My Plastic Brain Read online

  The trouble with unconscious thoughts is that you can’t just decide that you want to make them happen, Kounios tells me. “You can’t use a conscious strategy to influence an unconscious process. It just doesn’t work very well.” I’m reminded of my efforts to retrain my unconscious cognitive bias, and this point does ring true. Consciously knowing that people probably aren’t judging me harshly never changed how it felt, emotionally, to be in a challenging social situation. Only by working on my unconscious bias using an unconscious strategy was I able to turn it back in a healthier direction. Unconscious practice makes a conscious difference.

  Unfortunately, there is no creativity version of happy-face clicking that will get me in touch with my inner genius. What I can do, though, Kounios suggests, is to set up an environment where “aha” moments are more likely to occur. I’ll be trying this when I get home to the United Kingdom.

  Lila Chrysikou thinks about creativity a little differently. She is open to the possibility that creative ideas can come either as a moment of sudden insight after a period of unconscious musing, but equally could come after a period of thinking directly about a problem. “There's no evidence that one is better than the other for creativity,” she tells me. If this is right, it would be a major bonus to anyone wanting to improve on her or his creative powers—because conscious, deliberate thinking is something that can be changed if someone teaches you how.

  In a recent study, Tony McCaffrey, of the University of Massachusetts, in Amherst, found that after people had spent twenty minutes thinking of familiar objects by listing all of their component parts (for example: “a candle is made up of a wick, which is string, which is made up of long, interwoven fibrous strands…. It is also made of wax, which is a cylinder of fatty stuff”), they performed better on a test of their creativity afterward.2 The idea is that training people to think about not just the obvious features of an object (“a pen makes marks on paper”) but about all other aspects of it (“it is long, thin, and hard”) helps them to think of ordinary things in new ways. If you thought about a pen like this and then later found you needed something long and thin to stir some paint, for example, you might consider using the pen. More generally, learning to look past the obvious features of things might become a habit that spills over to other areas of life and work.

  Which sounds like it might be workable if you have the time and the inclination to properly break down a problem into its component parts. For his part, Kounios insists that if a skill can be taught then it doesn’t count as creativity. But, actually, I’m not sure I agree with him on that—surely the important measure of creativity is what you come up with, not the process by which it happens? I’m not in a position to decide who's right, scientifically. The two camps will have to carry on, as Kounios puts it, “shouting at each other and throwing experimental results at each other,” until there is enough evidence to settle it in one direction or another. All I care about is finding a way to make good ideas more likely to happen in real life, so my plan is to try both approaches: thinking hard about a problem and changing my environment so that unconscious “aha” moments are more likely to happen.

  As for a test of my creative prowess, I plan to step out of my journalistic comfort zone and try my hand at fiction. About seven years ago, I had a couple of ideas for children's books. Both of these ideas seem okay to me, but, because fiction writing is something I know nothing about, I have never done anything with either. Having another try at it seems as good a measure of my creative powers as any—and, who knows, I might just become the next J. K. Rowling.

  First, though, I’m in Kansas, having a go at what could turn out to be the easy option, if electrical brain stimulation (tDCS, or transcranial direct current stimulation) ever makes it safely out of the lab and into our homes. Actually, there is a (literally) buzzing online community of home tDCS-ers, who make their own devices—using a couple of wet sponges and a battery—so it is theoretically possible that I could do this to myself. I don’t recommend that anyone try this at home anytime soon, though. I can’t think of a way to put it any better than neuroscientist Micah Allen, of University College London, who said on Twitter recently, “I don’t know a single neuroscientist that doesn’t think it's a terrible idea to strap a battery to your head outside of a laboratory.”3 How would you know where the current was going? How would you know you weren’t zapping the wrong bit too hard, risking a seizure? What if you leave the current on for too long and cook your brain?

  It doesn’t matter how much anxiety-reducing meditation I do; I will always feel uncomfortable about the prospect of strapping a battery to my head. Today is no exception, even though I am in Lila Chrysikou's lab at the University of Kansas, in Lawrence, and she knows exactly what she is doing.

