11 ms·
New study shows highly creative people’s brains work differently from others'
- winReInstall 4y agoTo connect the unconnected, a feature also seen in which brain-disease, often associated with the erroneous associations (paranoia, over-association of noise as voices and faces). Show me your wunderkind and i show you the shizophrenia in the family. I wonder if you could even retrain active run-away shizophrenic people to produce meaningfull creative outcomes. So lets go to the tenderloin and connect random physics and science wikipedia articles to a megaphone. Schools out, but the learning is just getting started.
- bpodgursky 4y agoI agree with the first paragraph, but think the second paragraph conflates genetically linked mental illness with drug-induced paranoia, delusions, and general brain rot (which is rarely particularly creative).
- xattt 4y ago> So lets go to the tenderloin and connect random physics and science wikipedia articles to a megaphone. Is this word salad deliberate?
- myth_drannon 4y agoNope, just someone who is familiar with San-Francisco.
- Jgrubb 4y agoThe tenderloin is a neighborhood in San Francisco, one of the most interesting in terms of the street citizenry.
- xattt 4y agoOh jeez, I thought it was a take on the OP’s mention of neurodiversity within the post.
- Apocryphon 4y agoIf you're familiar with Vancouver: replace with East Hastings
- zeruch 4y agoIf one lives in the Bay Area this is an all linear meat grammar meal.
- tomc1985 4y agoAre you calling all creatives schizophrenic? Because, uh, citation needed, and that goes against my experiences of hanging out with nothing but creatives 90% of the time. Us all being schizophrenic would be pretty revelatory if it was true. Artists may be weird, but...
- tiborsaas 4y agoIt was just implied that being a prodigy and being schizophrenic might not be far off each other.
- anonporridge 4y agoPerhaps prodigy's are just the schizophrenics who are lucky enough to create value in their extreme heterodox thinking.
- tsol 4y agoIn some really basic way sure, but schizophrenia also causes definite excesses and deficiencies. They tend to be messy and bad at self care, they can see and hear things that aren't there, are subject to delusions, and can lack a normal affect
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- szundi 4y agoA schizophrenic cannot really stop/even know the association jump is weird, but a prodigy will know. Difference is the people who see prodigies as schizos are narrowminded. There is a big difference between not understood and being random.
- cgio 4y agoI don’t believe schizophrenic thinking is random either. Unproductive maybe, but schizophrenic creative minds are not uncommon either, so cannot really define one against the other. In the process of being offended sometimes we indicate our biases.
- krono 4y ago> So lets go to the tenderloin and connect random physics and science wikipedia articles to a megaphone That is scary good of a description of what goes on in ADHD brains all the time.
- plutonorm 4y agoMy mother was schizophrenic and very smart, I'm very smart and very creative, sometimes a little crazy, but not psychotic... yet, lol. So this checks out. Your second paragraph is a little word salady. My mind is always set to 100mph, until it's so tired that I fall into a mild depression. Then recover. Kinda bipolary. I think schizophrenia is what happens to creative brains with high connectivity and too much activation. The continuous activation causes excessive oxidative stress which eventual causes organic damage.
- blueflow 4y agoWhats the previous set of beliefs^H^H^H^H^H^H^H views that this is news?
- hans1729 4y agoThe "news" are the findings of the paper. Not sure why beliefs should matter for the value of scientific work
- ziddoap 4y agoCome on... An even slightly charitable reading of parents' comment would realize that they don't mean "belief" in the religious sense. It's pretty safe to assume they are asking what the previously understood and accepted academic stance on the matter was, and are asking how the findings of this paper differ in a way to make it newsworthy.
- blueflow 4y agoIf he can't figure that out, i'd regret having asked that question because i dont feel like the other replies will be of better quality. Ignore the thread please, y'all.
- hans1729 4y agoI simply wasn't sure what to make of your comment. I probably shouldn't have assumed the worst in the face of ambiguity. The sentiment that science needs to be newsworthy wrt actual beliefs is omnipresent online, indicating (to me) a wrong canvas for your post.
