Creativity
A fascinating Stanford study was just published in May 28, 2015 in Scientific Reports. It’s human research and the investigators say they have found new brain centers for creativity. And with it comes new understandings of what blocks creativity.
These researchers say that we now know that much of creativity comes from a brain center called the cerebellum. Historically, the cerebellum has most often been viewed as the brain’s practice-makes-perfect, higher learning and organization center. Not a creative center.
The cerebellum is where we activate executive-control (plan, organize and manage daily activities). If your cerebellum is working great, you have all your ducks in a row (or at least thinketh so.)
But using your mojo to keep all your details straight, say these researchers, tamps down your creative juices.
Creative and OCD?
So it isn’t a lark that creative folks often don’t have super clean living rooms or miss appointments or can’t balance their checkbooks. It may be one reason that OCD higher, functioning professionals may struggle with creativity, and vice versa. Or why editors and authors are two separate breeds.
This research started out with running human experiments trying to measure creativity. They found that the more they had participants think about things, the more they messed up the flow of creativity, because thinking takes up space in the cerebellum, and less brain energy is left to soar with the imagination.
This is the first functional evidence pointing to the cerebellum having a lot to do with creativity, but if it’s all clogged up with demands and details, creative bravado suffers.
Trying to be creative, planning and organizing to be creative, didn’t work either.
It will take organic means to birth creativity, and the freedom from details to let it burst forth.
This is a lot to ponder about.
And there you have it.