The Innovation Factor: Your Brain on Innovation

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If a period of incomprehension is essential for the learning that leads to innovation, then how does your brain assimilate that learning to the point where it can go beyond making connections and think outside the box? Two recent studies provide intriguing clues.

A brain-imaging experiment conducted by the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, England, found that a particular network in the brain -- based in the lateral frontal cortex of one or both hemispheres -- is activated when people are involved in complex thought. The region remains quiet during more routine thought. "My guess is that this is the kind of network that you might find operating in creative people at the moment that they're being creative," says Michael I. Posner, professor emeritus at the University of Oregon and coauthor of Images of Mind. The discovery of the network leads to some intriguing theories about why people often fail to come up with creative solutions when they're focusing on a problem but succeed later, when they're doing other things, like taking a shower or watching a movie. "It may very well be that in some people -- or all of us, some of the time -- the network sustains its activity even when the people, in their conscious minds, go on to something else," says Posner. "And that sustained activity, when it comes up with something, when something resonates, allows the [conscious] person to break in and come to a solution."

Crossing Hemispheres

Posner and a colleague at the University of Oregon conducted another study that shed light on novel thinking, this one using an EEG. The researchers asked subjects to generate a typical use for a list of nouns -- for example, pound for hammer and sweep for broom. Initially, left frontal areas and then Wernicke's area, which sits in the left temporal lobe, lit up. (Language is generally associated with left-hemisphere activity, spatial problems with the right hemisphere.) But as the task was repeated, the subjects' brain activity in those areas tapered off. For the next series of tests, the researchers added a twist: they had the subjects come up with a novel association between the words -- say, throw in response to hammer. The result? The frontal areas lit up, as before. But so did an area on the right side of the brain. And then the two sides, in a seeming game of neuronal catch, tossed the pulse back and forth. When we think outside the box, the study seems to tell us, the brain not only recruits additional processing power but also grabs input from unexpected neuronal circuits.

Yet is thinking outside the box all it takes to be innovative? Are reasoning and imagination -- the twin faculties that most of us associate with innovation -- enough for Ray Kurzweil to know which of the formulas that he's dreamed up based on past technological trends will lead to the best mathematical models for predicting future trends?

No, says Antonio Damasio, head of the neurology department at the University of Iowa College of Medicine. The innovator has to be able to feel outside the box, too -- that is, to make value judgments about the images and ideas that he or she has produced in such abundance. "Invention," as the French mathematician Henri PoincarÉ said, "is discernment, choice." And choice, notes Damasio, is based on human emotion -- sensations that originate in the brain but loop down into the body and back up again. "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," says Damasio. "Emotion is literally the alarm that permits the detection."

Kurzweil, for his part, calls that alarm "intuitive judgment." But he disagrees that it -- or reasoning or imagination, for that matter -- is exclusively human. He sees a day in the not-too-distant future when we will merge mechanical processes with biological ones in order to amplify what our brains alone do today. "Ultimately, we'll be able to develop machines that are based on the principles of operation of the human brain and that have the complexity of human intelligence," he says. "As we get to the 2030s and 2040s, the nonbiological component of our civilization's thinking power will dominate."

Thea Singer is an associate editor at Inc.

Ray Kurzweil's Brain on Innovation

To see what's happening inside the brain of an innovative entrepreneur, we asked the McLean Hospital Brain Imaging Center, in Belmont, Mass., to do a functional MRI (fMRI) of Ray Kurzweil's brain. Deborah A. Yurgelun-Todd, director of the center's Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory, and Staci A. Gruber, assistant director, had Kurzweil perform a routine task (reading aloud common nouns like blouse and razor) and then asked him to come up with novel uses for those words. For instance, Kurzweil suggested "building a cabin" for blouse and "decorating" for razor.

In the three-dimensional images pictured here, Yurgelun-Todd and Gruber explain, the green areas are the parts of Kurzweil's brain that were activated during the routine tasks, and the red areas are the parts of his brain that were activated during the innovative tasks. Some of the specific brain regions that sprang into action when Kurzweil was thinking outside the box: the dorsal anterior cingulate, which lies in the frontal lobes deep inside the brain, just above the band of fibers that connect the two hemispheres; the back part of the parietal lobes; and the right cerebellum, a cauliflower-shaped structure that lies at the base of the brain.

The Innovation Factor: Part II

Inside Innovative Minds
Innovative Minds
Your Brain on Innovation
What's Your Innovation Quotient?

Plus: The Innovation Factor: Part I

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