Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Tell me, Julie,
Speaker 1: where do how do you stir up your creativity? You've
Speaker 1: got a lot of creativity and that that millionators. How
Speaker 1: do you how do you get it going? Wow? Um?
Speaker 1: Do you know what? I usually look at certain books
Speaker 1: that I think you are intriguing or um, sometimes I
Speaker 1: just sit down and write and just try to empty
Speaker 1: out all the goo. Yeah, yeah, what about yourself? Um?
Speaker 1: You know, it depends on the task, I guess, but
Speaker 1: I find music tends to help put on some sort
Speaker 1: of music that seems fitting to you know, if I'm
Speaker 1: if it's a particular writing assignment or project, you know,
Speaker 1: like what kind of music would stir me and get
Speaker 1: me into this? Yeah? Um, A little coffee doesn't help,
Speaker 1: I mean doesn't hurt. I mean a lot of coffee doesn't.
Speaker 1: Coffee doesn't help. A small amount of coffee certainly helps.
Speaker 1: But but yeah, it's sort of set in the mood.
Speaker 1: And then of course inspiration from other things. If there's
Speaker 1: you know, look at looking at you think looking at
Speaker 1: at writing that I really like, looking at at art
Speaker 1: that I really like, and just you know, becoming inspired
Speaker 1: and sort of mishmashing ideas together. Yeah, I will say that.
Speaker 1: Um sometimes I'll dance around too, which is a horrible admission,
Speaker 1: but I will. Um, I'll do like kind of eighties
Speaker 1: moves around the furniture and like high kicks and um,
Speaker 1: like do you think I'm kidding, I'm just imagining doing
Speaker 1: like kung fu in your in your living room or
Speaker 1: something to get up. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. There's
Speaker 1: something about movement that's really freeing. And um, I think
Speaker 1: that kind of goes back to that whole thing about
Speaker 1: music and and they're inherently being that part of your
Speaker 1: brain that wants to move get things going anyway. Yeah,
Speaker 1: these are the ways that that, um, you know, we
Speaker 1: kind of throw out the marbles of creativity and have fun. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And the creativity is one of those things everybody wants
Speaker 1: to slide to this pie. If you've got a slice
Speaker 1: of this pie, you want a bigger slice. Like nobody
Speaker 1: I've never heard anybody say, man, I'm just too creative.
Speaker 1: I wish I was just a little less creative. And
Speaker 1: maybe you know, everybody's like, oh, man, I wish I
Speaker 1: could you know, you know, you know, even if you
Speaker 1: you're not have you're not you don't have writer's block
Speaker 1: or you're you're not, you know, having trouble coming within
Speaker 1: the ideas, everybody could use a little a little bit more.
Speaker 1: And and also everybody's been trying to understand it. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, besides the fact that you could potentially market
Speaker 1: something to improve creativity, uh, you know, it's just one
Speaker 1: of the big questions about you know, who we are.
Speaker 1: We're a creative species. So what's at the bottom of that? Right? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so what's what is the science behind creativity? If you
Speaker 1: can even look at it that way, which thanks to
Speaker 1: fm r I, once again we have a way that
Speaker 1: we can start to measure these things. So it's not
Speaker 1: just um, you know, certain disciplines that are able to
Speaker 1: you know, expand on the greatness of creativity and how
Speaker 1: we can go after it. We can we can look
Speaker 1: at the muse if we want, but then we can
Speaker 1: also look at fm R I and say, okay, what
Speaker 1: what's actually driving us in this process. There are a
Speaker 1: number of different views on it that have come out
Speaker 1: over the years that don't involve moras that that I
Speaker 1: find interesting. Some of these I think we can sort
Speaker 1: of well, we'll just sort of judge these as we
Speaker 1: go through, all right, I will turn on my judging mind.
Speaker 1: Don't turn on the judging mind. We'll discuss it more later.
Speaker 1: But first there's the cognitive view, and uh, this is
Speaker 1: kind of like the basic idea here is that like
Speaker 1: even a computer, if properly programed, could get really creative
Speaker 1: and it's just a matter of you know, data A
Speaker 1: plus data be I will combine into novel or mash
Speaker 1: up track you know that kind of just want to
Speaker 1: know that you're doing robot hands right now, just just
Speaker 1: so people can get the full effect. Well, we did
Speaker 1: him in yoga last night, So I got all into
Speaker 1: your robot hands. Wo robot yoga. Yeah, the one where
Speaker 1: you lay down on the floor and you make robot hands.
Speaker 1: Now maybe you guys don't do that now, sorry. Mine
Speaker 1: are less robotic, yeah, more touchy feely. Um okay, So
Speaker 1: that's one of them. Then there's the psychoanalytic Freudian view,
Speaker 1: and this one, um, I don't know like because this
Speaker 1: one says that creativity is an occurrence of the subconscious.