  Lawrence, Kansas, is an interesting place. On one level, it seems like a very strange place to have a university—it's classic, small-town America: a long, wide main street, surrounded by rows of clapboard houses with rocking chairs on the porch. I’m staying in one of these, with a lovely Midwestern lady called Karen who bakes cinnamon bread and granola for breakfast and regales me with stories about her kids and grandkids, who have good American names like Brent and Jackson. She seems like the kind of grandma who doesn’t take any nonsense from anyone, so no one ever tries. She's fantastic, and I could chat to her all day.

  About a ten-minute walk from Karen's B and B, at the top of seemingly the only hill in Kansas, is the university. When you discover that Lawrence is home to twenty-seven thousand students, the rest of the town makes more sense, particularly the huge number of bars, restaurants, and vintage clothing shops along the main street. I’d love to explore, but I have an appointment to meet Lila, in yet another windowless room—to be tested and zapped for the rest of the morning.

  Luckily, Lila is great company, and like so many of the scientists I’ve met so far, she is apologetic about putting me through hour upon hour of lab tests. Psychology researchers are more used to experimenting on students who need to do some research for course credits and are often tired, hungover, or less than enthusiastic about the research itself. They’re not used to visiting enthusiasts wanting to do all of their experiments in the space of two or three days. I’m genuinely enjoying it, though, not that any of them seem to believe me.

  The main test I’m going to do today is a measure of creativity called the “Alternative Uses Task.” Like so many psychology tests, this takes the form of a series of photographs on a computer screen. This time, the pictures are of various kinds of objects: a saxophone, a ski, a wheelbarrow, a shoe, and so on. My job is to come up with a use for that object that is anything but what you normally do with it. I will get marked on how many times I draw a blank, how quickly (in milliseconds) I come up with an idea, and how unusual it is.

  In previous experiments, Lila and her colleagues found that inhibiting the prefrontal cortex not only increases the number of ideas people came up with overall but also made them answer significantly more quickly. Also, the uses people came up with under tDCS were further removed from the standard uses. Yesterday, I completed the task without any stimulation, for a baseline measure, and over the next three days I am to have three sessions of twenty minutes: one a day, and one of which will be the sham condition, where they will turn off the current after only a few seconds without telling me. This is to see whether just thinking that I’m being stimulated is enough to make me a creative genius.

  I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing that today's stimulation is not the sham, because the best way I can describe the way my head is feeling is “a bit lopsided.” I am trying to focus on the instructions on the screen, but my attention keeps skipping away to some point in the middle distance. I’m just hoping I can stick to the task at hand. There are benefits to this feeling, though. I am aware that some of my suggestions are weird, verging on bonkers, and I have to say them out loud so that Lila can measure my reaction time. But I definitely feel less embarrassed about my ideas than yesterd
ay, when I did the baseline measure without any stimulation at all. This could be down to my being more familiar with the task and with Lila, but it might also be that my impulse control, another job of the PFC, has been dialed down a little as well. It's a bit like the effect of a glass of wine, or of being too tired to be tactful. Both alcohol and tiredness dampen down PFC activity—which raises the intriguing possibility that a lunchtime tipple might work pretty well for stimulating an afternoon of creative thought.

  In the lab, with my focus turned down and my inhibitions off with the fairies, it feels like a license to be random, and it's strangely liberating. When a picture of some fishing waders comes on the screen, I suggest that they could be “trousers for a horse's front legs.” When a kite pops up, I say, “To carry apples if you have lots.” A flip-flop? A letter rack. A fanblade? A rotatable snack dish. And so on, and so on. I’m aware that what I’m coming up with is a bit odd, but Lila assures me afterward that they are all perfectly reasonable. They don’t count suggestions that really don’t make sense, she assures me, but mine are all just about doable. You could use a flip-flop as a letter rack if you really wanted to.

