My Plastic Brain Read online

  The final bit of advice on getting into an ideas-generating state of mind is to cultivate a good mood. That's not a problem this morning—playing at being a children's author is a fun way to spend a few hours and doesn’t feel at all like work. That's a bonus because, personally, when I’m in a bad mood, there's no amount of comedy in the world that will lift me out of it—it's more likely to make me even more irritated. Nevertheless, in studies dating back to the 1980s, volunteers’ moods have been manipulated by either thinking about happy or sad memories, or by watching scary or funny film clips; a good mood made insights much easier to come by in the tests that followed.

  This effect, John Kounios tells me, is caused by the way that mood affects a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex, or ACC. The ACC is more active when you are in a good mood, he explained, and is also more active when people solve problems by insight rather than logical analysis. The ACC's job is to monitor the rest of the brain for signs of conflict. “The conflict could be that I give you a problem to solve and there are different possible paths to solving it. If the anterior cingulate is very active, it can detect all of those different possibilities and it can switch to one of them. And it might be something that is very weak and unconscious and you can still switch to it. That's an insight.” On the other hand, “If the anterior cingulate is in a low state of activity because you’re anxious, then you don’t detect all those possibilities; you go with the single strongest one. You do the obvious thing.”

  It sounds simple enough: power up the ACC with happy thoughts and it will have enough oomph to root out any daft ideas that might just work. Other studies have found that happy thoughts seem to deactivate the PFC more than sad ones, also suggesting that getting into the creative zone is easier when you are happy.5

  Good mood alone, though, might not be enough. Other studies have found that a positive mind-set has to be teamed with a certain amount of motivation, also known as an “approach” mind-set, where you feel like getting stuck in. Being hypofrontal and relaxed, it seems, doesn’t do the same job, because this state of mind doesn’t provide enough oomph to put in the necessary mental energy.6

  Interestingly, the same researchers found that the ultimate enemy of the (creative) state is anxiety. Anxiety, as I have learned already, either scatters attention or focuses it on the wrong things. Which probably explains why my “ideas days” never worked. The longer I spent trying to focus on whatever scientific journal, researcher's website, or article I was reading, the more stressed I would get about being a terrible journalist with no ideas and about wasting a day when I should be earning some money.

  Put all of this together and it seems that, to stand a chance of being creative, you need to be in a good mood, not too relaxed, and definitely not too worried about whether what you are doing is any good. It's a pretty tall order when you actually have to make a living. And when I read further into the literature on mood and creativity, it gets more complex still. Recent research suggests that whether you happen to be high or low on the neurotransmitter dopamine—a brain chemical that has a hand in everything from attention to desire to switching between one task and another—is important in deciding whether or not a good mood makes you more creative.

  According to a recent study by Bernhard Hommel, of Leiden University, in the Netherlands, you only really get a creativity boost from a good mood if you happen to also be low on dopamine. People with higher than average dopamine levels, the study suggested, might get the opposite effect—for them, a good mood might be bad for creativity.7

  This in turn is complicated by the fact that the whole dopamine story has changed a fair bit in recent years. Dopamine has long been thought of as the “pleasure” neurotransmitter, which spikes when we get a reward (be that praise, sex, or a hit from a drug). Now, though, researchers are starting to think of it as a chemical that drives “wanting” rather than being about the pleasure of “getting.” Which explains why wanting something—cake, wine, whatever—often elicits a more powerful feeling than the pleasure of having it. It's why smokers carry on smoking even though they have started to hate the habit and may have lost pleasure in the taste. Perhaps in the context of creativity, dopamine might stimulate a kind of wanting, searching mind-set that fosters creativity.

  I’m curious about my own dopamine levels, but with all the overseas travel, I no longer have the budget for another expensive lab test. Amazingly, though, I stumble across a quick and easy way to get a measure of your own personal dopamine levels—with nothing more scientific than a video recording of your face. For some reason, eye-blink rate correlates nicely with actual dopamine levels in the brain: a low blinking rate signifies low dopamine, and a higher blinking rate represents higher dopamine. All you have to do is film your face for, say, six minutes, while sitting alone (not talking or reading, since these change your blink rate), just staring at a blank wall a meter away from you. Afterward, watch the video (if you can bear it) and count the total number of blinks. Divide that number by six and you have a measure of your blink rate per minute. One tip: don’t measure your eye-blink rate in the evening—everyone blinks more than usual at the end of the day.

  Eye-blink rates vary a lot from person to person, but according to a couple of studies of healthy people, a rough average is fifteen blinks per minute.8 More than twenty blinks per minute is considered high, and below ten low.9 I came up with a blink rate of eleven: slightly below average but not mind-bogglingly low.

  Incidentally, finding out that my dopamine levels are lower than average sent me off on a tangent about what that might mean for my brain. Only a few clicks away was a website that claimed that low dopamine is linked to difficulty with sustaining focus, anxiety, impulsivity, and a lack of interest in food (the latter is also true of me; I would be first in line if they ever brought out a food-replacement pill). Which made me wonder if dopamine might be underlying everything about my brain that was bugging me. Might that be a better, and easier, target than all this mucking about with mental states?

