the study of human creativity, namely through innovative investigations of convergent and divergent thinking. With regards to the neural mechanisms of creativity, leading evidence points to a careful interplay between several large-scale brain networks at the macro level: the limbic system, the default mode network (DMN) and the executive control network (ECN) (Figure 1) (Pidgeon et al., 2016; Zhu et al., 2017; Beaty et al., 2015; Beaty, Kenett, et al., 2018; Beaty et al., 2014). Further down at the micro level, neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine play essential roles in the ballad of creative cognition (Gu et al., 2018; Ferreri et al., 2019). This review summarises a number of key current developments in the study of creativity and its neural mechanisms, while highlighting additional recent works that have utilised novel approaches to try and enhance aspects of creative thought.

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Different modes of creative thought exist, and under each creative mode lies a highly complex neural infrastructure II. The Creative Brain – New Insights & Perspectives Advances in functional neuroimaging have shown that widespread networks across the whole brain are predictive of individual creative ability. A 2018 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study of 163 individuals spanning diverse artistic and scientific domains utilised connectome-based predictive modelling (CPM) to identify functional brain networks relevant to creativity (Beaty, Kenett, et al., 2018). CPM is a recently developed method for delineating functional brain connections relevant to a particular behavioural variable, such as creative ability (Shen et al., 2017). CPM can further be used to predict behaviours of interest in subjects whose data are not used in the initial stage of model creation. In this case, with regards to predicting highly creative behaviour during a divergent thinking task, CPM revealed a broad neural network linking three cortical hubs of more specialised networks: the posterior cingulate cortex (DMN), the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (ECN) and the salience network (left anterior insula). Additionally, this ‘meta-network’ was able to predict creative ability in novel individuals during other creative tasks. These findings are particularly intriguing, since the three cortical hubs identified generally work in opposition to each other. This suggests that certain individuals have a unique ability to simultaneously recruit these hubs in order to maximise creative thought. Individual differences in intrinsic brain functional connectivity have also been associated with differences in creative ability. A 2017 fMRI study investigated differences in resting-state functional connectivity and creative ability assessed by the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) (Gao et

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al., 2017). Based on TTCT measures, two groups of individuals were compared: a high creativity group and a low creativity group. Overall, the high creativity group exhibited greater efficiency in functional connectivity across brain networks relevant to creative thought. Additional connectivity properties of the DMN and ECN were further correlated with differences in creative ability. Other studies reiterate the importance of interconnectivity across distinct brain networks for mediating creativity. For example, large-scale brain networks have been implicated in verbal and visual creativity, respectively (Zhu et al., 2017). In this resting fMRI study of 282 healthy participants, the investigators assessed functional connectivity within and across the DMN and ECN during both a verbal and a visual task. Functional connectivity between the DMN and ECN was positively correlated with both verbal and visual creativity. In contrast, functional connectivity within certain nodes of the DMN and ECN was negatively correlated with both domains of creativity. These findings reiterate the notion that distinct networks in the brain interact during creative cognition. They further suggest that inhibition of functional connectivity within these distinct networks allows for the emergence of a ‘meta-network’ relevant to creative processes. A 2019 fMRI study of jazz improvisation also reported a correlation between increased creativity and decreased functional connectivity in a number of relevant brain networks (Dhakal et al., 2019). In this study, a group of 24 professional jazz musicians with at least six years’ of improvisation experience was instructed to vocalise or imagine either pre-learned or improvised music while fMRI data were collected. While the pre-learned

music performance served as a control task, the imagined performances allowed the researchers to avoid potential confounds from neural activity related to motor and perceptual aspects of the performance. Compared with pre-learned musical performance, improvisation was associated with increased blood oxygen level dependency (BOLD) activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, lateral premotor cortex, supplementary motor area, cerebellum and Broca’s area. However, functional connectivity within and across these same areas was comparatively reduced during improvisation. This decreased functional connectivity between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (an ECN hub) and lower regions of the brain could disinhibit subconscious creative processes necessary for improvisation. These findings are in line with another recent study which investigated differences in brain anatomy and musical improvisation capacity. In this protocol, 38 participants completed an improvisation continuation task prior to a T1 anatomical MRI scan (Arkin et al., 2019). Next, a group of professional jazz instructors evaluated the creativity levels of the participants’ improvisations. The researchers then used voxel-based morphometry (VBM) to correlate creativity levels with anatomical differences across a number of brain regions. Increased creativity ratings on the improvisation task were associated with reduced gray matter volume in the bilateral hippocampus and right inferior temporal gyrus, both of which are key players in auditory processing and memory. Furthermore, individual years of improvisation training was associated with greater creativity ratings. However, more training was also associated with reduced gray matter volume in the rolandic operculum, a key hub between the parietal and temporal lobes important for multisensory integration and self-awareness. Pharmacological studies have further shown that dopaminergic reward systems can mediate appreciation of creative works. In a recent

double-blind and within-subject study (n = 27), participants were given either levodopa (a dopamine precursor), risperidone (a dopamine antagonist) or lactose (a placebo) prior to three separate music listening sessions (Ferreri et al., 2019). For each listening session, participants were asked to rate both their ‘liking’ of the music (hedonic response) and their ‘wanting’ of the music, in terms of how much money they would spend on it (motivational response). Both the hedonic and motivational responses of participants were significantly increased during the levodopa (dopamine) session, compared with the placebo session, while risperidone significantly decreased both response measures. The researchers suggested that dopaminergic reward systems may play a broad role in mediating abstract thought, given this apparent causal link between dopamine and pleasure derived from music. Brain networks involved in emotion, decision-making and reward are all known to be recruited during creative thinking. But how do these distinct networks specifically communicate during the planning of an artistic piece? Furthermore, do these networks communicate differently in professional artists compared with a layperson? One recent study sought to elucidate answers to these questions, using fMRI to investigate functional connectivity between the DMN and ECN in artists and non-artists (De Pisapia et al., 2016). Eyes-closed fMRI data were acquired at rest, during a focused alphabet recall task, and during the planning of a visual art piece. Indeed, all participants, regardless of artistic training, showed increased functional connectivity within the DMN and between the DMN and ECN during the creative planning task, compared with both rest and the alphabet recall task. Additionally, compared with the non-artist group, the artist group showed significantly increased functional connectivity between the precuneus and a number of regions implicated in both perception and executive

Dopaminergic reward systems may play a broad role in mediating abstract thought

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function, including the posterior cingulate cortex, fusiform gyrus and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. The precuneus is a critical hub of the DMN implicated in consciousness and information processing. Aside from functional connectivity and anatomical studies, others have begun to investigate potential causal relationships between brain networks implicated in creativity, by assessing effective connectivity. In one recent study, dynamic causal modelling (DCM) showed that the prefrontal cortex asserts unidirectional control over the middle temporal gyrus and inferior parietal lobule during a divergent thinking task (Vartanian et al., 2018). This is in contrast to the hypothesis that these regions exert bidirectional influence on each other via a feedback loop spanning the ECN and DMN. These results suggest a cascading model of divergent thinking. First, the DMN generates potential solutions to a problem based on ideas retrieved from semantic, episodic or recombined memories. Second, the ECN mediates the selection of the solution which is ultimately output. Although our understanding of the neural mechanisms of creativity has been greatly expanded through neuroimaging studies in healthy human volunteers, brain lesion studies can also provide major insights into the networks critical for creative thinking. Researchers in Paris, France hypothesised that patients with lesions in distinct nodes of the prefrontal cortex would exhibit differential deficits in creative thinking

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(Bendetowicz et al., 2018). This study aimed to elucidate the unique contributions of the DMN and ECN in mediating creative associations. It was found that patients with damage to the right medial prefrontal cortex, implicated in the DMN, exhibited deficits in the ability to generate remote ideas during

Brain lesion studies can also provide major insights into the networks critical for creative thinking

a Combined Associates Task (CAT). In contrast, patients with damage to the left rostrolateral prefrontal cortex, implicated in the ECN, were still able to generate remote ideas assessed by the CAT but exhibited deficits in combining remote associations during a Free Generation of Associates Task (FGAT).

