Customer Reviews

The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

It is accurate to say that there has been more creative energy released in the last twenty-five years than any than the last twenty-five hundred. This is due not only to the number of people that are actually alive now, but also to the vast amount of knowledge that is readily available. Modern technology is responsible for the availability of this knowledge, and the technology itself was the result of human creativity and ingenuity. In addition, creative people can now communicate in ways they could not before, thanks to the rise of the Internet. Further, innovation has been strongly encouraged, not primarily by educational institutions and hierarchies, but by the business community. This is an interesting development, and one that shows every indication of continuing. The academy, which used to be considered a refugee camp for the creative mind, is no longer a place where one can pursue and develop original ideas without extreme difficulty.

In this highly interesting book, the author acknowledges that the environment is important in nurturing creativity, but she also wants to understand what mechanisms in the brain are responsible for it. An understanding of these mechanisms is extremely important, for it could point the way to better methods of enhancing creativity, either by using pharmaceuticals, with techniques from genetic engineering, or possibly with radical changes in the environment. The author is a neuroscientist, and not a philosopher, and so her analysis is based more on what is observed in the laboratory, and not mere speculations from the armchair. Her goal is to obtain a neuroscience of creativity, which considering the paucity of research in this area, is a goal that one hopes she (and other researchers) will succeed in reaching.

One of the first issues that the author addresses in the book is the relation (if any) between intelligence and creativity. Reviewing the history of the study between these two notions, and noting creative people have been equated with "geniuses", she concludes that, in general, one can conclude that a certain level of intelligence is needed to make original contributions, one needs another faculty of the brain in order to do so. It is not clear from this discussion whether she believes that this entails a modular view of the brain, i.e. one in which the brain consists of specialized modules for various tasks, one of these modules being for tasks requiring creativity.

The author is also careful to note that originality, creativity, or novelty are concepts that are dependent on the context in which ideas arise and in the perceived utility of these ideas. In this regard, she discusses the work of the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who believed in the existence of "true creativity". As summarized by the author, Csikszentmihalyi held that creativity should be understood in terms of the relationship between a `domain', which is a particular area of knowledge; a `field' that is a collection of experts in the domain, and a `person' who actually introduces novel ideas into the domain under the auspices of the field. Motivated by these considerations, the author holds that creativity must involve originality, utility, and must lead to product of some kind. These requirements, at least on the surface, are reasonable, but there are difficulties that arise when one attempts to check them for a particular idea or concept. One issue that immediately arises in this regard is attempting to check whether indeed the concept or creation is indeed novel, or whether it was actually contained in prior ideas or creations. The issue of whether an idea was actually contained in prior ones comes up quite frequently in the field of automated mathematical discovery, which seeks to emulate, in a machine, human creative mathematical ability. Because of the deductive nature of mathematics, the progression of ideas must follow logically from those in prior ones, i.e. in the premises. But the "new" ideas must be different in some sense from the ones that they are logically derived from. It can be become very debatable whether these ideas were indeed original, or whether they were merely "contained in the premises."

The book would not be complete of course if the author did not discuss in detail her ideas on the neuroscience behind creativity. For the general reader, she includes some elementary discussion on brain anatomy as a warm-up. In her brief treatment of the functions of the brain she mentions the current debate as to the executive functions of the brain, i.e. whether there is a central "executive" in the brain that decides what changes are to occur. As an alternative to a central authority, the author mentions the view of the brain as being a `self-organizing' system. This is currently a popular view of the brain among physicists, and for the author it helps to explain what she calls "ordinary creativity." However, the author clearly believes that something else is needed to explain "extraordinary" creativity: unconscious processes such as the process of `free association.' The author refers to her experimental work on using neuroimaging technology to find out which areas of the brain are active during free association. Her work is also dependent on the notion of `episodic memory', which she characterizes as memory that is linked to the personal experiences of the individual. Her neuroimaging experiments indicated that the association cortex was active when the subject was engaging in random unconscious free association. She is careful to admit though that a lot more research is needed to find the neural basis behind extraordinary creativity, but her suspicion is that it involves making links between objects or concepts that were not linked before. These associative links "run wild" and create new connections, resulting in a disorganized mental state. This motivates her to study the connection between creativity and insanity, a topic that she also discusses at some length in the book, along with hints and exercises that individuals can use to enhance their creativity.

+++++

QUESTION: What do Neil Simon (playwright), Mozart (music composer), and Friedrich Kekule (organic chemist) have in common?
ANSWER: Each was considered to be a creative genius.

This slim book by Dr. Nancy Andreasen attempts to explain how the above people and those like them create great works of art and come up with original ideas in the sciences. Does their creative genius reside in their neuroanatomy?