  Unfortunately, attempting to change your own dopamine levels is not straightforward, even if I were to try to only tweak it with creativity in mind. A recent study found that giving people supplements of L-tyrosine, an amino acid that the body converts into dopamine, did boost the kind of creativity that is needed to bring unrelated pieces of information together in new ways, known as convergent thinking. On the other hand, it didn’t seem to help people come up with new ideas out of the blue, so-called divergent thinking. In fact, the researchers concluded, for blue-sky creativity, a naturally low dopamine level might actually be better.10

  So, I’m not sure messing with dopamine levels by taking supplements is the answer. Learning to use hypofrontality flexibly but without losing control of your focus sounds like a far smarter use of what nature gave me.

  Another option is to take Kounios's and Beeman's advice and use the parts of the day when you are naturally less alert for thinking creatively—evenings for morning people, mornings for night owls; or, if all else fails, sitting in a dark corner, closing your eyes, or wearing earplugs will most definitely set the mind wandering. With no external stimuli, the restless mind can’t help itself. You might come across as a bit weird in the office, but think of it as part of your new image as a creative genius.

  As it happened, I never did get as far as the mind-wandering dog walk. Once I dedicated the morning to it, and started thinking hard, the ideas started flowing, complete with a few aha moments: “Jiko has ADHD!” This then sent me off down other avenues, like how a boy with ADHD would be a terrible ninja on the one hand because he couldn’t sit still, but on the other he would be great at anything involving jumping about and running around at top speed. Aha! The moral of the story is play to your strengths!

  I bashed out a five-hundred-word story, sent it to my agent, and waited (this story, and another I tried out, are at the end of this chapter). And…no luck yet—watch this space. But as Lila gently pointed out to me when we
first met and I told her about my children's book plan, “You can be more creative, but it has to be good, right?”

  THE PREFRONTAL CORTEX: GATEKEEPER OF GOOD IDEAS

  This is where the story takes a bit of a turn, because more recent research has shown that, while hypofrontality is the perfect state for generating ideas, the prefrontal cortex is most definitely needed to sort the wheat from the chaff.11 As my son demonstrated in his reveries about frozen people, it is perfectly possible to be creative in a way that makes no sense to anyone else. Which is fine when you’re six and free-forming about nothing in particular, but if you’re an adult who wants to apply your newfound creative skills to something useful, hypofrontality alone isn’t going to cut it. In fact, a little PFC action can go a long way toward making creative thoughts work in the real world.

  Back in Kansas, Lila and I are headed to Kansas City, about an hour's drive from Lawrence, where the university houses its medical center. I’m booked in for another MRI scan, and, for the first time, I will get a snapshot of it in action while I try to apply creativity to solve a problem, and watch my PFC as it (hopefully) dials up and down to allow for a useful level of creativity. To do this, we are using functional MRI, which gives an indirect measure of brain activity by measuring blood flow to parts of the brain that are doing the work. I’m going to try Lila's latest experiment, which is an attempt to measure creative thinking in a more real-world kind of problem than the unusual-uses test. “In real-world problem-solving, rarely are you given objects and asked ‘tell me what else can you do with it,’” Lila tells me later. “You are given a problem or a goal. So you might want to take your dog for a walk and the leash breaks. You might think, ‘Oh, I can use my belt.’ You don’t sit around all day thinking of all the things you could do with your belt! So it's the other way around.”

  An emerging idea in the creativity research world is that in this kind of problem the PFC has a dual role, and hypofrontality is only the first part of the story.

  Until recently, the received wisdom was that the executive control network and default-mode network worked against each other—executive control focusing attention outside of the self while the default mode focuses inward. It's certainly true that you can’t have two focuses at the same time, as far as anyone knows. What the brain can do, though, is flip from one state to another, sometimes very quickly. The experiment I’m about to do is designed to watch that happen in real time.

  In the scanner, my job is to think about a particular goal, for example, to make a fire. Then a one-word example of how to achieve the goal flashes up (newspaper), followed by another two (a pen and a pencil). I need to think creatively about which one of the latter two items could best be used in the same way as the first to achieve the set goal. In this case, I would have to choose the pencil, because it would burn better than a pen.

  Doing this exercise in the scanner should reveal what parts of the brain are involved in thinking about everyday objects in unusual ways, depending on what it is you are trying to do. It's a simplified version of creative problem-solving for the purposes of identifying how the brain goes about the job.

  The good news is that my prefrontal cortex is in perfectly decent working order and lights up in all the right places at the right time. The bad news is that this new understanding about the prefrontal cortex's role in creative thinking is only going to make it more difficult to order ideas on demand. According to Lila, highly creative people are probably able to flick between low and high prefrontal activity very efficiently, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly. And nobody knows how they do it.

  “People who might be able to slip in and out of these states, and also be able to control the speed with which that occurs—maybe not intentionally to order, but it might be a natural process—these are the individuals who might be very successful.”