In addition to the study of creativity in general, a number of groups have utilised cuttingedge functional neuroimaging approaches for investigating the neural correlates of sudden insight, otherwise known as the eureka moment. In particular, a recent study utilising 7 Tesla, ultra high field fMRI during a remote association task (RAT) in healthy human participants (n = 29) revealed several key subcortical regions activated at moments of sudden insight (Tik et al., 2018). The RAT is unique in that it tests for both divergent and convergent thinking, compared to most other tests which evaluate just one or the other. Compared with low insight events during the RAT, high insight events were associated with significantly stronger activation in the nucleus accumbens, a subcortical region of the brain known to facilitate dopaminergic reward pathways. As a key player in the limbic system, the nucleus accumbens is well situated to mediate emotion-related networks spanning both subcortical and cortical regions. This could explain its strong functional activation during a eureka moment, when there is a sudden feeling of relief, ease, joy, and confidence. In another study of eureka moments, researchers assessed eye blinks and eye movement activity during problem-solving. In this case, sudden insights were associated with subtle attentional changes, indicated by the shutting out of visual inputs (Salvi et al., 2015). Specifically, the investigators found different patterns of ocular activity during insightful,

versus analytical, problem-solving. During the pre-solution phase, insightful problem-solving was associated with an increase in both the frequency and duration of blinking, along with a reduction in eye movements, compared to analytical problem solving. During the solution phase, insightful problem-solving was further associated with long blink durations, especially just before a eureka moment.The authors suggested that these involuntary changes in eye activity during insightful problem-solving could reflect increased phasic dopamine release and cognitive flexibility. These findings highlight a promising approach for delineating subconscious attentional processes relevant to creative problem-solving. Other recent work in the realm of eureka moments suggests that sudden insight or realisation is the consequence of subconscious processes reaching a critical mass of evidence which then pierces through to conscious awareness (Kang et al., 2017). In this study, five participants were asked to make perceptual judgements about a dynamic random-dot motion stimulus. During each trial, participants viewed random-dot motion and had to decide in which direction the dots were moving. Once a decision was made, participants would set a clock at the time that they made the decision. Overall, subjective decision times were shorter for ‘easy’ trials, where there was strong motion of the stimulus in one direction or the other. This allowed for a subjective decision time curve to be extrapolated for each participant. The investigators then fitted a drift-diffusion (i.e. bounded evidence accumulation) model to each participant’s subjective decision time curve. For four of the five participants, the drift-diffusion model predicted individual decision times very accurately. The researchers proposed that this model truly reflected the timing of a eureka moment, versus just a post hoc report. They further suggest that these conscious decisions were the result of sufficient accumulation of evidence at the subconscious level. As part of the growing body of work investigating mechanisms and properties of the eureka moment, novel paradigms have emerged for studying this enigmatic mental phenomenon. Researchers recently developed one such paradigm, coined ‘Dira’ (French for ‘he or she will point out’), for delineating the chronological and chronometric aspects of creative processes which

Insightful problem-solving was further associated with long blink durations

lead up to the eureka moment (Loesche, Goslin, and Bugmann, 2018). In this study, a eureka moment was defined as ‘the common human experience of suddenly understanding a previously incomprehensible problem or concept’. In the ‘Dira’ experimental paradigm, an individual goes through 40 trials (or rounds) where they are presented with a short line of scrambled text above a set of six blurred images. Images become clear when the participant hovers the mouse over them. The experiment also tracks the total amount of time the participant spends interacting with each image. The participant must ‘solve’ each trial by selecting an image which they feel appropriately matches the scrambled text message. Following each trial decision, the participant rates the difficulty of the preceding trial and notes how strongly they felt the eureka moment. The participant also rates their confidence and happiness levels following each trial decision. Using this approach in a group of 124 participants, researchers found that individuals spent more time interacting with images that were eventually selected as solutions, compared with unselected images. Furthermore, individuals could come to a solution without exploring all of the presented images. For trials which evoked a strong eureka moment, the time spent on selected solutions was approximately 50% greater than the time spent assessing unselected solutions. Strong eureka moments were also associated with a high level of confidence and happiness, echoing other studies that have linked dopamine release to creativity and insight.

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III. Neuroscientific Models of Creativity – Cognition & Emotion Several recent models have linked creativity with cognition and emotion, respectively. Creative cognition specifically refers to the cognitive processes that underlie creative thought, whether it be in the domain of visual arts, music or otherwise. As described earlier, creative thought can be either divergent (i.e. creative idea generation) or convergent (i.e. creative problem-solving). Mathias Benedek and Andreas Fink argue that creative cognition can in fact be understood by leveraging our knowledge of three fundamental aspects of normal cognition: memory, attention and cognitive control (Benedek and Fink, 2019). Importantly, creative cognition is not necessarily exclusive to artistic geniuses or mad scientists, but instead is thought to be the summation of ordinary events within the scope of normal cognition. With regards to memory, research has shown that conceptualising future events activates brain networks which overlap with those activated during episodic memory recollection (Beaty, Thakral, et al., 2018). Indeed, although creative thought ultimately seeks to generate ideas beyond those contained in memories, drawing on a foundation of experiences can facilitate the conceptualisation of novel approaches and solutions. Benedek and Fink also emphasise the potential role of internal attention in mediating creative cognition, drawing on studies that have shown increased EEG alpha activity in the right parietal cortex (Benedek, Schickel, et al., 2014) and decreased fMRI activity in the visual cortex (Benedek et al., 2016) during creative thought. They suggest that creative cognition is not wholly dependent on sensory input, and that internally focusing attention on self-generated ideas allows creative individuals to fully leverage their imaginations. Finally, cognitive control appears to be a key aspect of creative cognition, with executive function and intelligence being highly predictive of creative abilities in a number of studies (Benedek, Jauk, et al., 2014). Furthermore, although certain brain lesions within the prefrontal cortex have been shown to inhibit creative thought, in some cases brain lesions affecting executive function may actually enhance certain aspects of creativity (Abraham et al., 2012). Ultimately, under Benedek and Fink’s three-tiered