Speaker 1: All right, well, that's fine, but it also gets into
Speaker 1: the idea of humans attempt to avoid pain through the
Speaker 1: creation of daydreams and dreams and fantasies. And if you
Speaker 1: follow this theories, like every like cool creative thing that
Speaker 1: has ever been is us trying to avoid pain? Um,
Speaker 1: which is a is a reaction to like a depressive circumstance. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and just just sort of like I gotta get my
Speaker 1: mind out of this world in this life. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: you know, it's just which which holds up with I
Speaker 1: think the thing is some of the a lot of
Speaker 1: these examples like they can hold up under certain types
Speaker 1: of creativity. And you could say, all right, well there,
Speaker 1: you know, this is an example somebody trying to escape
Speaker 1: some hard circumstances and maybe they're doing a little bit
Speaker 1: of dreaming to get out of this world. But then, like,
Speaker 1: how do you explain somebody like Bobby McFerrin. Bobby McFerrin
Speaker 1: is happy, Bobby mcparents creative. Bobby mcferhin couldn't exist under
Speaker 1: this view. He doesn't need to escape his reality. He
Speaker 1: creates his reality exactly. Yeah, he's a happy Um. You know,
Speaker 1: so I think I have problems no, I see that
Speaker 1: because it's limiting. Yeah. Then there's the behaviorals few and
Speaker 1: uh this is uh this one states the creativity is
Speaker 1: a combination of previously know knowledge joined together spot in
Speaker 1: with with a lot of spontaneity. Um and uh. And
Speaker 1: it's also you know, it's about conditioned response to two situations. Now,
Speaker 1: this one I kind of like it's it is kind
Speaker 1: of like strikes me, kind of the mash up approach,
Speaker 1: you know, where it's like I'm looking at this, I'm
Speaker 1: looking at this. They come together new combinations or new
Speaker 1: ideas and you know, kind of falling into stuff we've
Speaker 1: talked about in the in the Dream Inspiration the Dream
Speaker 1: Inception podcast, we're talking about the brain kind of does
Speaker 1: this where it sort of throws things together, different combinations,
Speaker 1: and uh, an insight can sort of emerge from this. Okay,
Speaker 1: because when you say behavioralists, I always think about PF.
Speaker 1: Skinner And then I started thinking about Pavlov's dog and
Speaker 1: could Pavlov's dog have been creative? I guess you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the that's the downside to it, because it does
Speaker 1: We'll make it a situation where this is conditioned response
Speaker 1: to a situation. So Um. So yeah, bs Skinners kind
Speaker 1: of a kill joy to everything drag him into. And
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm not I'm sure the dog was creative,
Speaker 1: probably did get creative time after time after time that
Speaker 1: the bell was rung and it started salivating. Um. Then
Speaker 1: there's the Another one is the intrinsic motivational view, and
Speaker 1: this is the the idea that people reach their creative
Speaker 1: potential through the desire for pleasure and the activities that
Speaker 1: they engage in. Um. And of course, the major criticism
Speaker 1: on this is that not all creativity or you know,
Speaker 1: an inventive enterprise comes out of an enjoyment of an activity.
Speaker 1: Now I would I would argue that it helps if
Speaker 1: you enjoy it. I mean, I'm I'm having a hard
Speaker 1: time thinking of an example where somebody did something really
Speaker 1: creative and awesome and hated every minute of it. No.
Speaker 1: And i know I've said this like probably a million
Speaker 1: times in the previous podcast, but you know, it's that
Speaker 1: whole obsessive quality to it that the mind plays with
Speaker 1: what it loves essentially, right, So that's perhaps why we
Speaker 1: perhaps why we dream about certain things, or we just
Speaker 1: keep sort of rotating a certain problem around in our mind.
Speaker 1: Because we want to find this solution you have to
Speaker 1: take a totally non scientific slant on It's kind of
Speaker 1: like the whole you can taste the love thing about food,
Speaker 1: you know, like this this meal is prepared by somebody
Speaker 1: who's really into and you can taste the love and
Speaker 1: this meal was made in a factory, and there's you know,
Speaker 1: love is not on the list of crazy um, long
Speaker 1: winded ingredients hydrogen hydrogenated peanut oil, love, high pre dost
Speaker 1: corn syrup. So but but I think there's a you know,
Speaker 1: there's a sense of that and a lot of things.
Speaker 1: It's like if if someone doesn't care about it, if
Speaker 1: they're not passionate about they're not obsessed at least on
Speaker 1: some level with it. If the brain is not, like
Speaker 1: you say, playing with what it loves, then you can
Speaker 1: you can generally tell because it's kind of it's gonna
Speaker 1: be crap. Yeah. Yeah, I'm also thinking to you about coffee,
Speaker 1: since you've already mentioned it and that great ted talk
Speaker 1: that you sent me. Oh yes, yes, about where just
Speaker 1: creativity come from? Yeah, coffee, Yeah, because the argument there
Speaker 1: was that before coffee really integrated European society, people were
Speaker 1: drinking water, because this stuff will make you sick. So
Speaker 1: what do you drink all day alcohol exactly all day long,
Speaker 1: morning tonight, just a complete stupor for centuries. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: this is Steven Johnson, right, he's a writer and a
Speaker 1: founder of Feed magazine. And uh, he was talking about that.
Speaker 1: He was saying like, look here here, you have a
Speaker 1: depressant alcohol for all of this time, you know, up
Speaker 1: until like the sixteen hundreds and then boom coffee houses. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you not only have the stimulant, but you also have
Speaker 1: the culture in the interaction, the interaction, the flow of ideas,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, the Age of Enlightenment is
Speaker 1: starting to percolate in the UK, which is really interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: elsewhere it's still fer minute right, yes, too far. I
Speaker 1: don't know I like that. Um well, let's get into
Speaker 1: one more view take on this before we get into
Speaker 1: the more scientific stuff, and that is the developmental view
Speaker 1: and that this one is another one I really don't like.
Speaker 1: This is this one sounds like you know, the the
Speaker 1: hard uh you know, this hard faced father that doesn't
Speaker 1: want his child to uh, you know, to to write
Speaker 1: poetry but wants him to play for the football team.