  Lila is nothing if not efficient and processes my results in half an hour while I slip next door to get on with the less creative side to my job—frantically typing out interviews word for word so that I can quote people accurately later. And to accurately quote Lila when she showed me my results…“Ta-dah!”

  Figure 3.1. Number of omissions (blank answers).

  The number of omissions—where I looked at a picture and couldn’t think of a single other use for it in the nine allotted seconds—was reduced by half when the tDCS current was flowing. I’m not sure what sort of effect I expected, but this was pretty clear: having a twenty-minute zap in the head made me come up with more ideas. I was also faster—up to half a second faster—to come up with the ideas after I’d been plugged in.

  Half a second doesn’t sound like that much of a change, but Lila assures me that it's actually quite a big jump. “To a psychologist, when we are thinking of a difference in reaction time, we are thinking of 50 milliseconds, 60 milliseconds; 500 milliseconds doesn’t sound like much, but to a psychologist that's huge.”

  Lila is beaming when she shows me this graph, even though she has seen something similar many times in her real studies. “I’m always super excited when it works,” she told me. “It's just so weird when it does—but it does!”

  I’m amazed, too. Being in the zoned-out state, whether I like feeling that way or not, does seem to be more useful for coming up with original ideas. Maybe my natural state, with few powers of focus, is something to be embraced rather than fought. I’m a little worried that I might have to choose between the two—a state of intense focus that isn’t terribly creative, or creativity with no powers of self-control. I’m really hoping not.

  Lila later analyzes the content of my actual ideas to see whether they got any more creative. This is measured on a sliding scale between uses that are close to the normal use of an object and things that would work but have nothing to do with what the object was designed for. For example, if it was a butter knife and the suggested use was for spreading icing on a cake—for that, you’d get 1 point. If the use was more about the properties of the object rather than what it does—for example, if you suggested using the knife to focus light onto some kindling to start a fire—then you’d get 4 points. I only got one 4, while under tDCS: for suggesting that barbed wire could be used to make jewelry. Overall, though, my score edged slightly upward while under tDCS, from an average of 2.5 to closer to 3 points. So slightly more creative perhaps and roughly equivalent with what Lila had found in her previous studies.

  I now also have a new term for the zoned-out feeling that I have always struggled to put into words. About the closest I have come up with is being mentally offline or feeling like my engines are revving while I’m still in neutral. Now Lila has given me the proper scientific name for it: hypofrontality—low activity in my prefrontal cortex. And now I know that the days I feel “a bit hypofrontal” might be a good time to look for ideas, however random they might seem.

  Given that this zoned-out state of mind seems to come fairly naturally to me, what I want to know now is how to get into the hypofrontal creative zone without slipping into mind-wandering inertia, boredom, or stressing out about having nothing to show for my time.

  This is something that has been a challenge ever since I started out as a science journalist, fifteen years ago. In the early days, I tried nominating one day every week as an “ideas day.” This meant giving myself a whole day off from writing, panicking about deadlines, and trying to get paid, to read around and look for original new story ideas. It sounds like an idyllic way to spend the day, lounging around in some floaty writer's wear, thinking big thoughts while reclining on the sofa. In reality, it is by far the hardest part of the job. A freelancer's challenge is to find ideas that none of the in-house editors have thought of, and that means ignoring the low-hanging fruit like press releases, and anything in big, famous journals like Science and Nature, and instead going to strange-sounding conferences, reading obscure scientific journals, and hopping randomly around the web in the hope that a new angle will present itself.

  Sometimes this approach paid off. One time, while perusing the website of a marine biology group, I stumbled across an area of research I didn’t know existed: scientists recording the burp-like sounds that fish make to communicate with each other. Apparently, you can use slight differences in the sound of these burps, grunts, and whistles to tell haddock from pollock, and cod from herring, which is useful if you want to estimate the populations of each. More to the point, who knew that fish talked to each other at all? That was a good day in the office, and it ended up being a fun piece for a BBC Radio science program. The researcher even provided impressions of different fish for comic effect.