  This theory is all very new, and nobody has any bright ideas yet about how to practice this kind of control. The best we’ve got so far, research-wise, are the studies of expert meditators, who have seemingly inhuman powers of frontal control—and no one knows if that will help specifically for creativity. My meditation practice has dropped off a little recently, but this does make me think hard about adding it back into the daily routine.

  Hypofrontal creativity is probably easier to achieve than rapid switching between low and high levels of mental control, because everyone can easily recognize the feeling of being zoned out and off with the fairies. Recognizing that state and letting the mind wander where it will could be the best chance so far of coming up with solutions to problems or with ideas that the world doesn’t yet know that it needs. If you’re lucky, your assessment of the ideas when you’re more in the room, with the PFC back in charge, will help you sort the good stuff from the junk.

  It's not exactly the answer I was hoping for, but as yet we don’t know enough about how switching works to find ways to make it happen. I ask Lila if she thinks it will be possible anytime soon. “We know pieces of the puzzle, but we haven’t put it all together. We haven’t examined what happens when you increase or decrease your control and whether you can do it on the same person for the same task. That's ultimately the challenge.”

  And what about brain stimulation to get into the hypofrontal state? She looks pained and tells me about a headline once written about her work that screamed, Prototype Headband Makes You More Creative!! We laugh at how ridiculous it is…and then I ask anyway if it might just work. “It's not that we don’t want to apply it; it's just that we don’t want to suggest that this is ready for prime time,” she says. “I wouldn’t sign and say, ‘Yeah, everybody that uses this, this is gonna happen.’ No.”

  So far, this much we know: brain stimulation that gets people into a hypofrontal mode helps with the generation of new ideas. We also know from research into meditation, and the kind of cognitive training I did in Boston, that it is possible to improve control over attention and focus. What we don’t know is whether practicing both of these separately will help anyone switch between the two.

  “There is no one answer for everything,” says Lila with a shrug. “For better or for worse, we are very complex beings.”

  One thing that does occur to me, though, is that we, the wide-eyed users of all this neuroscience research, have been barking up the wrong tree with the whole “use it or lose it” view of neuroscience. Training a particular bit of circuitry—even if such a thing is possible—might not be what we want, after all. Instead, the picture that is emerging is that, to build brainpower, it's not muscle you want, but it's flexibility.

  MY KIDS’ BOOK IDEAS….

  Dave's Doggy Detective Agency, and the Mystery of the Missing Pups

  Molly is a six-year-old dog who has learned to speak “human” by listening to her people and to Radio 4 when her humans go out. She never uses it with her humans at home because people like dogs to listen and lick their hands, not talk back.

  When her main human gets a job, they hire a dog walker. Unbeknown to them, they hire Dave, who runs an undercover doggy detective agency masquerading as a dog-walking service.

  The mystery: dogs have been going missing from the local park and outside shops. People are really upset: the adults talk in hushed voices about dog-fighting rings, and the children panic that their beloved dogs have been made into fur coats, 101 Dalmatians–style.

  Dave puts Molly—his best doggy detective—on the case.

  The dogs have been stolen by a lazy person, whose doctor has given her a treadmill to power her TV. It's the only way the TV will work now. The doctor did it as a last resort after trying to persuade the lazy person to not just watch TV all day. However, instead of exercising, she sent her son out to steal dogs instead. She keeps the dogs in cages in the basement, bringing them up only when it's their turn to run on the treadmill. She has more than one dog, because “otherwise it’d be cruel.” Her son is kind, feeding and looking after the dogs, but he is too scared of his mother to disobey her. If he did, she’d make
him run on the treadmill all the time.

  Molly and Dave track the dog thieves down and help the boy…aided by Billy, Molly's youngest human; the other doggy detectives in the team; and Governor, the black cat who is the team's eyes and ears at night.

  Jiko, the Noisy Ninja

  In the house with the dirty windows, everyone was sleeping.

  But then…

  BANG!!!

  CRASH!!!

  “Uh-oh,” said Jiko. And he jumped into the shadows….

  Jiko (Japanese for “trouble”) is a boy who has just finished ninja school and is training to be a house ninja for Sam's family. It's a little-known secret that all homes with children in them have a ninja who secretly helps around the house. Grandmas employ them to help out because they know how messy children can be. Mums don’t know about them, though. They wouldn’t like it, because mums like to Do It All.

  Jiko, though, has ADHD, and although he is brilliant at moving fast and doing things with enthusiasm, he is clumsy, easily distracted, and not very good at sitting still for long enough to hide. His teacher, Mr. Soso (Japanese for “neat”), despairs of him and wonders if he will ever slow down enough to become the great ninja he knows he can be.

  In this story, Jiko makes a big noise at night and accidentally wakes up Sam, the boy in the house. They become best friends and get up to all kinds of mischief together. But will they be able to keep their adventures a secret from Mum, Mr. Soso, and the ever-observant grandma?