Speaker 1: Kind of a thing because it's uh in general, right, well,
Speaker 1: at least she's you know, making them play the piano
Speaker 1: or very creative instrument. This presentation is brought to you
Speaker 1: by Intel Sponsors of Tomorrow. So this one maintains that
Speaker 1: the majority of creative behavior exists in younger life and
Speaker 1: uh and and it's these these younger developmental years that
Speaker 1: that stirs to become creative. And then as as we
Speaker 1: grow out of that, we grow out of such foolish
Speaker 1: ideas as creating things that are beautiful. Yeah, we get
Speaker 1: down to the hard science of the let's see, that's
Speaker 1: the other thing. So something inside his dies, something inside
Speaker 1: of dies. We get older, and you know, I think
Speaker 1: this is one of those that you can sort of
Speaker 1: I don't agree with it, but if you hold it up,
Speaker 1: you can say, oh, well look at this this artist.
Speaker 1: They sure did run out of good ideas as they
Speaker 1: got older. But but then you see so many people
Speaker 1: who are just contrary to the rule. Like one of
Speaker 1: my one of my favorite authors is this guy, Brian McNaughton.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't ntil the end of his life that
Speaker 1: he wrote like it's this really awesome collection of short
Speaker 1: stories called Thrown of Bones and it was like the
Speaker 1: last thing he really wrote, and then he kind of
Speaker 1: and then he kind of trickled off and died, but
Speaker 1: he broke that like blow into his uh like into
Speaker 1: his fifties. I think. So. I was actually looking at
Speaker 1: some research on peak ears depending on different disciplines, and
Speaker 1: it turns out that writers actually peak after their forties generally,
Speaker 1: and that poets like twenties and then it's over. I
Speaker 1: know it's very odd, but I wonder if it kind
Speaker 1: of goes back to that idea that there's there's something
Speaker 1: um intrinsic to the way that you are looking at
Speaker 1: the world when everything is fresh and new. Yeah, or
Speaker 1: maybe the writers somehow avoid getting a real job into
Speaker 1: the mid forties and the poets able to find the
Speaker 1: gain game for employee. Yeah, yeah, that's right. They didn't
Speaker 1: really widen the circumstances of the studies they were looking
Speaker 1: at to include that information. So it's very possible. Um.
Speaker 1: But you know, when I think about creativity, I always
Speaker 1: think about the right brain. You have to say, I
Speaker 1: was one of those people who thought, okay, this is
Speaker 1: you know, I'm a right brain person or I'm a
Speaker 1: left brain person, and that seems to be something that
Speaker 1: is completely inaccurate that came out of some sort of
Speaker 1: seventies notion of personality tests. Yeah, but people loved it
Speaker 1: because it has this sort of star bellied sneeches kind
Speaker 1: of a thing to it, where it's and it's like
Speaker 1: it's a it's a war between the creatives and the
Speaker 1: non creatives. It's the left brain versus the right bright
Speaker 1: and this idea of an internal struggle too. Yeah. But
Speaker 1: and in fact it's actually a lot more nuanced than that.
Speaker 1: In the the conclusion from one study by surgeon and
Speaker 1: jazz musician Charles Limb, who will now refer to as
Speaker 1: the Jazz Doctor Jazz doctor, and and that is that
Speaker 1: there is no single creative area of the brain. So
Speaker 1: there's no focal activation of a single area, which is
Speaker 1: really important. Yeah, You've got a whole lot of stuff
Speaker 1: going on there. And it's it's not like you can say, look,
Speaker 1: there's the creativity right there. It's you look at these
Speaker 1: f m r I s that people of engaging in
Speaker 1: creative activities, and it's you know, it's throughout the brain.
Speaker 1: It's not like, you know, just one little portion lighting up. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And when they were looking at some of these activities
Speaker 1: to a lot of them were music based ones. And
Speaker 1: we saw this when we were doing research for music
Speaker 1: and the brain. Same thing, like the entire head is
Speaker 1: or the entire brain is lighting up like a pinball machine.
Speaker 1: So that's that's the interesting part about this. You know,
Speaker 1: you've got language, you've got the seat of judgments, so
Speaker 1: on and so forth. Yeah. I was really impressed with
Speaker 1: this one and that they had like a special keyboard
Speaker 1: uh created that could basically go inside the f m
Speaker 1: R I, which again the fm R. I've ever seen
Speaker 1: people going into a giant, you know, big big square
Speaker 1: device with a little hole in it, and you know
Speaker 1: they put them in. They have you have to be
Speaker 1: real real still like that's the f m R I.
Speaker 1: And and so they had to create this little keyboard
Speaker 1: that they could the jazz musicians could could do a
Speaker 1: little improv piano playing on while they were in it.
Speaker 1: So and they had to create it so they had
Speaker 1: like you know, minimal interference with the fMRI I and
Speaker 1: it sent like a MIDI signal to a computer and
Speaker 1: then and then that was so they could hear it back. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: which is yeah, so incredible thing of course the jazz
Speaker 1: doctor would do that, right, And again that's Charles Limb.
Speaker 1: He's looking at these m R scans of jazz musicians
Speaker 1: and rappers, Yeah, freestyle rappers. This part was really amazing too,
Speaker 1: where he's getting like he's looking like with the number
Speaker 1: of Baltimore area hip hop artists and like getting them
Speaker 1: in put throwing him in the f m R I
Speaker 1: and and just getting them the freestyle and yeah, and
Speaker 1: this is the cool thing. This is this is how
Speaker 1: he created the study is with the jazz musicians, he
Speaker 1: had them learn a piece of music that he wrote
Speaker 1: that was only familiar to him, and then he asked
Speaker 1: them to play it back and they scanned their brains
Speaker 1: and then he asked them, Okay, can you improvise on this?