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framework of creative cognition, one can postulate means of directly or indirectly enhancing creative thought by manipulating various aspects of attention, memory and cognitive control. Of course, aside from cognition, it is well established that creativity is intrinsically linked to emotional processes, particularly with regards to the arts. Artifacts, music, and nature can all elicit strong emotional responses in the viewer that are governed by distinct neural mechanisms, depending on the particular emotion that is evoked. One provocative model attempting to reconcile the link between creativity and emotion is the Three Primary Colour Model, which assumes that humans have four basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear/ surprise and anger/disgust) that are governed by the three primary monoamine neuromodulators: dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin (Gu et al., 2018). This model emphasises two main aspects of creativity with respect to a creative work: value and novelty. From an evolutionary perspective, value refers to the level of efficiency of a coping method in response to a stressful situation, through a process of primary appraisal, secondary appraisal and reappraisal. In the Three Primary Colour Model, dopamine is theorised to facilitate the process of creative problem-solving because its release depends on whether or not a chosen coping method is successful or not. A more creative coping method that is highly efficient could result in a greater dopamine-based reward and reinforce that line of creative problem-solving. In contrast to value, novelty refers to the unexpectedness of a particular situation or stimulus, which could elicit arousal and trigger a fight or flight response. Norepinephrine is the key monoamine neuromodulator in this case, as its release is triggered in response to surprise, fear, and novel situations. Creativity could be driven by emphasising attention on the salience of novel stimuli which consistently lead to arousal and norepinephrine release. Finally, we come to serotonin, which is also released during stressful situations, particularly when there is a need to cope with or avoid stressful stimuli. Serotonin is strongly associated with punishment, aversion, and behavioural inhibition, and generally has a negative correlation with reward (Dayan and Huys, 2009). In fact, serotonergic

F igure 1: C reativit y N et works © A bhrajeet R oy

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Serotonin could potentially mediate creativity systems have been shown to act in opposition to dopaminergic systems (Gu et al., 2018; Khalil, Godde, and Karim, 2019). However, the specific link between serotonin and creativity is still up for debate. Since adequate levels of serotonin are critical for stress management and mood stabilisation, serotonin could potentially mediate creativity, which flourishes when the mind is relaxed and ideas are free-flowing. Serotonin may also mediate emotional responses to creative works in a manner similar to dopamine. While certain works of art evoke pleasure and comfort via dopaminergic pathways, others which evoke feelings of disgust, shame, or aversion may operate via serotonergic pathways. At this time, further work must be done to elucidate better the complex interactions between serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine as they relate to creativity.

IV. Boosting Creativity – From Neuromodulation to Mindfulness Humanity’s propensity for creativity and culture separates it from other earthly organisms, so it is no surprise that humans have consistently explored means of enhancing creative thought over the generations. Recent advances in both technology and our understanding of the mind point to novel and exciting ways of facilitating creativity without the use of pharmacological agents. For example, a number of studies have explored the application of non-invasive brain stimulation for enhancing creativity (Lucchiari, Sala, and Vanutelli, 2018). The theory behind this neuromodulation approach is that brain networks related to creative thought can be subtly modulated in a safe and reversible manner, in order to induce transient increases in

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divergent or convergent ways of thinking. Repeated cognitive training sessions coupled with neuromodulation may even facilitate long-term changes in brain network connectivity and creative thought processes. One group recently conducted a pilot study to investigate whether transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) can be used to modulate aspects of divergent and convergent thought (Ruggiero et al., 2018). tDCS is a non-invasive means of stimulating the brain across the scalp surface through the application of very small, polarity-specific electrical currents (generally less than 2.0 mA) at the subthreshold level (i.e. tDCS does not induce action potentials in the brain but instead modulates the excitability of target brain regions and associated networks). In this case, the researchers were interested in elucidating the specific role of excitability in the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) as it relates to creative thought. The ATL has been implicated in semantic memory processes across a range of studies, which makes it a critical node for facilitating general worldly knowledge related to concepts, facts and things (Bonner and Price, 2013). Anodal (excitatory) tDCS (1.5 mA, 20 minutes) or sham stimulation was applied over the left and right ATL during a divergent thinking task, with a convergent thinking task being completed before and after the tDCS period. One group received tDCS over the left ATL, one received tDCS over the right ATL, and one underwent the sham stimulation protocol (seven subjects per group). Interestingly, tDCS over the left ATL reduced reaction times during the convergent thinking task, suggesting an effect on insight itself. However, stimulation to the right ATL had no discernible effects on reaction time during the convergent thinking task, and neither stimulation approach showed significant effects during the divergent thinking task. Although this was only a small pilot study, it highlights the potential of using tDCS for elucidating the role of specific brain regions in mediating opposing facets of creativity. Another larger study of tDCS recently investigated how stimulation of the prefrontal cortex could potentially influence performance on three aspects of creative cognition: conceptual expansion, associative thinking, and set-shifting ability. In this study, 90 healthy university students were

recruited and received bilateral tDCS over the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) during the performance of three tasks: Alternate Uses Task (AUT), Compound Remote Associate Task (CRA) and the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (WCST). Participants showed improved performance on creative tasks when anodal (excitatory) tDCS targeted the right IFG, in tandem with cathodal (inhibitory) tDCS over the left IFG, compared to the sham stimulation condition. In contrast, anodal tDCS of the left IFG with cathodal tDCS of the right IFG resulted in inferior creative performance compared to sham stimulation. Additionally, EEG recordings revealed increased right frontal activity in the beta band (12-30 Hz) following anodal stimulation of the right IFG. This increase in beta band activity was correlated with enhanced performance on the behavioural tasks. Aside from tDCS, which utilises a continuous direct current to modulate neural activity, tACS (transcranial alternating current stimulation) has emerged as a non-invasive means of stimulating the cortex in a frequency-specific manner. Given that oscillatory activity in the brain is both indicative of different brain states and utilised for different types of information processing, there is growing interest in leveraging tACS for studying human cognition. One such 2019 study specifically investigated the potential of tACS in the gamma range for increasing the occurrence of eureka moments (Santarnecchi et al., 2019). In a group of 31 healthy participants, tACS at 10 Hz (alpha) and 40 Hz (gamma) was applied to the right parietal and temporal lobes, respectively, during both a compound remote association (CRA) task and a Rebus Puzzles task. Resting EEG activity was also recorded after each task + tACS block. Improvements in accuracy on the CRA task were only observed during gamma band stimulation of the right temporal lobe – no effects on CRA or Rebus Puzzle performance were reported during alpha tACS over the right parietal lobe. Resting state fMRI data collected prior to the tACS experiments also revealed a correlation between bilateral temporal lobe functional connectivity and individual

