Month: July 2010

Newsweek has an eye-opening article on creativity which doesn’t really discuss why creativity is supposedly ‘declining’, as it claims, but is still full of fascinating and counter-intuitive snapshots of creativity research.

I have to say, I’m not very familiar with the scientific research on creativity, so I can’t say how well the article represents it as a whole, however, it does capture lots of interesting angles on creativity I’d not encountered before.

Nobody would argue that Torrance’s tasks, which have become the gold standard in creativity assessment, measure creativity perfectly. What’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrance’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance’s tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed Torrance’s data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.

There’s a few throwaway lines that bugged me (“Normally, the r-TPJ reads incoming stimuli” – not without the rest of the brain it doesn’t; “One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames” – evidence? none) but its generally a well written piece that integrates both neuroscience and psychology studies into a compelling exploration of what it means to think creatively.

UPDATE: Ashley Merryman, one of the authors of the Newsweek piece got in touch to say that there is some evidence on children’s TV viewing and creativity – finding that more time spent spent watching TV correlates with less creativity, although we still don’t have the evidence to say whether this is cause or effect.

Link to Newsweek article ‘The Creativity Crisis’.

Vanity Fair has a great article that charts the very early days of LSD. Before the drug became a symbol of hippy psychedelia, it was used by a select group of psychiatrists to facilitate ‘LSD psychotherapy’ and became popular among the Hollywood set of the 1950s.

To understand why LSD had such a grip on the American psychiatrists who had access to it, it’s useful to know some background about how psychiatry pictured the human mind in the mid-20th century.

Most importantly, it was the height of Freud’s influence when virtually all training was heavily influenced by psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis has a certain view of the unconscious that chimes very well with the effects of LSD. According to the Freudian model, the unconscious mind exists below the level of our awareness but still operates in terms of personal meaning.

Contrast this with the cognitive model of the mind in which the conscious mind is interpretable in terms of personal meaning but the unconscious mind is ‘subpersonal’ or only interpretable in terms of computation or neurobiology.

In other words, the conscious and the unconscious are connected but we can’t use the same concepts to understand the two.

In the Freudian model, the unconscious remains personally significant to the point where the mind may have to shroud this meaning in elaborate symbols to shield us from its unpleasant impact when any of it is revealed through thought or action.

To get to the true significance, psychoanalysis seeks to decode the protected symbols that have been put in place by our defence mechanisms.

Psychoanalysis says our thoughts, dreams, actions and perceptions are rich with hidden personal meaning. LSD reveals a world which seems rich with hidden personal meaning.

Therefore, it is not surprising that many of the psychoanalysts of the time thought the drug was a fast track to the unconscious where the normal route was years of painstaking therapy.

The Vanity Fair article traces the early years when it was used in therapy – a time just after LSD was invented and originally used by psychiatrists to see what madness might be like, and before it was taken up by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and 60s counter-culture.

Nevertheless, the influence of Freudian thought can be clearly seen in the psychedelic movement. The idea that you can ‘free your mind’ from ‘hang ups’ is almost a direct translation of the psychoanalysts creed that you need to ‘resolve’ your ‘neuroses’ in which society and the super ego play a similar role.

In fact, Leary, a psychologist himself, had extensive knowledge of psychoanalysis and, interestingly, couched the effects of psychedelic drugs in terms of Freud, neuroscience and computation.

This is from a lecture delivered to the 1961 International Congress of Applied Psychology, published as ‘How to Change Behaviour’.

Let’s assume that the cortex, the seat of consciousness is a millionfold network of neurons. A fantastic computing machine. Cultural learning has imposed a few pitifully small programs on the cortex. These programs may activate perhaps one-hundredth of the potential neural connections. All the learned games of life can be seen as programs which select, censor, alert and thus drastically limit the available cortical response. The consciousness expanding drugs unplug these narrow programs. They unplug the ego, the game machinery, and the mind (that cluster of game concepts). And with the ego and mind unplugged, what is left? ‚Ķ What is left is something Western culture knows little about. The Open brain. The uncensored cortex, alert and open to a broad sweep of internal and external stimuli hitherto screened out.