Speaker 1: They looked at the improvisation in the brain scanning. At
Speaker 1: the same time, same thing with the rappers. They had
Speaker 1: the rappers rap something that the jazz doctor wrote. Just
Speaker 1: pretty fun. It's actually pretty good for like a non rapper,
Speaker 1: Um says me, who has no experience in the rap world.
Speaker 1: It's it's adorable, but I don't know that it is. Okay,
Speaker 1: you're right, it's a it's adorable rapping. And then there
Speaker 1: are certain words that are highlighted in this um, in
Speaker 1: this prepared jazz ex excusing on jazz rap that Dr
Speaker 1: Jazz says, Okay, now, rapper, can you take those at
Speaker 1: certain cues, take those words, and now you start to freestyle,
Speaker 1: you start to im improvise on this. And what's really
Speaker 1: interesting is they found that there are a couple parts
Speaker 1: of the brain that that went really quiet during the improvisation.
Speaker 1: And this is the brains dorsal lateral prefrontal and lateral
Speaker 1: overtald regions. Okay, just for the just for the record,
Speaker 1: I'm touching that part of my head, okay, yeah, and
Speaker 1: that's the seat of judgment. So what that was telling
Speaker 1: us is that in order to improvise to reach what
Speaker 1: I think is sort of like an apex of creativity, right,
Speaker 1: because if you're just free forming anything, then you're really
Speaker 1: relying on um not just your own past experiences, but
Speaker 1: you're really playing with form. And so that part that's
Speaker 1: like oh they're no good, Oh stop doing that, which
Speaker 1: is called the observer effect actually in writing, Yeah, that
Speaker 1: part goes quiet. So we know that in order to
Speaker 1: reach that sort of state, you have to be able
Speaker 1: to get in some sort of flow. Okay, so this
Speaker 1: is yeah, this is the flow moment. And this is
Speaker 1: like when you're writing and somewhat you don't even realize
Speaker 1: that the music has stopped playing and you're just going yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: And then what they saw is that the medial prefrontal
Speaker 1: cortex was going nuts. Um. And they also the and
Speaker 1: then allows self expression by the way, so you know,
Speaker 1: there's there's an actual hard data here, as much as
Speaker 1: it can be with fm R I that points to
Speaker 1: at least this one part of it. We know that
Speaker 1: we have to be in this sort of frame of mind.
Speaker 1: And it actually falls in line with any if anybody
Speaker 1: out there has ever taken an improv class. Um, you
Speaker 1: know that is I recall from like acting classes back
Speaker 1: in college. Um, you know, they're always like, you know,
Speaker 1: don't don't think of don't you know, don't bring your
Speaker 1: judgment into it. Just go with it. Just you know,
Speaker 1: don't don't worry about looking like a fool because because
Speaker 1: that's gonna that's gonna get in the way of doing
Speaker 1: something which like for nine percent of the population, is
Speaker 1: really hard to do. Yeah, I mean, I think it's
Speaker 1: the same and anytime you create something and you're going
Speaker 1: out on all them and you've got to You've gotta
Speaker 1: be on one level, you've gotta be confident in what
Speaker 1: you're doing, but also just kind of like, yeah, some
Speaker 1: people may not dig it, and we're gonna roll with that.
Speaker 1: I do that every time I get behind this microphone.
Speaker 1: I guess, yeah, me too. Um, but yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: you have to have a passion for it too, right,
Speaker 1: So there that that's where that comes into play. You
Speaker 1: want to be able to have fun with it and
Speaker 1: um and hang out with whatever format you are using,
Speaker 1: whether or not it's podcasting or um, whether or not
Speaker 1: it's scientific research or astrophysicists, all of that creativity comes
Speaker 1: into play. Well, that's something that, Yeah, that also is
Speaker 1: important to stress about, Like the whole idea of what
Speaker 1: word is creativity come from. There's also this kind of
Speaker 1: false dichonomy between like artistic creativity and scientific creativity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of that's sort of been like gangs, you know,
Speaker 1: like East Side West Side in the past because they
Speaker 1: never thought that the two would meet. But since we're
Speaker 1: learning so much more about how creat creativity works, we
Speaker 1: realize that it's across the board. Um. And in fact,
Speaker 1: and that actually makes me think about that Stephen Johnson
Speaker 1: ted video because he talks about that sort of improv
Speaker 1: that happens um. And he used the example of when
Speaker 1: spot nick was launched and how there were some astrophysicists
Speaker 1: hanging around and someone was like, hey, can you guys
Speaker 1: figure out the trajectory of that? Can you do those
Speaker 1: front words and backwards? And just as a you know, okay,
Speaker 1: well we'll just sit down and do this for eight
Speaker 1: hours sort of thing. We're playing with that data, which
Speaker 1: led to what we now know is GPS. Right, it's
Speaker 1: just so cool. It's not even something they set out
Speaker 1: to do. It's just sort of a game for them.
Speaker 1: Another thing that I wanted to talk about too, in
Speaker 1: terms of myths is that there's this lone creative genius idea.