- blueflow 4y agoBut Science is still belief. Because belief is orthogonal to whether its researched, well informed, guessed or made up.
- hans1729 4y ago
- kcplate 4y ago
- Terry_Roll 4y agoMore Phosphatidylcholine, more connections. Tobacco is best for schizophrenia.
- UnpossibleJim 4y agoThis doesn't say which comes first, though. Does the training of "creative" disciplines make the brain work differently from the "non-creative" disciplines, or is it a birth trait? The brain is an elastic organ.
- exmadscientist 4y agoSpeaking as someone with family experience with a very closely related thing... oh man, it's totally 100% visible from birth or nearly so. Some brains are just different. And, unfortunately, the schizophrenia thing discussed above is real too. Not that it's necessarily genuine schizophrenia or even some watered-down version, just that these things live in the same metaphorical neighborhood and you cannot pretend otherwise.
- UnpossibleJim 4y agoI only bring it up because I graduated from art school and now I code all day for my job (I'm older with a family to support) and the difference in my thinking styles is noticeable. Not only to me, but to my friends by the way I speak and in my personality. This leads me to the "chicken and the egg" question. So often people look at coding as an acquisitionable ability, where as they view creative ability as something you have to be born with, discounting the years if effort that goes into those abilities. Be they cooking, painting, writing, what have you. Even their test subjects had graduate degrees in creative disciplines. Generally that doesn't bide well for schizoeffective disorders... the comparison to graduate degrees in the arts with graduate degrees in mathematics with schizoeffective disorders is probably near equal, as many papers have linked schizophrenia to a pre-viral load: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/schizophrenia-linked-with-abnormal-immune-response-to-epstein-barr-virus#:~:text=New%20research%20from%20Johns%20Hopkins,mononucleosis%2C%20so%2Dcalled%20mono https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/....
- exmadscientist 4y ago> the difference in my thinking styles is noticeable. Not only to me, but to my friends by the way I speak and in my personality I agree that's a real effect. (I think a big part of it is the people around you, too.) I'm pointing out that there are some people in this world whose thinking is not like the rest, and there's no amount of environmental difference that can explain or erase it. > This leads me to the "chicken and the egg" question. So often people look at coding as an acquisitionable ability, where as they view creative ability as something you have to be born with, discounting the years if effort that goes into those abilities. Be they cooking, painting, writing, what have you. I also completely agree with this. I think that even if not everyone can be the "Michael Jordan of creativity" (okay, there's a better example... just, my own creativity, you know...), it still does every one of us massive good to exercise our brains.
- an9n 4y ago> The artists and scientists in the study were nominated by panels of experts before being validated as exceptional based on objective metrics Hmmmmm
- robonerd 4y agoI believe that everybody has the capacity to be creative, and those who think they don't are impeded not by a lack of creative spark, but rather by their own inhibitions and belief that they aren't creative. Part of this is cultural; engineers are told by society that an engineer/artist schism exists and incorporate that meme into their self-image, writing off their own ability to be creative. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy because creativity is like a muscle that needs to be exercised.
- mountainriver 4y agoYeah I agree with this, most of the people I know that aren’t creative seem to have some emotional block or belief that it’s not their role. Often if you get past that they are incredibly creative
- mattwad 4y agoFor sure. I have a bachelor's in Fine Arts but taught myself to code. I think the pendulum has swung too far, I need to get back to painting/drawing and exercise that muscle again :)
- GuB-42 4y agoMake demos ;) I am talking about the demoscene here.
- bergenty 4y agoI’m right there with you. I thought I wasn’t creative. The magic insight was that you just start doing the thing and creativity comes as part of the process. Don’t know how to start? Just start and the process automatically becomes breaking down the task into thousands of tiny parts that you then just do.