  Most of the time, though, this scattergun approach wasn’t so fruitful. It didn’t take long to get bored of aimlessly trawling the internet for something that sparked an idea. And after digging my way through pile after pile of turgid scientific papers looking for a gem that no one else had spotted, I’d start to lose the will to live. If you have an attention span like mine, I decided, it's impossible to order creative ideas on demand.

  Maybe, though, the knowledge of what hypofrontality feels like and how it helps creative thinking is the way to gain control over idea generation. This could be as simple as choosing whether to bother looking for new ideas or not, depending on what state of mind showed up that morning. Or, more usefully, it could mean practicing getting into that state deliberately.

  In The Eureka Factor Kounios and Beeman offer various tips that, although aimed at creating the right conditions for “aha” moments to pop up, are also suitable for putting the brain into a hypofrontal state. “Aha” moments, too, only seem to come when the PFC is snoozing on the job. So, given that I don’t plan to make a tDCS kit to use at home, for my next bit of me-search, I’m going to try a few of Kounios's and Beeman's strategies. If they work, they would be far easier to implement than DIY brain stimulation and, at the moment, much safer.

  The first suggestion from them is, boringly, to do some work. Ideas or solutions to problems might seem to pop up out of nowhere, but in reality they are always the result of making connections between things or ideas that we just haven’t put together before. This can only really work if we give the unconscious mind something to dig about in. Kounios and Beeman suggest working on a problem using all your powers of analysis and sensible thinking until you get stuck. Then, and only then, take a break. During the break, they suggest, it might be an idea to indulge in some sensory deprivation.

  They suggest that because in experiments that recorded the brain's electrical activity as people solved brainteasers, Kounios and Beeman found that one second before the solution popped into their heads, the visual cortex at the back of the head, which processes visual information, briefly switch
ed itself to a kind of “offline” state.4 The explanation for this, known as an “alpha blink,” is that the visual cortex shuts off incoming information for just long enough to allow the solution to a problem to pop through. It's an automatic, neural version of scrunching up our eyes when we’re trying to remember a fact—it takes visual information out of the equation and lets the rest of the brain take that share of the available thinking power.

  The alpha blink is almost certainly beyond our conscious control, Beeman and Kounios point out—but another way to take your visual cortex offline is to close your eyes or sit in the dark while you are waiting for genius to strike. In fact, Kounios suggests, any kind of sensory deprivation might do the trick: ear plugs, standing in the shower, staring at your feet on a long walk, anything that focuses your attention away from the outside world and directs it inside your head.

  It sounds doable, so here's the plan: I am going to dig out the pile of notes, drawings, and scribbles—the children's book ideas that I have written down and stuffed into drawers over the past few years. I will think, sensibly and analytically, about what kind of books I want them to be (picture books for younger kids or chapter books for eight-year-olds), think about the best way to fill in the plot holes that have been bugging me, and think about how I might get someone in the know to look at it and tell me if it has promise (or whether it's frankly embarrassing and I should stick to the day job). And then, when I can’t think about it anymore, I’m going to go for a long dog walk with my hood up and hope the stories write themselves.

  While I’m doing the sensible-thinking bit, I try another tip from Beeman and Kounios: to deliberately think about distant places. Experiments have shown that people told to think about faraway places, or the far future, are more likely to come up with new ideas, supposedly because anything that broadens our mind has the side effect of making us think more broadly in general. With this in mind, I gather various souvenirs from far-flung places and use them as paperweights on the crumpled mass of notes. I add some Korean wooden dolls, and one from Japan, a wall-hanging from China, and some Japanese letter stamps. Maybe, just maybe, all of these oriental influences will make the hero of one of the stories—Jiko, a trainee ninja, who is noisy and clumsy and terrible at hiding—spring into life in my imagination. The other story is about a dog, so just going for the walk might help with that one.