Speaker 1: So again talking about these astrophysicists who got together on
Speaker 1: this problem. Um, you know that that flies in the
Speaker 1: face of what we always think of as this person,
Speaker 1: you know, toiling away at whatever they're doing and having
Speaker 1: that Eureka moment, when in fact we know that it
Speaker 1: really takes a village, so to speak. UM. And that
Speaker 1: usually and of course it can be a solitary endeavor,
Speaker 1: but it's not usually something that just happens out of
Speaker 1: the blue. It's usually um something that someone's been working
Speaker 1: on for a really long time. And it's almost like
Speaker 1: um in terms of groups, sort of like emergency we
Speaker 1: talked about in that podcast, where everybody is pooling their
Speaker 1: intelligence and that's creating all of this um really interesting
Speaker 1: innovative ways to look at a problem and to tackle it.
Speaker 1: And I was even thinking about someone like the artist
Speaker 1: Damian Hurst, who has done like the huge puppy dog sculpture.
Speaker 1: I don't think I've seen that. Yeah, it's it's amazing.
Speaker 1: I don't even I want to say. It's like a
Speaker 1: hundred feet high, and um, he's none different versions of them,
Speaker 1: and you know it's it's a highly polished veneer. It
Speaker 1: looks like metal and it reflects back the person looking
Speaker 1: at it, and for some reason it's really mesmer I
Speaker 1: think it's very cool. Anyway, He's done a lot of
Speaker 1: this sort of um pop art, as suppose you could
Speaker 1: call it. But the fact of the matter is that
Speaker 1: this guy has a huge team of artists working under him,
Speaker 1: who feed him ideas, who come up with color samples
Speaker 1: and so it's not like just Damian Hirst sitting there
Speaker 1: being a genius. So it's kind of like the Mr
Speaker 1: Brainwash Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, from the documentary exit through
Speaker 1: the Yes yeah, so yeah. I mean he's relying on
Speaker 1: a lot of different people to get together on these ideas,
Speaker 1: and of course he's you know, I guess you could
Speaker 1: say that he's the person who's directing the project, but
Speaker 1: without all of those people under and there's no way
Speaker 1: that he could pull off the sort of art that
Speaker 1: he does. It's like the George Lucas factor. You know.
Speaker 1: It's like when when you look at the creation of
Speaker 1: the original Star Wars movies, it's like, yeah, Lucas had
Speaker 1: like decided, but then he's like, all right, guys, design
Speaker 1: me this, design me that. And you know so I
Speaker 1: kind of think of like Mr Brainwash and George Lucas
Speaker 1: and the same the same area. Yeah no, And it's
Speaker 1: but you know, it may have been him who looked
Speaker 1: at a bridge and then said, oh, the way that
Speaker 1: that bridge is constructed, how how can I fit that
Speaker 1: into this worldview that I'm creating, which is really interesting,
Speaker 1: But you're right, it takes a fleet of people to
Speaker 1: pull that off Star No starl at Star Treks. Oh Man,
Speaker 1: that was almost a huge nerd photo. Um. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it's it gets in the idea of the of of
Speaker 1: collective intelligence. You know that that it's you know, it's
Speaker 1: about interaction between individuals and uh. And I actually ran
Speaker 1: across this great quote from the Wall Street Journals Matt Ridley, Um,
Speaker 1: and he was his whole thing was like, there's hope
Speaker 1: for the future because quote ideas are having sex with
Speaker 1: each other as never before, you know, And because it's
Speaker 1: because of the idea is that like modern innovation doesn't
Speaker 1: depend on a single human brain to contain it because
Speaker 1: you have you have all these people working working on things,
Speaker 1: and then it's it's like everybody is like has the
Speaker 1: like I sometimes when I think of creativity, I think
Speaker 1: that like the maple syrup spiggott pep in the tree
Speaker 1: and it's stuck in the the side of your head.
Speaker 1: Like everybody can squeeze out a cup each day, but
Speaker 1: through like modern science and modern culture, everybody is taking
Speaker 1: that little cup of syrup and they're pouring it into
Speaker 1: the collective ocean of syrup that we continue to pull from.
Speaker 1: Then it's a search job to wade through the syrup
Speaker 1: and figure out what it is that we need syrups. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: which I mean presents its sound problem. Right. Yeah. We
Speaker 1: get into the whole idea of you know web three
Speaker 1: point oh and the semantic web, where the the web
Speaker 1: that the syrup ocean will wade through itself. Um, at
Speaker 1: our slightest command gets it's pretty sticky. I don't know
Speaker 1: what's going on here. There's a lot of fun thing
Speaker 1: going on. Um. Well, that makes me think of dopamine,
Speaker 1: of course. Yes, this is the the the good stuff,
Speaker 1: if you will. Yeah, yeah, the surupy stuff. Um, there's
Speaker 1: a sort of dopamine factor, if you will. And researchers
Speaker 1: were studying receptors in the brain and they found at
Speaker 1: the Karlinska instill it um uh that there's a dopamine
Speaker 1: system in healthy, highly creative people that's similar to some
Speaker 1: people with schizophrenia. So it's almost like this dopamine gene.
Speaker 1: Actually it's not almost, it is um. They've found they
Speaker 1: have found actually that the dopamine receptors are linked to
Speaker 1: the ability for divergent thought, which is really necessary and
Speaker 1: creative thinking or innovative thinking. Um. The study measured the
Speaker 1: creativity of the healthy individuals using psychological test and then
Speaker 1: the ask was to find as many solutions to a
Speaker 1: problem as possible, and so they found that highly creative
Speaker 1: people they're calling them healthy people because they don't have schizophrenia,
Speaker 1: and schizophrenic people have a low density of dopamine receptors.