- pm90 4y agoA CS centric way of looking at this is that spending (brain) cycles exploring the problem is a necessary but not sufficient condition to solve it. Most people don’t believe they can and don’t even try. But the brain is very fascinating and imo anyone is capable of problem solving. One practical reason I am really sold on diversity in Tech is that I believe peoples experiences shape the way they think about problems. Having different kinds of minds looking at the same problem can result in different solutions. And that’s amazing. We can’t predict how it will work in advance, all we can do is create the right conditions which precipitate this result.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoI am one of these highly creative types, and I would say I do not understand my biology. After my PhD@MIT I joined the materials industry and filed over 120 patents in nine years. I definitely did not expect this to happen, and I have no idea where the ideas come from. I’ll just be doing my routine lab work and get showered with ideas occasionally. Edit: Someone below mentioned schizophrenia and its association, and it’s true in our family history that there is a lot of schizophrenia. An ability of mine that seems interesting is an ease of very clear mental visualizations and object manipulations. Main problem now is trying to filter out what to do now and what to wait for in terms of viability. Have had ideas that are definitely 10 years too soon… Anyway, life is interesting for sure!
- tgflynn 4y agoI used to have lots of ideas. The trouble is none of them actually worked.
- analog31 4y agoThis raises a good point. I've adopted a rule, that something is not an "idea" unless it's shown to work. This avoids the scenario where someone like a manager takes credit for blurting out a suggestion at a meeting, and then taking credit after someone else has actually made it work. It's especially tricky when a team is working on something, and someone has to figure out who's name goes on the patent submittal.
- markdown 4y agoDo you actually make things, or is this just rent-seeking idea squatting?
- mensetmanusman 4y agoMake things, materials science…
- markdown 4y ago
- ezekiel11 4y agoOne of the key indicator of creativity is how they modify their behavior after mass novelty is achieved. It's distinctively a schizoid behavior, where you shun something that becomes widely known or appreciated by "too many ppl". It's knowing esoteric facts/connections that allow neural pathways to discover unbeaten path, however its often not without risks. Many artists/actors/engineers/any line of work really remain undiscovered and then there is a sudden wide recognition of their work, much to their disliking. You know what they say about genius artists, they straight up jack somebody else's work and claim it as their own.
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- dereg 4y agoThis is fascinating. I relate to everything you just talked about. Both in the way that I've treated artists, by liking/appreciating them way before they were popular and dropping them once they've achieved fame, and the way that I've treated my own interests. There was a time when I achieved sudden and moderate popularity in a field, which I then blew up by deeply retreating from the spotlight. The life in the public eye can put you in a creative prison, as people expect you stick to a "brand". After that experience, I deeply understood why Dave Chappelle left the spotlight in his prime, giving up $50m to live in Africa. Is there anything that I could read to learn more about this?
- ezekiel11 4y ago
- cutler 4y agoThis is why I disagree fundamentally with TDD - it kills the creative spark. Whatever happened to hiring dedicated testers in order to give the creatives freedom to do what they do best? Forcing a creative dev to constrain him/herself right out of the gate is an exercise in futility made even worse when you add the requirement to be a Docker+Kubernetes+AWS gun-slinger. Whatever happened to specialisation?
- dboreham 4y agoThere are many other problems with TDD (caveat: it's a good idea for _some_ projects) besides "it's no fun". Watch the Jonathan Blow video on the subject for the details.
- astrange 4y agoThe classic example is sudoku, where all the TDD advocates failed to get there because they spent their time testing incorrect ideas instead of actually thinking their way to a solution. You can't build a moon rocket a step at a time, as they say. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3033446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3033446 But I do think if you're going to write sudoku you should start with an end to end test, i.e., a solved sudoku problem.
- curiousDog 4y agoVery true. Though less “prestigious”, the most fun I ever had was actually working as an SDET in the beginning of my career at Microsoft in Azure. I would spend hours dreaming up corner cases on how to break dev code in a distributed systems setting and came up with (for that time) quite a few unique frameworks that helped catch bugs that would’ve otherwise slipped through the usual unit, functional and smoke test archetypes. Unfortunately, I believe this job function has been removed entirely within MS
- jiggawatts 4y ago> Unfortunately, I believe this job function has been removed entirely within MS Azure customers like me all suspected this, it's funny to see it confirmed. The lack of testing is glaringly obvious. I can "break" Azure by deploying trivial, toy architectures. I can't imagine what customers go through if they actually try to scale up to something bigger or more complex.