performance enhancement on the CRA following gamma tACS over the right temporal lobe. This study highlights the relevance of subject-specific responses to neuromodulation as it relates to enhancement of creative cognition and further expands our knowledge of the relevant mechanisms of eureka moments. Although technological means for boosting creativity are certainly exciting, more conventional practices such as mindfulness and meditation may be sufficient on their own. Indeed, as we discussed earlier, quieting the mind may allow more space for creative focus and imagination. This is highlighted by a recent study which compared creativity and brain activation measures across groups of individuals with varying levels of mindfulness training (BerkovichOhana et al., 2017). These researchers specifically evaluated associations between DMN activity (as indexed by low-gamma band resting-state EEG) and divergent thinking. Their findings revealed that the two subject groups with high levels of mindfulness training (over 1000 hours) showed reduced resting-state interhemispheric EEG functional connectivity in frontal and posterior brain regions, along with increased divergent thinking abilities (indexed by fluency and flexibility), with respect to the subject groups with little or no mindfulness training (12 subjects per group). Despite the small sample size, these results reiterate the notion that cognitive training alone, specifically in the realm of mindfulness, could enhance creative thinking skills over time through the reduction of ‘noisy’ neural activity in the DMN. EEG has also been used to study the effects of cyclic meditation on creative cognition (Shetkar et al., 2019). Cyclic meditation, also known as moving meditation, combines different yoga postures with elements of guided meditation, and has its origins in an ancient Indian text known as Mandukya Upanishad. Researchers found that cyclic meditation enhances aspects of divergent thinking during the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults (ATTA). Furthermore, while EEG activity was

Practicing meditation may also contribute to creative cognition

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Neuromodulation could enhance the occurrence of spontaneous visual imagery

primarily in the delta (low frequency) range for the control group, EEG activity in the cyclic meditation group shifted from the delta to gamma (high frequency) range. Additionally, increased functional connectivity between frontal and parietal EEG channels was observed in the gamma band for the cyclic meditation, a potential mechanism for the observed increase in creative cognition. Practicing meditation may also contribute to creative cognition in seemingly indirect ways, through enhancement of visual imagery. Visual imagery, although not explicitly defined in terms of either divergent or convergent thinking, can bolster creativity by enhancing imagination, which itself is unique from creativity. A 2019 case study used both EEG and neuromodulation to investigate the link between creativity and spontaneous visual imagery in a professional artist during ten meditation sessions over the course of six months (Luft et al., 2019). For seven of the meditation sessions, EEG was used to delineate changes in cortical activity related to the occurrence and characteristics of spontaneous visual imagery. During these sessions, occipital activity in the high gamma range (30-70 Hz) was consistently increased during the deepest stages of meditation and strongly associated with increases in spontaneous visual imagery. tACS was further applied during three of the meditation sessions (10 Hz, 40 hz, and sham stimulation) to assess whether neuromodulation could enhance the occurrence of spontaneous visual imagery. Interestingly, the participant reported sharper, shorter, and more numerous occurrences of spontaneous visual imagery during the 10 Hz (alpha band) tACS session only, while gamma and sham stimulation had no reported behavioural effect. Despite being a case study, these highly intriguing

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findings suggest a deeper link between aspects of visual imagery and creative cognition, and highlight the potential in simultaneously leveraging meditation and neuromodulation for enhancing inspiration and subsequent creativity.

V. Conclusion There is no doubt that great progress has been made in recent years towards the neuroscientific understanding of creativity and insight. From major advances in neuroimaging technology, to novel means of modulating creative cognition, our neural models of creativity continue to expand and differentiate, much like a dendrite. Ultimately, the aggregation of scientific research continues to support the notion of cross-network communication across disparate brain regions during creative thought. Indeed, the brains of creative individuals appear to have a knack for simultaneously engaging brain networks that would otherwise be in cognitive conflict. In particular, these creative brains may help us delineate the interplay between conscious and subconscious neural processes as it relates to convergent and divergent thinking, respectively. Furthermore, given the deep connection between emotion and creativity, additional research may lead to novel approaches for maintaining a good state of mind. After all, numerous studies have shown that exposure to creative works can improve mental health and well-being (Mastandrea, Fagioli, and Biasi, 2019). Advancing the neuroscientific study of creativity will continue to challenge our paradigms of human expression and could elucidate the deepest mysteries of the mind in years to come.

AUDREY RANGEL AGUIRRE

HUMAN BRAIN CELLS SILICON (2019), LIGHT SCULPTURE

THE FIRST TEAR (DETAIL) (2018-2020), BISMUTH ON VELVET

FRONTAL LOBE (2018-2020), BRONZE WITH CERAMIC SHELL

CHERYL SAFREN

BRAIN STEM (2013), CHEMISTRY ON COPPER, 24X32”

INTERVIEW

LITERARY ARTS

FACTS ABOUT FICTION CHARLES FERNYHOUGH + KEITH OATLEY IN CONVERSATION WITH LYNDSEY WINSHIP

FICTION

Two psychologists, and published fiction writers, have a unique perspective on what fiction is, the writing process itself, and how reading fiction might change you.

Keith Oatley is professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto who studies the psychology of emotions and the psychology of fiction. Charles Fernyhough is a professor of psychology at Durham University, where among other things he leads the interdisciplinary Hearing the Voice project, investigating auditory and verbal hallucinations (Hearing the Voice | Interdisciplinary voice-hearing research, 2020). As well as authoring numerous books on their academic subjects, both are published novelists. Oatley’s first novel The Case of Emily V won a Commonwealth Writers Prize (Oatley, 2006). Fernyhough’s fiction includes 2012’s A Box of Birds, whose protagonist is a neuroscientist with a stubbornly materialist worldview (Fernyhough, 2012). ‘Writing pushes buttons that academia definitely can’t get anywhere near,’ says Fernyhough, explaining fiction’s pull. ‘It’s the most intellectually rewarding and exciting thing I’ve ever done, a workout for the entire mind, heart, body and soul.’ Seisma joined Oatley and Fernyhough on

a group call to talk about the power of fiction and their careers combining storytelling with science. Lyndsey Winship: One of the influential themes in your work, Keith, is the idea that fiction is a simulation of reality. Let’s start there. Keith Oatley: The word fiction comes from Latin, meaning ‘something made’ and people think ‘made up’. But fiction isn’t made up. It’s constructed from things that we know. It’s about what we human beings are up to with each other, our intentions and emotions. Fiction is about making a kind of simulation, so that we can think about these interrelations (Oatley et al., 2018). Charles Fernyhough: Your work on this has been really inspirational over the years. People ask, what’s the relationship between writing fiction and doing science. Is writing a scientific process? I think it’s more like engineering, or software design – when you’re writing, you’re writing a code for that simulation, which then goes into somebody else’s head and the whole idea is that it does certain

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PART 5: OCTOPUS/HUMAN COLLISION

the right My octopus has ten thousand neurons makes the two eyes move together in the interests of a whole world of experience. creativity depends on the union of things that are also maintained separately – the precise function of the in each semi-independent arm, more together , both to separate and connect. there is increased right than make up what we’d call her brain. involvement when generating unusual or distantly related words or novel uses for objects. If it is the right One school of thought is that they were needed to manage, to control that is vigilant for whatever exists ‘out there’, it alone can bring us something other than what we already know. Events anywhere in the the octopus’s unique body shape, and then perhaps like us - are connected to, and potentially have consequences for, other regions, which may inhibit it, or strive to reestablished equilibrium. the when her neurons started talking, unexpected benefits arose: has to attend to the world in two completely different ways. In the one, we experience – the live, complex, embodied, world of individual, always unique beings, forever in flux. In the other we ‘experience’ a ‘re-presented’ version of it, containing now static, separable, bounded, but essentially fragmented entities on which predictions can be based. our understanding of the curiosity, imagination, these things ways of understanding alters our understanding of the we call intelligence. itself. it tells us something about the nature of reality