Link to Vanity Fair article (via The Frontal Cortex).

Neuroscientists sometimes forget just how different the experience of an MRI scan is from everyday life. I’ve just found this intriguing study that asked patients who had scans for the first time how they felt about the experience – the most common theme was the ‘sense of being in another world’.

There is a delightful bit in the study where one man compares it to being in a space capsule.

The participants’ overall experience of going through the MRI scan was a sense of being in another world. The environment, the enclosed space, the hammering metallic noise and sometimes the discomfort of lying on a hard bed, made the experience special and something out of their normal frame of reference. The experience of being in ‘another world’ was derived from the participants’ feelings of being isolated, far away, confined, lonely and dependent on others. ‘You feel confined, there is no door you yourself can open if you want to go out of there’ (P11). Being in the scanner was often associated with other enclosed spaces like coffins, a wooden sofa with a lid, a space capsule or ‘like lying almost as for cremation’ (P16).

All associations with other enclosed spaces were of a negative kind except for one man who had previously been inside a space capsule. He experienced that ‘I got a feeling, which is quite natural, that I entered a space capsule in NASA, Houston‚Ķ I was lucky I have been there’ (P17). The fact that the MRI department was situated in the basement contributed to the feeling that it was a different and scary place. Walking down the culvert made some participants imagine that this must be special as the MRI scanners had to be down here. A participant experienced a feeling of going to his own execution (P8).

The hammering noise added to the feeling of unreality and was associated with other sounds familiar to the participants. ‘When you have this sound in your ears it’s like listening to those who chop asphalt or concrete’ (P12). The unusual situation with the enclosed space and the sound at irregular intervals made the participants experience difficulties keeping track of time.

UPDATE: Thanks to Mind Hacks reader Brenner who posted a link to this article where a journalist describes their own experience of being MRI scanned:

“It was like being inserted headfirst into a giant, white cigar tube and having minimalist techno music hammered over my entire body. If robots were born and not made, it would be what a robot fetus experienced in the womb — if the robot’s mother was a bipolar drum machine stuck in manic phase”…

Link to PubMed entry for study.

The NeuroKüz blog covers a new study in which research participants were asked to take the hallucinogenic drug psilocybin before being asked to take part in a pretend brain scan in a fake fMRI machine.

If the situation seems a little odd, a bit trippy even, it’s actually more common than you think as almost all functioning brain scanning centres now have fake brain scanners that are used to test out experiments before running them ‘live’.

Brain scanning is a very expensive business and an hour of scanning time can easily cost ¬£500, so it wasn’t long before someone worked out that building a fake ‘dry run’ scanner was actually very economical.

Some of the time, experiments need to be tested out to see if they’re practically possible in the cramped space of the scanner and with the restrictions on equipment that are necessitated by having to avoid material that would be affected by the powerful MRI magnet.

Other times, its more a concern about the psychological well-being of the participants and how well they’d tolerate the conditions.

In this case, no-one had ever tried giving participants psilocybin and then asking them to do experiments while lying down in the restricted ‘tube’ of an fMRI machine, particularly as they hear the loud metallic scanning noises.

It could be a recipe for an unpleasant experience, so the researchers, who plan to do future fMRI research with the drug, tested nine people who stayed inside the mock scanner for 25 minutes after being injected with the substance.

As it turned out, no-one had a bad trip:

During the initial onset, some subjects described ‘quite strong’ drug effects. Synaesthesia was described by one subject (sounds influencing visual percepts) and this was also evident in other subjects’ 5-D ASC [5-Dimensions of Altered States of Consciousness questionnaire] ratings. Several subjects reported an altered sense of time (also seen in 5-D ASC ratings). There were no indications of distress during the acute experience and all subjects reported having found it interesting and insightful.

This doesn’t mean that the researchers will not need to worry about people feeling uncomfortable in future studies, although it does show that fMRI research on psilocybin can be done while participants remain relaxed and able to take part in the research.

Link to NeuroKüz on psilocybin and fake fMRI (via Thoughtful Animal).
Link to PubMed entry for study.