- cutler 4y agoThis is why I disagree fundamentally with TDD - it kills the creative spark. Whatever happened to hiring dedicated testers in order to give the creatives freedom to do what they do best?
- dqpb 4y agoI don’t see why TDD would kill the creative spark, but I do think “Agile” development does.
- galaxyLogic 4y agoI find it interesting how brain works when we try to solve a problem. It is like we have to tell the brain "Here is the problem ... now come up with a solution". And then it does somehow come up with proposed solutions. But we are unaware of how it does that. It is the sub-conscious. How do we come up with thoughts? They just seem to appear out of nowhere. We don't decide what we will think next. Something guides what thoughts come to mind next, but we have no idea of the internal reasoning that must be going on under the surface.
- drigby 4y agoDaniel Dennett has an interesting theory. Consciousness is a “pandemonium architecture” where clusters of neural connections (daemons) “shout” when activated. The more activations, the louder it shouts, and the higher it climbs in the unconscious, until it gains enough energy to irrupt through the threshold of consciousness.
- galaxyLogic 4y agoSomething like that surely. And what about dreams? When I'm about to fall asleep it is as if some kind of story starts to be told by my brain, it invents it. I just hear it and am in a different world. If I don't fall asleep because of some interruption I can remember how the dream-world was starting to take over.
- russelg 4y agoGreen is not a creative colour.
- astrange 4y agoBut it is the color with the most contribution to luminance.
- westurner 4y agoCreativity #Neuroscience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity#Neuroscience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity#Neuroscience awesome-ideation-tools in re: neuroimaging https://github.com/zazaalaza/awesome-ideation-tools https://github.com/zazaalaza/awesome-ideation-tools /? creativity forgetting rate and instability in the brain: https://www.google.com/search?q=creativity+forgetting+rate+and+instability+in+the+brain https://www.google.com/search?q=creativity+forgetting+rate+a... Catastrophic interference is proposed as one cause of maybe pathological forgetting in the brain. This forgetting in the brain may be strongly linked with creativity. Are there links to hippocampal neurogenesis? Catastrophic interference > Proposed solutions > Orthogonality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophic_interference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophic_interference : > Input vectors are said to be orthogonal to each other if the pairwise product of their elements across the two vectors sum to zero. For example, the patterns [0,0,1,0] and [0,1,0,0] are said to be orthogonal because (0×0 + 0×1 + 1×0 + 0×0) = 0. One of the techniques which can create orthogonal representations at the hidden layers involves bipolar feature coding (i.e., coding using -1 and 1 rather than 0 and 1). [10] Orthogonal patterns tend to produce less interference with each other. However, not all learning problems can be represented using these types of vectors and some studies report that the degree of interference is still problematic with orthogonal vectors. [2]
- tambourine_man 4y agoIt’s very hard for me to take results like these seriously. We don’t even have the fundamental concepts set. How does one define creativity? How do you measure it?
- isitmadeofglass 4y ago> How does one define creativity? How do you measure it? Different studies might define it slight differently and test it via different tests. But to suggest that we as humans don’t have a fundamental understanding of what creativity even is quite hyperbolic.
- tambourine_man 4y agoI disagree. Our lack of fundamental concept definition in this area is abysmal. Intelligence, consciousness, agency/free will… it’s all a huge epistemological void that we are trying to recreate artificially without even knowing what it is.
- Bud 4y ago"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference." -Robert Frost
- isitmadeofglass 4y agoYea, your missing the context. The entire point of the poem is that the two roads were identical and that the choice didn’t matter at all.
- motohagiography 4y agoThis just means they've found yet a new way to find and sabotage us.