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PART 6: RESULT

the octopus has ten thousand neurons

eyes move together

in the interests of a whole world of experience creativity the union of things that are also maintained separately semi-independent arm separate

each connect

her brain when generating unusual related words or novel uses

or distantly

for objects school of thought needed to manage vigilant for whatever exists ‘out there’ it alone can bring us something other than what we already know like us, other regions

Perhaps

inhibit or strive to reestablish equilibrium Her neurons started talking unexpected benefits arose: imagination, our understanding of intelligence tells us something about nature reality

Sources Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life by Peter Godfrey Smith The Master and His Emissary by Ian McGilchrist The Intention Experiment by Lynne McTaggart

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LITERARY ARTS INTERVIEW

REASON + RHYME HELEN MORT + TANIA HERSHMAN

What lies behind our responses to poetry and how does the process of poetic writing affect our brains? We spoke with two poets to find out how they experience both the writing and reading of creative literary works.

Poetry can mean different things to different people. According to Wordsworth, ‘poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.’ Emily Dickinson defines it this way: ‘If I read a book and it makes my body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry.’ For Dylan Thomas, ‘poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing.’ In this issue, we have commissioned exciting new works from Tania Hershman and Helen Mort, both writers with a science background. Poetry offers a world of diverse forms and experiences. Take a single glance at the pieces written by Tania Hershman and Helen Mort [pages 89-95], and you’ll see that diversity in full bloom. Hershman’s piece is complex and transitional in form, while Mort’s poem appears more structured. Yet, both poems generate fascinating impressions when read through the lens of neuroscience. So, does poetry feed on

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RHYME

ERMAN MISIRLISOY

imagination? And how might poetry engage with science? Neuroscience thrives on formal definitions, because independent labs need to distill the same concepts in order to objectively study them. By contrast, poetry is tough to define. Hershman says: ‘everything is poetry, everything is story, and everything is part-fiction, part-non-fiction.’ Mort, meanwhile, takes a different approach. To her, poetry is ‘a dance between the known and the unknown, both dancers wearing blindfolds.’ Without a widely-agreed definition, neuroscientists simply have to rely on whatever their participants are thinking when they hear the word “poetry”. If researchers want to study the brain of a poetry reader, they might ask people to read poems on a screen inside a brain scanner. If they want to study the creation process, their best hope is to ask people to write poetry in a brain scanner instead. These methods might sound tricky, but the results are fascinating.

H elen M ort © E mma L edwith

The Brain on Poetry In 2017, a study in Germany examined how the brain reacts to poetry (Wassiliwizky et al., 2017). The researchers were interested in peak pleasure sensations—sensations such as ecstasy or “chills”—that many people report when they come across a poignant piece. They recruited eighteen participants and asked them to read from a selection of poems while lying in an fMRI scanner. Whenever participants experienced chills, they would let the experimenters know by pressing a button. The imaging data showed that poetry could ignite the brain’s most ancient reward circuitry. When people experienced chills, goosebumps would sprout on their skin, and their brains would become more active in areas such as the precuneus and the caudate nucleus. The precuneus has been linked to visual mental imagery (Cavanna & Trimble, 2006), suggesting that people may experience powerful and relatable visuals when they connect with poetry. The caudate nucleus is buried deep within the brain, and it releases dopamine during primal experiences of pleasure such as those during feeding (Small et al., 2003).

T ania H ershman © N aomi W oddis

All of this shows that poetry isn’t just an intellectual pursuit; it’s a bliss factory. The poets’ minds also tell an interesting story. One study suggests that when writing poetry, an individual’s brain turns down its cognitive control systems—systems that usually keep attention focused on goals and plans (Liu et al., 2015). This allows the mind to navigate freely in unusual territory, inspiring unique modes of expression and new connections between concepts. Cognitive control systems are active when a poet revises his or her poetry, as they engage a more critical and analytical mindset to polish their creation. This distinction between a generative mode and a revisionary mode in the brain may apply more broadly to a writer’s process. For example, imagining a reader’s reaction requires a theory of the mind: the ability to predict other people’s behaviour by inferring their mental states (Gallager & Frith, 2003). Theory of mind is essential for many writers. For Helen Mort, it’s essential when she is revising a poem, but not necessarily when she is generating a first draft. ‘I have to keep the reader’s cognitive journey to the back of my mind when I’m actually writing

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M ax R evell © M onika C iunkaite

something I have not personally experienced. In contrast, when I make pieces for others, the movement and stories come from them in order to create a more honest piece.

to, not only for shows, exhibitions or to be seen. There is more power in freely making work as it gives you the opportunity to improve as you build your creative thought.

DG: Now looking over your life so far, have your creative thought processes become more convergent or divergent? MR: My creative process was highly convergent because I spent a long time trying to dance like others, I used to choreograph what I thought people wanted to see. We tend to copy our teachers, people online and people that really inspire us. However, the big difference now is that I have learnt you have everything you need within yourself. The key is staying attuned to your body and your life experiences while finding your own way of moving; no one will be able to touch that.

DG: That links to the concept of ‘flow’; when one immerses themselves within an activity for its own sake, leading to a subsequently stronger concept of self (Csikszentmihalyi, 2002). What is your experience of this? MR: There are times when I’ve been in the studio, so lost in flow I didn’t even notice the time. It feels like a pocket of time that has separated from everything else, like a dream, you feel like you spent three hours but it was ten minutes. What is also enjoyable is when you’re teaching and you see someone experience flow for the first time, or when you experience it whilst co-choreographing or performing a duet.

DG: I love the last thing you said about being attuned to your own body and life experiences. I believe that if a message is important to you, the fact that it meant something to you means you should express it in a way that is unique to yourself. Nevertheless, seeing various skills inspires artists to ‘enhance their creativity’. Do you agree with this concept? If so, which methodologies have you used to enhance the divergent aspects of your creativity? MR: I definitely think that creativity can be enhanced, I’m a big believer in practice. To enhance your creativity, make work just because you want

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DG: On the convergent aspects of creativity, research has revealed that aesthetic experiences can be universal and objective. This can be seen in dance competitions with panels and criteria. What are your views on the objective vs subjective element of dance competitions? MR: Dance competitions are partially valid, as I do believe there are subjective and objective elements to art. I’ve had to judge competitions based on criteria such as technical movement and performance technique. I then ask myself, what is performance? How do you give someone a score

Competitions are a useful tool for testing your skills and gaining constructive criticism

from 1-10 on performance? It’s such a weird territory and an endless debate. On the other hand, as a competitor, it is important to realise that the panel is comprised of people that have their own opinions, biases, and preferences, which they are trying to ignore to judge objectively but it is impossible to do that with art. Nevertheless, I think competitions are a useful tool for testing your skills and gaining constructive criticism.