Andreasen explains more about her book:

"[My] book is primarily about extraordinary creativity. I wanted to write about how extremely gifted people have created things that have made our lives, our society, and our civilization richer and more beautiful."

Each of this book's six chapters is divided into subsections. Below I will give the title of the chapter (in upper case) and then give the titles of each subsection so as to give an overview of the entire book:

(1) THE NATURE OF CREATIVITY

The evolution of concepts of creativity; Creativity vs intelligence; Creativity and society: who decides?; What is creativity.

(2) UNDERSTANDING THE CREATIVE PERSON AND THE CREATIVE PROCSS

The scientific study of creativity; The creative person; The creative process; The case-study method and introspective descriptions of the creative process; Five introspective accounts (written by five people who represent extraordinary creativity).

(3) HOW DOES THE BRAIN CREATE?

Creativity and the brain; How does the brain think?; A primer of brain anatomy; The complexity of brain networks; The human brain as a self-organizing system; What is human thought?; Unconscious thought; The neural basis of extraordinary creativity.

(4) GENIUS AND INSANITY

Early explorations of genius and insanity: the anecdotal era; Improving diagnostic precision: the quantitative era; Is there a connection between creativity and schizophrenia?; Mental illness, creativity, and the brain; What are the effects of treating mental illness in creative people?

(5) WHAT CREATES THE CREATIVE BRAIN?

The role of nurture; Renaissance Florence as a Lab for the case study of nature and nurture (note that Andreasen's PhD is in Renaissance Literature); What kind of environment nurtures Creativity?; The role of nature: innate gifts and hereditary factors; Nature vs nurture: What creates the creative brain?

(6) BUILDING BETTER BRAINS

What is brain plasticity?; Plasticity and the creative brain; Ordinary creativity and extraordinary creativity; (Creative enhancing) mental exercises for adults; Tips for teaching tots; The creating brain: Quo Vadis.

If you peruse the above chapter subsections, you will find that the actual amount of neuroscience presented in this book is minimal. This is actually justified since the amount of research in this area is slim. What Andreasen does is actually concentrate on the mind rather than to analyze only the brain in order to understand creativity.

This book contains almost 35 black and white photos and illustrations, most of which I found interesting.

Don't worry! This book is easy to read. You don't have to have a PhD to understand it.

There are a few problems with this book. I will state three that I consider major ones:

(i) This book's title is "The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of [Creative] Genius." As explained above, this book deals more with the mind than with the brain. As well, the neuroscience in this book is minimal. (Some people may get angry at this expecting the entire book to be about the brain and neuroscience. Personally, I was not angry but surprised.) I think a more accurate title would have been: "The Creating Mind: With Some Neuroscience Explaining Creative Genius."

(ii) The preface made me wince. Andreasen begins it with "When I was a kindergartener, I was IQ-tested and declared a genius." She then goes on and briefly describes her life with this label. Why?

(iii) The author attempts to imply that Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein suffered from mental illness. Maybe she's justified in saying this since she has a degree in psychiatry. However, one of my degrees is in psychology and I would say that she is reading too much into Newton's and Einstein's idiosyncrasies.

Finally, I had a difficult time deciding how to rate this book. I decided I would rate this book on the more accurate title that I mentioned in (i) above. Some people might disagree with me on doing this but I feel the information presented in this book is important to know with respect to creativity.

In conclusion, despite some problems, I feel that this book does an adequate job in explaining extraordinary creativity.

(2005; preface; 6 chapters; main narrative 180 pages; bibliography; index)

+++++

In writing this book Dr. Andreasen had to consider her audience. This
book was written for a general audience, not the academic or medical community.
Therefore it must appeal to that end both in language and length of text.
I think that Dr. Andreasen is successful in her anecdotal approach to
writing this book. It keeps things interesting for those of us who might
have trouble sifting through the thousands and thousands of articles
published about creativity in medical or psychology journals. If you are looking for a summary of everything that has been written on the topic, you are looking for another book....and very likely one that would not be of much interest to a general audience.
Why anyone would expect a book that is obviously written for most
moderately educated people to be so conclusive, especially at this stage
in neuroscience, is beyond me. If one were to try to cover all aspects of
how people are creative, it would likely be longer than all of wikipedia.
I am an artist. For this book, I used a method usually reserved for viewing art, and
that is, assume everything is intentional. If the painter gives Mary a
long neck, it's not that he or she doesn't know how to paint a neck. It is because the painter is trying to emphasize something about the neck. Being a PhD in
English, I would gather that Dr. Andreasen knows a thing or two about
writing well. Being an accomplished scientist in addition, she also has an amazing capacity to make difficult topics easy to understand. Perhaps this skill-one that is quite rare in highly credentialed scholars like Dr. Andreasen-is one reason that several reviewers have perceived the book to be "too simple."
In this book Dr. Andreasen has selectively chosen some aspects of creativity the aspects of creativity that she finds most interesting. The most challenging aspect is the neuroscience of creativity. How does the brain actually work when it develops original ideas? The book is a tour de force in this respect. Few others could have written about this topic in such a knowledgeable but interesting and approachable way.