Speaker 1: And what this means is that the dopamine receptors and
Speaker 1: the thalamus, which is linked to the sensory information that
Speaker 1: gets passed onto the frugal cortex, um means that there's
Speaker 1: a lower degree of signal filtering and so there's a
Speaker 1: higher flow of information from the thalamus, which really means
Speaker 1: that like what might get sort of plugged up before,
Speaker 1: all these ideas are actually coming through at an incredible rate.
Speaker 1: It's what I'm thinking is that you're just getting bombarded
Speaker 1: by all these different ideas, which I thought it was
Speaker 1: pretty fascinating. So that sort of accounts for some of
Speaker 1: the more bizarre symptoms that you see in schizophrenia, but
Speaker 1: in a healthy person, that accounts for their ability to
Speaker 1: make creative associations pretty easily. Yeah. I mean, I don't
Speaker 1: know if this guy hit schizophrenia, but there's this guy
Speaker 1: on the train a couple of week ago. Already you
Speaker 1: say the train. It was just amazing stuff. I mean,
Speaker 1: he seemed I can enjoy it because he seemed very happy.
Speaker 1: He was not a like you know, he did not
Speaker 1: seem to be in misery, but he was like sort
Speaker 1: of giving this. He was preaching this kind of apro
Speaker 1: futurist message. Um. And it had to do with like
Speaker 1: the face on Mars and the Kennedy assassination and like, okay,
Speaker 1: there's already red flag Kennedy assassination. Okay, go on. Oh no,
Speaker 1: Elvis showed up in it, and there was a whole
Speaker 1: time Are you kidding? No, I'm not kidding. I actually
Speaker 1: recorded it, and I haven't kicking around here somewhere, but God,
Speaker 1: you've gotta please, we've got to put that on Facebook
Speaker 1: and somebody if I don't know if we can do audiophiles,
Speaker 1: Oh well we we can. I just I guess off
Speaker 1: to check and see if this one's kosher, because it
Speaker 1: also gets into like the idea that the sun is
Speaker 1: racist and has a brain, So it could be it
Speaker 1: could be. I don't know, I don't know, but man
Speaker 1: was asking questions. There was a lot of interesting data,
Speaker 1: but it was like it was so like crazy creative
Speaker 1: that it was like that's why I recorded it, you know,
Speaker 1: because like this is amazing. I love this well. And
Speaker 1: obviously this is someone whose judgment part of the brain
Speaker 1: was completely shut off. Yeah, because he's most of is.
Speaker 1: Even if we had these thoughts, we wouldn't just spout
Speaker 1: them to the entire train full of people. No, No,
Speaker 1: I don't normally at least um, but at that point
Speaker 1: to that whole madness aspect too, right, Yeah, you have
Speaker 1: to be crazy? Do you have to be deeply troubled
Speaker 1: to be created? Right? Which is the again another stereotype
Speaker 1: that we have about creativity. Um. But I thought it
Speaker 1: was interesting I found this um van Go Um, A
Speaker 1: couple other folks, Uh, Edgar Allan Poe, Lewis Carroll. According
Speaker 1: to eve La Plant, who has a book called Seized
Speaker 1: of these were people who suffered from temporal lobe seizures,
Speaker 1: and so it could very well be that a lot
Speaker 1: of the art that they produced, or the or the
Speaker 1: or the books and so on and so forth, were
Speaker 1: a result of that sort of hallucinatory period um in
Speaker 1: which they were seeing things afresh. And if you look
Speaker 1: at van Go's work. You can really see that, right,
Speaker 1: because it's sort of like it's sort of like he
Speaker 1: here's the starry night when right, which is the archetypical
Speaker 1: uh van Go painting, and you recognize it. But it
Speaker 1: looks like the world has tilted about thirty degrees and
Speaker 1: everything is so much brighter and fresher, looking like these
Speaker 1: incredible you know, colors popping out. And that's what's so
Speaker 1: intriguing about it is because it captures something that's familiar
Speaker 1: but at the same time completely alien. So there you go.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's there is m that's something that we
Speaker 1: have intrinsically thought mad about, you know Van Go and
Speaker 1: his paintings. But again, this is very likely just a
Speaker 1: side effect of his own temporal lobe seizures. Now, of
Speaker 1: course it's you know, important to point out that not
Speaker 1: everybody who is intensely creative is crazy or problem but
Speaker 1: but but but we often fall back on that, I find.
Speaker 1: But that's what I was sort of saying, is that,
Speaker 1: you know, people sort of point to that and say, oh, well,
Speaker 1: they're just mad that we know so much more now
Speaker 1: medically scientifically about conditions that we can say, well, you know,
Speaker 1: this unique perspective was brought on by that. But you know,
Speaker 1: some people say that you could get that same perspective
Speaker 1: from trans transcend all meditation. Oh yeah, the director David Lynch, Yeah,
Speaker 1: thirty six years strong, doing that every morning, every night.