DG: And what would you investigate in regards to the artist? MR: I would love to investigate the long-term effects of artistic training on the brain. What’s the progression? What part of the brain grows? What is different about it? Why does that difference exist?

DG: One benefit of such objective criteria is that scientists are able to deconstruct elements of dance to enable scientific research. Some might argue that this empirical exploration of art is dangerously convergent. What are your thoughts on this? MR: I think it is really progressive, as we are now able to understand and discover these constructs, we should continue to strip down everything for understanding. If there are people that don’t believe in scientific research of the arts I would ask, why? Surely you would want to know more about the audience’s aesthetic experiences during your performances? I definitely think it’s important. DG: If you had the opportunity to collaborate on a research project with me what would you investigate in regards to the audience? MR: I would love to research why non-experienced dancers can tell the difference between a beginner and an experienced dancer.

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still others require song to have syllabic diversity the repetitive and transformative patterns that define music which songs are songs and which are calls some groups are nearly voiceless almost all song is sung by male birds babblers, the scimitar babblers some owls occupy an acoustic niche the available frequency range is partitioned music reflects some pre-ordained harmony we can all sing we can all draw when I hear some harmonies I break down I feel the weave all the chancers I am not afraid the birds go on singing banal and profound wind riffing their breasts the surge to open their mouths louder and at a higher pitch in urban zones along the roadside there is a violent thrush I love it like my sons young birds learn outlines of songs from their fathers their mothers are filling holes with flesh seeds over generations birds form dialects research on parrots suggests nouns adjectives verbs can we recover vocal plasticity indulge us bickering uprising wings

Some text in this poem uses text from the Wikipedia entry on bird vocalisation.

INSTRUMENTAL

SARAH WESTCOTT

JODY RASCH

THOUGHT-MRI (2020), ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 36X48IN

‘He took the preliminary precaution of having his wife watched by a private detective.’ Vertigo

So he shadows a quarry, her eyes on the prize, parks at a discreet five metres, palms his Homburg at the entrance, the graveyard otherwise empty – pulls away after waiting for the ignition to fire. Though each injured soul thinks it theirs alone to diagnose another’s injury, it is as she seems to slip her bonds she slips into her role more deeply.

BLIND SPOT

MATT BRYDEN

KNOWING ME KNOWING ME (2020). DIGITAL SCAN FROM FMRI

TALINE TEMIZIAN

SCREEN ARTS INTERVIEW

COMEDY CIRCUITS SOPHIE SCOTT + ORI AMIR

Neuroscience is deepening our understanding of humour by shedding light on the evolutionary function of laughter and brain activity when we make jokes. But could our capacity for humour ever be replicated by AI?

As anyone who’s sat through a misfiring best-man’s speech can testify, comedy is a ticklish business. Humour may be one of the great constants of human behaviour, but questions about what drives it abound. What is its evolutionary function, exactly? Why can watching a man slip on an icy pavement make us freeze with horror in one context, but guffaw in another? Why is it easier to laugh when we’re in company than when we’re on our own? One of the funniest things about humour, perhaps, is that, the more you spend time cogitating it, the less and less amusing – and the deeper and more fascinating – the topic becomes. Strangely, perhaps, neuroscientists haven’t exactly fallen over each other in the quest for answers. Whereas the literature on ‘affective’ emotions such as disgust and pleasure is plentiful, papers focusing on humour are harder to come by, and there are far fewer researchers in the field. It wasn’t until 2000 that the American psychologist

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CIRCUITS

ANDREW DICKSON

Robert Provine persuaded many colleagues to attend to what he called this branch of ‘sidewalk neuroscience’ – that is, work that could engage and intrigue non-specialists – in his pioneering book, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (Provine, 2001). Even now, twenty years on, humour is a subject too few neuroscientists take, well, seriously. ‘It is surprising that it’s less researched than it should be,’ agrees Sophie Scott, professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London, who has spent her career investigating the neurobiology of speech, with a particular focus on laughter. ‘It’s often regarded as trivial – not the business of science, somehow. But then people say the same about comedy itself – that it’s not as worth studying as tragedy: funny films never win Oscars, do they?’ Nonetheless, the fact that neuroscientists have been slow on the uptake remains puzzling. Humour has a lot to offer researchers: even if the things that provoke it are wildly different, it is universal

S ophie S cot t

across cultures and time, giving the subject broad applicability. It’s also easy to detect both visually and aurally (we smile and laugh). And, most appealing of all, it appears to be binary – we either find something funny, or we don’t. ‘Unlike a lot of behaviours, we actually have a relatively objective measure,’ argues Ori Amir, a neuroscientist at Pomona College in California, who, like Scott, focuses on humour. ‘People agree far more that something is funny rather than when, say, a piece of art is beautiful. It’s a great subject if you’re interested in creativity.’ There is a degree of consensus, too, on how the brain handles humour. While experts disagree on the details, the psychologist Brian King outlines the process in his book The Laughing Cure (King, 2016).Let’s say I’m telling you a classic question-and-answer joke: how many psychotherapists does it take to change a lightbulb? You reply, of course, that you don’t know. The moment I deliver the punchline (‘but does the lightbulb want to change?’), your prefrontal cortex (PFC) – the section of your brain that handles complex cognitive behaviour – along with areas in the temporal cortex, leaps into action to analyse what I’ve just said. Because it’s a joke involving language – specifically a pun on the word ‘change’ – your dominant brain hemisphere (the left side for the majority of us

O ri A mir

who are right-handed) is called in to help process the information, while the other hemisphere helps assess its emotional and social intent, specifically that I’m intending to be funny. In King’s phrase, ‘the right hemisphere “gets” the joke’. As the joke moves at lightning speed through your neural networks, other areas of your brain get involved. Your parietal lobe, which helps with visualisation, might become stimulated (maybe you’re picturing Sigmund Freud struggling to reach a ceiling fitting). The subcortical areas constituting your limbic system encourage you to feel joy. Finally – assuming my gag amused you enough – the regions of your brain that control physical movement induce you to smile or even laugh. Badoom-tish. ‘Many different areas of the brain are involved,’ says Amir. ‘When you look at the brain using functional MRI (fMRI), you see activity in the temporal poles, the medial prefrontal cortex and other parts too; you see the brain working to bring all these different elements together.’ ‘But it’s after this point that things get truly interesting,’ he adds. While most neuroscientists have focused on ‘passive humour appreciation’ – how the brain processes what might be described as ‘incoming’ humour – Amir has investigated how we actually generate jokes. His most famous experiment to date, conducted

Amir has investigated how we actually generate jokes

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Laughter has a strong evolutionary basis with his colleague Irving Biederman, focused on a cohort of 40 people, made up of thirteen professional comedians, nine amateurs and eighteen control subjects (Amir & Biederman, 2016). After lying down in an MRI scanner, each person was shown a New Yorker cartoon and given fifteen seconds to think of two captions: one straight, the other as amusing as possible. These captions were then recorded and rated for funniness by an independent group of 81 undergraduates. Several enticing insights emerged. First, the stronger the activity in the temporal lobe (which is involved in vision, memory, sensory input, language, emotion and comprehension), the greater the comedic experience. Even more intriguingly, the ventral striatum – a major ‘reward’ region – showed activity even before a joke was generated, hinting that either the brain ‘knows’ if a joke will be funny (hence producing a reward), or possibly that the brain is priming itself to come up with funny ideas. Amir and Biedermann also demonstrated that professional comedians use their dorsolateral prefrontal cortices (dlPFC) less than amateurs do when generating material, instead relying on their medial prefrontal cortices (mPFC). Given that the dlPFC is associated with cognitive control, and the mPFC with self-expression, this indicates that pros are doing what improv comedy coaches always advise: conquering the inner critic and going with the flow, rather than trying to ‘force the funny’. ‘That piece of research was satisfying,’ Amir says. ‘The advice to get out of your head is supported by evidence: you really do need to reduce the activity of your control centres.’ As well as researching comedy, Amir also performs as a standup. When I ask if these insights have affected his own performances, he laughs.