'The Creating Brain' book is about creativity, the person and the process involved. Nancy also talks about how creative people have a certain personality which could affect their mental behavior.

The book starts with how most creative ideas sprang into te select minds while in 'bed, bath or bus'- Kekule,Archimedes,Poincare int he order fo their situation.

The chapter on five creative persons gives a first account of the creative person at their act.

A very interesting chapter of the book is the one in which Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo are studied to see how nature (Genes. The concept of 'Hereditary Genius' and Francis Galton's contribution of Scatter Plots and Unique finger prints theory , his misused theory of eugenics was interesting to know) and nurture(the need for a mentor) are both part in bringing about a persons creativity to light.

The last chapter deals with how to build a better brain with exercises like learning something new everyday since its associating different domains which has been seen as a bed for creativity, active reading with a list of books for children of different ages.

I was intrigued by the title of this book and the background of the author. The book turned out to be a disappointment. There were only a few insights from neuroscience, and the synthesis based on the biography of geniuses was superficial, leading to somewhat obvious conclusions. While an integrative approach to writing on such a complex topic must be appreciated, the balance of the content could have been more in favor of scientific findings. Also, a slightly irritating aspect is the author's desire to communicate her likeness to the creative people whom she describes. The book is easy to read, though, the content could have been presented in an article of a few pages.

Andreasen has multiple chops to bring to this modern study. Before she got her M.D. as a psychiatrist, she had a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature and taught at the University of Iowa, renowned for the Iowa Writers' Workshop. That allows her to combine anecdotal and empirical study on this issue.

Unfortunately, her chops rarely get run to their full. More on that later.

Andreasen's centerpiece, but by no means the only part of the book, is what, if any, actual link there is between creativity, especially the high state of creativity she labels "extraordinary creativity," and mental issues such as schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, alcoholism and drug abuse.

Reviewing a variety of statistics and studies, as well as her own and other researchers' work in fMRI and other brain research tools, she is able to point out correlations, especially with depressive/affective disorders and chemical dependency. She, with her background, primarily studies writers, but also looks at other artistic types.

Not such much here, but elsewhere in the book, she also expands her gaze to the most creative types in the natural sciences, i.e., the Newtons and Einsteins of the world.

Andreasen also does a decent job of tackling nature vs. nurture, on a surface level

That said, while this is a very good book, it falls just short of five-star status for a couple of related reasons.

Basically, what they all boil down to is a psychiatrist who also has a Ph.D. in Renaissance lit has given us thin gruel versus what we really could have had.

The first is the length -- less than 200 pages, not counting footnotes.

The second is a relatively small number of studies cited. More research information, and meta-analysis, could be provided without overwhelming lay readers. And, while new ground is being broken all the time, such meta-analysis might point to where we could -- or should -- be heading. Beyond the studies on creative genius' links to mental illness, more from the rapidly growing field of genomic studies and the years of twin studies, again with some meta-analysis, are missing.

I think about 250-300 pages would have been nice, if not more.

Creating Brain reads like a chat accross the kitchen table with an occasional very brief trip to the lecture podium.

For a natural scientist, Andreasen presents lots of conclusions, such as recommendations on TV exposure to children, with little data or reason other than her personal opinion for support. While her thoughts aren't unreasonable, they are also not supported by data. This weakness taints the other statements (both biographical and scientific)which one hopes are better supported by the research cited. The distance of the lecture podium requires better connection between evidence and conclusion. I had hoped for more depth on current research and imaging.

Still, the accross-the-kitchen-table tone does match the interesting stories, personal anecdotes, and opinions. Also, the complexity of nature and nurture (clearly nature vs nurture is no longer a fruitful concept)comes through well.

AFTER THE TEXT a tempting bibliography including material said to be freely available from Andreasen's institution may lead to works of more rigor that do not sacrifice good explanation of methods.

I bought this book due to an over-active click finger (ever experienced that?). I regret the finger-enthusiasm (though the price was not high). I did not get my small amount of money's worth.

Basically you have someone who pulls too many punches, skimpy partial unbalanced survey of prior creativity studies, skimpy partial unbalanced survey of fMRI and MRI and prior imaging studies of brains while people do creativity-related things, skimpy partial unbalanced survey of the mental-illness-creativity link literature (not citing five of the top ten sources in this literature!), skimpy partial unbalanced survey of the non-literature non-music non-art types of creativity (invention, scientific discovery, engineering design, fashion design, anything design, etc.)--in sum, this book is an excellent introduction to 1/1000th of its topic. 999 more books and you would have a good idea of what creativity is and does.