Speaker 1: And he's completely normal. I mean, he's totally normal. Um,
Speaker 1: and his films make perfect sense, they do well makes
Speaker 1: pretty yeah. Actually, Um. There's an essay by David Foster
Speaker 1: Wallace about donating to read that you do it basically
Speaker 1: says like that's the reason why David Lynch can do
Speaker 1: with what he can is because he took this one
Speaker 1: mainstream job. Um. But what I thought was interesting is
Speaker 1: David Lynch was talking about his meditating experience and he says,
Speaker 1: it's so beautiful how the enjoyment of beauty blossoms when
Speaker 1: the suffocating rubber clown suit of negativity begins to to dissolve. Well,
Speaker 1: which is so lynch in. Yeah. But I mean I
Speaker 1: I kind of like just last night when I was
Speaker 1: having to like like, I got off work, I went
Speaker 1: to yoga, and then after yoga, I came home and
Speaker 1: had dinner and then worked on this podcast a little more.
Speaker 1: And and there's a like a you know, there's a
Speaker 1: meditative aspect to yoga and it kind of detached you
Speaker 1: and and I can totally get that. I I wish
Speaker 1: I had the patients for more like hardcore meditation. Maybe
Speaker 1: I'll get there. Did your rubber clown suit dissolve? Yes, well,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm a yeah, I'm I'm a proponent of rubber
Speaker 1: clown suit yoga, which is one of the newer schools
Speaker 1: of yoga. That this is made different from the robot
Speaker 1: yoga but the same place, right, Well, yeah, well we
Speaker 1: get robot Yoga on Tuesdays and then rubber clown Yoga
Speaker 1: is on Fridays. Okay, yeah, well but I think that
Speaker 1: again there's this idea of being eccentric um and when
Speaker 1: we talk about temporal lobe activity like we were with
Speaker 1: van Go, it makes me think about the alien abduction
Speaker 1: stories that we looked into. And again here's this case
Speaker 1: where Susan Blackmore, who is a psychologist and has really
Speaker 1: looked into this from a skeptics point of view. I
Speaker 1: visited someone named Chael Personer. I know you guys probably
Speaker 1: heard me talk about this before, but he's the guy
Speaker 1: who has the God Machine, which has magnets which can
Speaker 1: manipulate the frontal lobes so on and so forth. And
Speaker 1: what they found is that people have in that area
Speaker 1: a high ability or a low ability. And what that
Speaker 1: means is that some people have more electro magnets or
Speaker 1: excuse me, electro activity going on in the temporal lobes
Speaker 1: and other people and those are people that have high abilities.
Speaker 1: And those people actually they did some studies on them,
Speaker 1: and what they found is that they tend to be
Speaker 1: a little bit more creative um and also a little
Speaker 1: bit more paranoid to which is interesting. And these are
Speaker 1: the people that tend to have these experiences of feeling
Speaker 1: like they've been objected before. Interesting. Yeah, so you know,
Speaker 1: you've got the explosions in the mind, I think, is
Speaker 1: what it's boiling down to. Yeah. Well, I remember the
Speaker 1: whole deal with William Blake, Like supposedly he was you know,
Speaker 1: as a child, and he had a lot of sort
Speaker 1: of craziness going on. I mean, from what i've little
Speaker 1: life read about him, he seemed to be a happy guy,
Speaker 1: but that he did have some pretty fantastic stuff going
Speaker 1: on in his life. Okay, So if I don't want
Speaker 1: to use drugs or I don't want to go mad,
Speaker 1: but I want to be creative. How do I do
Speaker 1: it best? Well, Um, you know, I think some of
Speaker 1: the the tips are are kind of out there already,
Speaker 1: like the ones the ones that I like, um are
Speaker 1: like experiencing new things and you know, to termly because
Speaker 1: because the you know, there's a whole argument that time
Speaker 1: seems to like we experienced time differently when we're on
Speaker 1: vacation because we're seeing everything new for the first time,
Speaker 1: and then we experience that time seems to um speed
Speaker 1: up as we get older because we're seeing less new
Speaker 1: things when we're younger, Like, there's so much that's new,
Speaker 1: there's so much that's bright. Wasn't Einstein who said something
Speaker 1: about time slowing down when he's talking to a pretty girl? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: he used the whole beautiful woman u um um analogy
Speaker 1: to explain relativity. Yeah, such a rogue. Yeah. And he
Speaker 1: designed a spaceship that was they would load the whole
Speaker 1: of it with five thousand beautiful women and one male
Speaker 1: pilot and he would look at a different beautiful woman
Speaker 1: each day. And the power the retail the special engines,
Speaker 1: but little known NASA project that didn't get off the ground. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but so that's one. You know. I think it's like
Speaker 1: new new experiences. Uh. And then absorbing like creativity, you know,
Speaker 1: reading things, looking at the things that are creative. You know,
Speaker 1: you are what you eat kind of a kind of
Speaker 1: a situation, um, you know. And uh and also like
Speaker 1: as they turn off that judgment center, not being afraid
Speaker 1: to ask troubling questions about yourself. Um. Yeah, and thought experiments.
Speaker 1: You I thought this was interesting, trying to create a
Speaker 1: solution to a problem that you could never really like
Speaker 1: something like how do I say it? Like, um, it
Speaker 1: would be an experiment that just had no solution. So
Speaker 1: how do I get my cat to make something for
Speaker 1: me for dinner that I would like to eat? Okay?
Speaker 1: You see you asked this one yesterday, and so now
Speaker 1: you quantified a little more because that's so I know,
Speaker 1: because you started to answ shirt and I was like, no,
Speaker 1: no, no no, not a dead bird. I don't want a
Speaker 1: dead bird, and I want them to serve it to me. Um.