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‘I always say that doing comedy has informed my science much more than doing science has informed my comedy.’ Sophie Scott is, it turns out, another neuroscientist turned comedian; she first tried her hand at live performance a decade ago and still appears on occasion at UCL’s own Bright Club (billed as ‘the thinking person’s comedy night’). But her own research into humour reaches back to when she was doing postdoctoral work into non-verbal expressions of strong emotions in the 1990s. ‘I never set out to study laughter,’ she says. ‘But then as soon as you start looking at it, you realise that it’s everywhere. It’s connected to so many different things.’ While Amir has delved inside the brain, trying to unravel how it processes and assembles humour, Scott has primarily looked outwards – to how humans express their appreciation of it. She has investigated why we sometimes break out into fits of uncontrollable giggles, explored the differences between ‘authentic’ and fake laughs, demonstrated that laughing can indeed be contagious in groups, and even tested the effectiveness of taped ‘canned’ laughter, used in TV sitcoms since time immemorial. Laughter has a strong evolutionary basis, Scott argues: as well as being inherently a social act (other research suggests we are 30 times more likely to laugh when we’re with someone else rather than alone), it helps humans navigate our relationships with others (Provine, 2001). ‘At base, it’s an invitation to play,’ she says. ‘Laughter says, “I’m not going to hurt you, or mate with you, or do anything else. I want to connect with you.”’ Scott’s research also suggests something surprising: that there are at least two kinds of laughter, which her co-authored 2017 paper on the subject split into ‘spontaneous and volitional’ (Lavan et al., 2017). The spontaneous kind (also exhibited by apes and rats) is activated by being tickled, and seems more primal. If we receive that stimulus, in other words, we can’t help ourselves laughing, even if we don’t really want to. The volitional kind, however, suggests a social dimension – we’re laughing to show we’re relaxed, we’re having a good time, we’re joining in, we get the joke. One estimate suggests humans laugh in conversation around seven times every ten minutes, approximately once every minute and a half. It is

clearly a crucial part of sociability, as it happens to be with chimpanzees, too. ‘That kind of laughter is about regulating emotion,’ argues Scott. ‘And your brain really cares about the difference. You can see it very clearly in brain imaging.’ One of Scott and her colleagues’ most striking recent pieces of research, published in Current Biology last year, shows that groan-worthy, so-called dad jokes (‘What do you call a man with a spade on his head? Dug.’) are perceived by audiences to be funnier if researchers add a pre-recorded laughter track (Cai et al., 2019). This suggests that there’s something about hearing other people laugh that increases our own sense of hilarity, as anyone who’s crammed into a small, soldout stand-up gig knows (or, conversely, anyone who’s watched a comedian struggle to raise a three-quarters-empty room). ‘Laughter is almost more like an animal call than it is speech,’ says Scott, pointing out that her own experience doing standup supports this. ‘One of the things I realised on stage is how you really need to give the audience space to laugh; it’s as much about orchestrating that as it is about telling jokes.’ Gags about nerdy neuroscientists aside (think of the character that real-life neurobiologist Mayim Bialik plays in American sitcom The Big Bang Theory), there is a great deal researchers still don’t know about humour, and would like to. On a practical basis, accurately measuring the brain activity of someone who’s laughing, still more delivering jokes, is tough – head and mouth movements make getting clean fMRI data near-impossible, and EEG data can also be easily contaminated with noise. Then, of course, it is equally difficult to get someone to be funny on cue while trapped in an intimidating, noisy scanner: conditions that make even the most bearpit-like comedy club seem encouraging. Other queries are more subtle. Given Scott’s research into different forms of laughter, is humour less ‘binary’ – either we find something funny, or we don’t – than we suppose? How is laughter triggered across different global cultures or social groups, which may laugh at radically different things, and at different times? What are the evolutionary links with other species? Do humans experience humour differently as we get older?

You really need to give the audience space to laugh ‘Things are changing slowly, but there’s a huge amount of work to do,’ says Scott. Or, depending on how you look at it, there are plentiful opportunities in the field. Scott would like to delve deeper into involuntary laughter, and explore its neural basis. She’d also like to explore the links between that and voluntary laughter – how laughing intentionally can transmute into laughing helplessly, to the point where we actually lose control of our motor inhibition. ‘It’s a risky form of behaviour, if you think about it,’ she says. ‘You’re completely defenceless.’ Amir, by contrast, is searching for something that has long been of interest to cognition researchers: whether or not humour can be created by computers. Commercial confidentiality prevents him from saying too much, but he is currently doing early research into using artificial intelligence to explore how machines can generate jokes. ‘That would be the killer app,’ he says, pointing out that it could be of use to anyone from ad agencies to governments crafting public announcements and wanting to make them more approachable. ‘You could imagine something like Google Translate,’ he adds. ‘You put in a serious statement and it comes out with something funny.’ Is anything like that in the pipeline? ‘We are working on intermediate steps,’ he says. One thing is undeniable. However we comprehend humour, or frame it – both Scott and Amir agree that researchers are still only just starting to unravel its many secrets – it is impossible to imagine life without laughter, even in the midst of a pandemic. ‘It’s one of the most important social and survival skills we have,’ says Scott.

