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Careful! Your Brain Might be Playing Tricks on You

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his has been my second year teaching an elective class to high school students, the subject of the class is “Creativity and Concept Creation”. My role in the classroom is more of a coach, a facilitator.

Through a series of activities, games, and exercises I try to encourage students to find ways to solve simple problems using unconventional methods of thinking that can be used in their daily lives, not only as young students, but also later as professionals.

All these activities are complemented with a fair amount of theory about how and why the brain works the way it does.

Although most find the theory part boring and tedious, I insist on it because of a principle in which I strongly believe; “to be able to bend the rules you must first understand the rules”.

To unleash our creativity to the fullest, it is very important to be familiar with the mechanisms the brain uses to function, but is even more crucial to understand the factors that are inhibiting our capacities and working against us, stopping us from fulfilling our potential. 

These factors can range from the social, cultural or religious, to the psychological or biological, the latter being probably the most disabling of all.

As surprising as it might sound, it has been discovered that our biggest creativity inhibitor is the very same organ responsible for our thinking and problem-solving skills. Our brain is a most advanced supercomputer with a very specific purpose. 

Processes in our brain relating to speech and reasoning are the principal creativity inhibitors. Research at the Centre of the Mind at the University of Sydney, led by Professor Allan Snyder, revealed that the amazing artistic and mathematical capabilities are shown by savant children are the product of dysfunction in areas of the brain responsible for our social skills.

His interest was sparked when he noticed the case of a 3-and-a-half year old girl, who he describes a severely autistic, with a speech impediment, who was able to draw with an impressive amount of detail and with very confident strokes, comparable to sketches made by Leonardo D’Vinci. Soon after the girl overcame her speech impediment and started to make improvements, her artistic abilities completely vanished.

Snyder explains that the human brain is constantly processing and storing information; in fact, nothing is lost. The problem comes when we need to access this information; our brain is designed to filter and simplify it all, in order to optimise resources and make the thinking process more efficient.

Thinking and creating are processes that consume an enormous amount of energy form our body, so in order to save energy, all this thinking and reasoning is turned into automatic responses that later become habits; in that way we don’t need to think every time we get dressed, eat, walk or return home after work.

The brains in savant children have impairments which inhibit these processes, allowing them the ability to access the details of the entire information stored in their memory. This is how we explain the cases such as Stephen Wiltshire, a British autistic man famous for being able to reproduce extremely complex architectural landscapes with incredibly precision after only staring at it once.

There have also been a series of controversial experiments undertaken at the Centre of the Mind, designed by Snyder, in which the participant is asked to make a drawing from memory and participate in numerical exercises, after which they are administered a 15-minute session of magnetic pulses that inhibit the left side of the brain, while the right side of the brain is stimulated. After the session, the participant is asked to repeat the exercises. The results are that, after the session, on average, subjects are not only capable of performing with much more confidence, but also with a considerable increment in detail and assertiveness.

In the words of Snyder, “Creativity is a process of defiance and rebellion against ourselves”.

It is believed that in the future, we will find a way, either chemical or mechanical, to inhibit those natural brain processes that impair our innate creativity, allowing us to access our true potential. Like a sort of thinking helmet.

In the meantime, we can take conscious steps to disrupt those natural inhibitors and create new thinking processes that can help us achieve our creative potential.

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