Speaker 1: And I wanted to be seasoned with rosemary. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, so the mind starts to play with like, well,
Speaker 1: so okay, maybe I can put some treats around I mean,
Speaker 1: and again this is engaging your brain in all these
Speaker 1: different ways, different ways of thinking. Yeah, or you know,
Speaker 1: it's like you mash up two ideas and then you're like,
Speaker 1: all right, how does that work? You know as a
Speaker 1: as a story or as a or as a piece
Speaker 1: of art, or is as music. Um, you know, it's
Speaker 1: like a random combination, and then you have to make
Speaker 1: sense of it. I really like that view of things.
Speaker 1: And and then there's collaboration too. Oh yeah, yeah, as
Speaker 1: long as there's not competition, because competition actually makes people
Speaker 1: squirrel away their best information and doesn't actually ever create
Speaker 1: some sort of group, collective great thing. So you have
Speaker 1: to not be a squirrel or aware no, no squirreling. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And sleep and dreaming of course, we know. Yeah, sleep,
Speaker 1: sleep is big. Actually sleep so your brain can confunction
Speaker 1: and can they can do things other than just try
Speaker 1: and keep you from tipping over from lack of balance.
Speaker 1: And uh and yeah, like we've like we've shown that
Speaker 1: our dreams are it's like the mind's defragment or so
Speaker 1: you know, let it run every now and then otherwise
Speaker 1: that that hard drive is gonna crash. It's going to hard. Um.
Speaker 1: Speaking of defragging, we're gonna do you have any defragging
Speaker 1: on email here? We do. We have some listener mail
Speaker 1: that I'm gonna read here for us. Jane writes in,
Speaker 1: and she says, hey, guys, I just wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know that in Japanese uh kauai u k a
Speaker 1: w aii. Well that's the you know, the English version
Speaker 1: of the can't you cute is pronounced co like the
Speaker 1: cawing of a crow. So cow because I see I
Speaker 1: can't do it? Um okay no wait here it cough
Speaker 1: like the cawing of a crow. Wa is in water
Speaker 1: and I i uh as in the letter e, so
Speaker 1: like hawaii exactly how cute. The way you were pronouncing
Speaker 1: it made it sound like kowai, which in Japanese means scary.
Speaker 1: It's just the opposite of cute, which is the well.
Speaker 1: But then again, like I said, there's that whole kawa
Speaker 1: e noir thing which combines. But anyway, just then, just
Speaker 1: an f y I, James says, love the podcast, So yes,
Speaker 1: thanks for the clarification on that. We actually received a
Speaker 1: couple of comments on that from the more uh from
Speaker 1: our listeners that are more in tune with the Japanese
Speaker 1: language and or Japanese culture. And we also heard from Adam.
Speaker 1: Adam wrote in and says, while listening to podcast, I
Speaker 1: couldn't help but reflect um and he's talking about the podcasts.
Speaker 1: Are you smarter than an ant swarm? He says, I
Speaker 1: couldn't help it reflect on on the Middle East and
Speaker 1: the protests going on right now. Is social media creating
Speaker 1: an emergence intelligence that is shaping our world today? I
Speaker 1: hear hear stories of people using Twitter to avoid snipers
Speaker 1: and Facebook to organize marches in real time, and it
Speaker 1: all seems like something greater than our current understanding. Uh so, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's some interesting thought. Yeah. I was looking at um
Speaker 1: an rsspeed the other day and actually saw something that
Speaker 1: was ranking pretty high, but I didn't have a whole
Speaker 1: lot of time to look. But it was something about
Speaker 1: Facebook Country asking people um to help them with the
Speaker 1: chemical properties of tear gas and how to ameliorate that,
Speaker 1: which is kind of interesting. Yeah, they're doing all sorts
Speaker 1: of interesting things. Actually, I wrote an article called her
Speaker 1: Smartphone is Worth It, and it goes into a little
Speaker 1: to the idea of like smartphones being annoying in you know,
Speaker 1: modern Western culture, but also goes into how it's and
Speaker 1: this was before the protest broke out, how it was
Speaker 1: helping to achieve social change in uh in Sub Saharan Africa. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which was pretty cool. And indeed, just the other day,
Speaker 1: this Nigerian guy contacted me on Facebook and I'm sending
Speaker 1: him money to help help out the situation. There is
Speaker 1: a deposed king, yes he is. Did you read about
Speaker 1: this on a Is there a story on AP or something?
Speaker 1: You know? I was contacted as well. Yeah, well let's
Speaker 1: kick in. Let's talk about this later, because there's some
Speaker 1: really big things happening that you know, I don't want
Speaker 1: to share with everybody, but if you want to share
Speaker 1: something with us, check us out on Twitter and Facebook.
Speaker 1: We are blow the mind on both of those and
Speaker 1: we try to keep those updated pretty regularly with all
Speaker 1: sorts of cool happenings on how stuff works and elsewhere
Speaker 1: on the web. And hey, I was just sitting here thinking,
Speaker 1: it is not Damien Hirst, who's the artist who did
Speaker 1: the Big Puppy Dog. It is actually Jeff Coon's. Damian
Speaker 1: Hirst is the guy that likes to play with animal carcasses,
Speaker 1: um entirely different. So there you go. Jeff Coons who
Speaker 1: has the team of people helping them. So to that end,
Speaker 1: do you, guys, have a team of people helping you?
Speaker 1: What sort of things get your creative juices blowing? Let
Speaker 1: us know at blow the Mind at how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Speaker 1: Is it how stuff works dot com. To learn more
Speaker 1: about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the
Speaker 1: upper right corner of our homepage. The houstof Works iPhone
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