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SCREEN ARTS INTERVIEW

SCREEN SPARKS MAKENNA GUYLER

For this print issue, we commissioned a spoken word short film, which explores the eureka moment. Here, Ella K Clarke, writer and director of the Eureka short, shares with us the flashes of inspiration which she experienced while creating this piece and talks to its star, actress Makenna Guyler

My starting point for Eureka was the inimitable ‘breakthrough’ experience, seen from the point of view of the visionary or inventor, who exhausts all possibilities in the search and capture of this elusive moment of enlightenment. My own thoughts were drawn to the source of that moment, as a personification of the spark, and from there sprang this piece depicting transformation, discovery and shifts in identity through ‘thought alchemy’. In our conversation, Makenna and I gravitated towards a redemptive narrative, whereby our personal struggles to find our place in professional endeavours could be gratified and, in some way, resolved. This then led us to question our need for control and satisfaction in the work we create. We reflected on the narratives of various inventors and their striving for this sense of success through a never-before-encountered idea that would shape life as we know it. We also considered how trauma enables us to adapt and shape

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SPARKS

IN CONVERSATION WITH ELLA K CLARKE

new thought patterns and new levels of resilience. This ‘thought alchemy’ presented itself in a spoken word piece which best illustrated the words with vocal vigour, performative rhyming and rhythm to create an almost meditative state of engagement and convulsion within the performer. The filming of the piece needed to translate the mutational themes of the poem and so the beautifully Brutalist architecture of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, at London’s Barbican Centre, provided a wonderful canvas on which to paint the story. EKC: What about Eureka inspired you (forgive the pun) and what in Eureka can you relate to? MG: Trying to describe that moment… where everything clicks into place and there’s complete clarity is something, I haven’t tried to do before. It was the beginning of some very interesting conversations. In the early stages I found it hard to articulate how they come about: they’re completely

piece we’re exploring all that’s beneath the surface.

The development was messy, non-linear and more personal than I’d intended elusive at times – it’s like catching cloud and something about that excites me. I can completely relate to the relentless churning that the pacing of Ella’s writing gives us; sometimes it feels like a real uphill battle, and I think it’s important to acknowledge that before the stillness and quiet that follows. It’s like that iceberg description of success – in this

EKC: What was the first instance you can remember when you experienced the eureka moment? MG: I remember being in my first dance show at the ripe old age of five. I walked out and something inside clicked: all the rehearsal, the practice, the work had accumulated in this moment and it just felt like a real belonging. This was my first eureka and calling into the creative world and since then I haven’t left it! EKC: What about the development process of this piece challenged you? MG: It was messy, non-linear and more personal than I’d intended – much like the pursuit of eureka moments in life! I originally wanted to give the relief angle, the success and the clarity of the lightbulb moments in a bid to be the ‘keep going’ voice to fellow creatives, but as the piece developed I realised we had to let go of that to a degree to acknowledge

M akenna G uyler at T he B arbican C entre , 2019 © M onika C iunkaite

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M akenna G uyler at T he B arbican C entre , 2019 © M onika C iunkaite

the difficulty in each journey, and to honour that. This in turn made the writing more relatable, like a true reflection of the ups and downs, which then makes the aha moment that much sweeter. EKC: What was the most inspiring piece of art you saw this year? MG: I’m a fan of truth and simplicity – I’m a complete overthinker and sometimes I just need something that cuts through all of that to give me a much needed reminder that it’s okay to just be. Notes to strangers (Andy Leek,) seems to have popped up more and more in my life this year, and are always in the most unexpected places – they’re simple statements or questions that just seem to always yank me back into the present and give me a little joy in my day. This is what I like art to be, a human connection and a level of understanding of this existence. You can see his works in random side streets, on post boxes, or easier to track down on Instagram.

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EKC: Where can we find more of your work? MG: Feature film Blood Bags has just had its US release and will be following into other territories soon. The Barge People has a 2020 release, as do After Dark, Crawl To Me Darling and Hobbes House. All releases will be shared on my Instagram @makennaguyler – it’s going to be a big year!

I’m a fan of truth and simplicity

EUREKA

POEM BY ELLA K CLARKE ID me please – I’m breaking through the gates, Through burrows and lakes, my synapse breaks, shaking like tremors under-ground, waves of the Mexican kind. I find, this network of under earth, under skin, under kin, layers that formulate my thought befriending my shell in this house of thin, translucent sparks… In the dark, I’m swimming, in the frantically stark, sheets of ice that complete my totality. Frankly, losing my grip, while I slip deep into this field of lightning. My emergence comes freely but not into the palms of the hand who grasps my throat. Afloat, sailing into the wind, the current, my dorsal fin, navigating, the compass dial twitching, thrown backward onto the knife that carves me open. Splirting and splitting my sides in fragments, of glass, this farce of a thousand particles. Salt rusting, sugar frosting, frothing at my mouth. Silver or platinum, the jumpstart cables. I’m flailing, splaying my organs in a vortex of knots. No sinew left behind. I’m blind. Wood turns cold, stone burns to ashes, my fire snuffs out in a bowl of molasses. Stuck still, still spinning, a head rush, gold flush, Dopamine stream into the Caudate Nucleus. The falling apple prompts Newton to formulate his laws, a light-bulb in herding his gravity’s cause. The Greek Archimedes, his maths his best asset, finds water displacement in an oversized facet, of his lord’s jewels, fools. Neither was I the pip that sprouted the fruit, nor the blacksmith who moulded that kings loot… I was the garter he slipped that hard-earned note into that night, and might have been the woman he bedded that night out of spite, when he thought all was lost in that kaleidoscope of starlight. I was not the fore-thought, but the rain that shortly followed. Breathing as if for the first time, I could stay here indefinitely. Freefalling, thawing, I’m spawning from the once infertile mud, the oxygen, feeding this unholy flood. Seeing my face, it’s bareness, it’s case – it’s unutterable, meaningless collection of space, draws something from the ether. Just something. Rural, un-pathed, Neural, un-scaved. Acumbens with a capital ‘A’, my name was never important anyway. No longer a singularity in this community of links, a chain, the Salience thinks, a glimpse of my own reflection.

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RETRACING MEMORIES (2020), PHOTOGRAPH

NIKITA EPHANOV

INTERVIEW

CULINARY ARTS

GASTROPHYSICS CHARLES SPENCE IN CONVERSATION WITH KATE TIGHE

GASTRO

What makes someone a ‘super-taster’, and what does that mean? How is our perception of food influenced by external stimuli such as ‘sonic seasoning’? These are just some of the conundrums neurogastronomy aims to investigate.

Charles Spence is a professor of experimental psychology, specialising in food and sensory science. He runs the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at The University of Oxford, which is part of the Experimental Psychology Department, and his work focuses on the ways in which we perceive the multisensory world around us. We sat down with him to talk about the basics of the discipline he calls ‘the new science of eating’ and the ways in which the food industry utilises and traverses the fields of neuroscience and culinary creativity. Kate Tighe: Thank you very much for agreeing to talk with us. Firstly, could you give a simple definition of ‘Neurogastronomy’ Charles Spence: Basically, this means the ‘brain on flavour’ or the idea that by understanding how flavour is processed by the brain we begin to understand how this might help design more desirable and/or healthier foods. Neurogastronomy has

undoubtedly provided some important insights that one couldn’t really get any other way, such as resolving what is going on in the Coke vs Pepsi challenge, and the impact of pricing on things like wine. It is intriguing to see how branding, naming, and pricing have been shown to trigger functions in some of the earliest areas of the brain, both where taste stimuli are first perceived and in the orbitofrontal cortex, where pleasure and reward is represented. KT: Are there any limitations to this term? CS: Certainly. The limitation is that in order to get the nice brain pictures (of the brain on flavour), people very often need to be tested in isolation – lying in a claustrophobic narrow noisy tube with liquidised food squirted into their mouth. This, of course, is nothing like real-world eating and drinking, meaning that the approach lacks ecological validity.

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