I am puzzled by all the big name endorsements of this book--is there some sort of investment or personal relationship or mystical community thing that explains why they would endorse so clearly a partial work--are they old and getting dotty--are they simply constantly, week in and week out, endorsing everything that comes across their desk? It makes me get careful about buying--if Gardner and his sort endorse something in the future, I will be skeptical about buying it after my experience with this tome. Also suspicious is the lack of computer access to the table of contents--a glance at that before ordering and I would have never ordered, it is trite, out of date, and clearly a hackneyed repetition and re-covering of past territory, territory that was new and exciting in idea terms, say, 30 years ago. Anyone who thinks this book will introduce them to creativity and recent creativity research in its full splendor is in for a rude shock or a very bad future education. It is not that this book does not cover the entire current literature on creativity--it is this book reeks of never having read EVEN the TITLES of those articles, books, conferences, and algorithms. I can forgive not having read the sources but I cannot forgive never having read their titles and thereby knowing how very partial one's own efforts really are.

One star is too much.

Schizophrenia can riddle the mind with colliding thoughts, compounding what is already a puzzling environment; that is, the existence of neuron cluster-based thought sources that give rise to a sense of existence of a self. It is little wonder that multiple clusters contemplating myriad phenomena needing management in order to maintain cerebral stasis would inadvertently create crosscurrents of messages that would be detectable to the more sensitive mind. This sensitive mind, that can only indefensibly accept its existence as it is, would of course experience the cacophony that produce symptoms expressed as Schizophrenia.

Those beings that have a controlled mind input, e.g., Andreasen, and reason with which to focus the restrained trains of connected, or single-source, thoughts, can cope with the nearly infinite multi-dimensional combinations of considerations generated by genes, proteins, neurotransmitters, and the indefatigable tides of sodium and potassium that are creating the waves that pump the pulses that refreshes memory and the sense of our higher level continuous consciousness. These are the fortunates, for they enjoy minds that can impose structure on the chaos of particles or strings of energy that build a foundation for space, time, and the unique but intermittent and regularly rearranging arrangement of neurons which, through the most fragile of filaments of flesh, lay down a thin layer of seemingly consistent experiences that constitute a conventional decades-long human life.

Those of us with alternative and concurrent sources of thoughts envy the minds whose thinking looks like a string of railroad cars following a never swerving track across an isolated Siberia, kept free of distraction by an interminable white noise as the snow stretching for days and miles in all directions away from their steadily progressing train of concentration.

Our minds, though, are busy railroad switching stations of thoughts spaghettied throughout a bustling metropolis of constant and conflicting demands, each important if not critical. The effect is to labor under a dull overcast sky hovering above a ground grey with indecision and free of mile markers, compasses, and clocks. Our minds observe with wonder the winners of advanced degrees and avalanches of dollars, those who seem internally guided by arrows all aimed in the same direction. Ours are arrows of shifting alliances among the neuronal clusters, buffeted by the external winds of peers, fashions, and recognition of the eternal nothingness that preceded our sense of self and that will rush in after us, as the universe that nursed our infinitesimal existence dissipates into a perpetual cloud of motionless iron dust.

Doctor, or is it doctors Andreasen is gazing into the worlds within our heads from which all awareness flows. This citadel is well protected and may only let her, in her lifetime, see shadows and traces, intuit inklings and hints upon which she can speculate and share. Should our species be fortunate, others, standing on her giant shoulders, may ultimately glimpse that which is us.

Read all that Andreasen writes. Damasio too. Keep abreast. And, during any moments of stillness that your mind may find, look within yourself, delve down into your own structure of self. See if you can discover your own network of yesterdays, previous minutes, familiar faces, and the source of the pulses that refresh your underlying sense of being. Find your network. Study the nodes and links. Examine the possibility of improving this net that holds you and your universe together.

Copyright 2005 Selling Results Corporation

I completely agree with Richard Greene's review of this book. Thank you Richard for putting my identical views in such good words.

I bought the book because I am known as "a creative".
I was curious about the title, however I found no new information that I haven't already read or studied in the past. In fact I got angry at the author the more I read and I disagree with some of her statements. She made a book out of her past college studies and got it published. I wonder if I could get away with that?

It may be a good book for someone totally uneducated, who never has heard about about Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo or ever went to college, since the information is totally out of past text books. She totally missed or intentionally ignored the true creative wave that we have now in our society and the reason for it. Don't waste your money, I did.