The Innovation Factor: Your Brain on Innovation

Want to know what makes a creative genius tick? Neuroscience gives us some clues.

Innovation: Part II

You're giving a presentation to your board of directors, and your pants fall down. Mortified, you hightail it out of the room, only to fall on your face, trousers in a tourniquet around your ankles. As you lie splattered on the carpet, something clicks: You can fly out of there! You take wing, exiting through a chimney that materializes out of thin air.

That is, of course, the stuff that dreams are made of. Freud could have had a field day with the symbols: Naked. Flying. A chimney. But does it have anything to do with innovation?

Quintessential innovator Ray Kurzweil thinks so. For 37 of his 54 years, Kurzweil, who's founded nine companies, has been inventing revolutionary products, among them a print-to-speech reading machine for the blind and a music synthesizer capable of re-creating the sounds of orchestral instruments. For the past 20 years, he's been quite literally dreaming up the solutions to his creative dilemmas in the dead of night.

Every evening before bed, Kurzweil plucks out a vexing problem -- perhaps a business strategy, a technical conundrum, or even an interpersonal issue. First he posits the characteristics of a potential solution. Take, for example, the extraskeletal walking system for paraplegics that he's considering developing. He wants it to be simple enough for a user to put on without help. Lying in bed, Kurzweil begins to fantasize about such a system, sometimes imagining that he's giving a speech about how he reached his conclusions. "This has the purpose of seeding your subconscious to influence your dreams," he says. Then he drifts off to sleep.

All night, snippets of the solution filter in and out of his dreams. At the first glimmer of consciousness, Kurzweil returns to the problem. It is then, during the brief quasi-conscious state known as "lucid dreaming," that he merges the logic of his conscious thought with the relaxation of inhibition engendered by his dreams to arrive at many of his most startling insights. "The most interesting thing about dreams is that you don't consider it unusual when unusual things happen, like a room floating away," says Kurzweil. "You accept this lack of logic. And that [irrational] faculty is needed for creative thinking. But you also need to be able to apply a critical faculty, because not every idea that's different and out of the box will work."

Kurzweil has plenty of proof that the method works. Lucid dreaming helped him visualize a new stock-predictor system and nearly verbatim sections of his latest book, The Age of Spiritual Machines. Which makes one wonder: What is occurring in his brain during that half hour of luminously creative thinking? What is the look of Ray Kurzweil's -- or any innovator's -- brain during innovation? And are the brains of innovative individuals structurally or functionally different from other people's -- that is, are they larger than average, do their synapses operate differently, or is their wiring denser or perhaps more sparse but faster?

"What you're really doing in the process of creating is choosing one thing over another, not necessarily because it is factually more positive but because it attracts you more. Emotion is literally the alarm that permits the detection."

The 21st century may be the golden age of neuroscience. But when it comes to understanding precisely how creativity works in the brain -- and whether an innovator's brain is indeed different from yours and mine -- the experts still have to rely more on conjecture than on fact. Yes, it's known that most higher brain functions (such as perception, memory, and intelligence) are centered in the cerebral cortex, that 0.1-inch-thick infolding of neuron-rich gray matter overlaying both the right and the left hemispheres that would cover some 1.5 square feet if it were laid out like a tablecloth. And it's accepted that the neurons in the gray matter -- as in other, more subterranean sections of the brain -- use branchlike projections called dendrites and axons to transmit information to one another across the gaps, or synapses, that separate them. The information -- instructions, say, to store memories -- is transferred along the daisy chains of neurons by chemicals called neurotransmitters, forming charged networks, or circuits, in the process. (The average brain has 100 billion to 1,000 billion neurons, each of which makes 100 to 10,000 connections with other neurons.)

The brain has a remarkable ability to create new circuits, a phenomenon known as plasticity. That capacity for regeneration means that the cerebral wiring for our own store of knowledge and memories, which grows as we do, is as unique as a thumbprint. It also means that if one chunk of gray matter is destroyed by, say, a stroke, new circuits may be laid in another location to compensate, essentially rewiring a person's store of knowledge and memories.

To date, neuroscientists, like cartographers, have created maps of the brain. But they have been unable to capture fully the neuronal landscape that evokes a Kurzweil music synthesizer or reading machine, for example. Among the questions researchers are asking: Does the process of innovating activate neuronal circuits in a particular part of the brain, the way that language, say, primarily activates circuits in parts of the brain's left hemisphere? Or does it pull in contributions from other parts of the cerebral cortex and even from areas that are involved in emotional behavior, like the amygdala, which lies deep in the brain's core? What components of thought does innovating require: Visualization? Auditory recall? Working memory?

Though researchers don't yet have all the answers, they are getting closer to posing the right questions. For instance, a study done at Heinrich-Heine University, in DÜsseldorf, Germany, has shown that the primary auditory areas of musicians who have perfect pitch are larger than average on the left side of the brain, despite the fact that pitch perception generally resides on the right. The finding suggests that the brains of gifted people may, in fact, be different -- although which came first, the rare ability or the unusual brain structure, remains a chicken-or-egg inquiry.

Tracking the "Aha!"

In a study at Tufts University, researchers using an electroencephalograph (EEG) detected the actual "Eureka!" experience -- the moment when the fog surrounding a problem clears and insight hits. The researchers presented subjects with sentences that made no apparent sense. The subjects sat mute, confused. Five seconds later, the researchers gave them a single-word cue. For example: "The dinner was uneaten because the wood was warped." Pause. "Chopsticks." Less than half a second later, electrodes that were attached to the subjects' foreheads -- right above their frontal lobes -- picked up a pulse that came with the flash of insight.

The researchers learned that a period of confusion not only led to insight but also helped the subjects remember what they'd learned. "Put the person in the transition from noncomprehension to sudden insight -- that's the memory boost," says Tufts associate professor Sal A. Soraci, one of the researchers.

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