person reacts to chair. Interestingly, the scientists found that marijuana seems to induce a state of hyperpriming, meaning that it extends the reach of semantic priming to distantly related concepts. As a result, one hears dog and thinks of nouns that in more sober circumstances would seem completely disconnected. This state of hyperpriming helps explain why can-nabis has so often been used as a creative fuel: it seems to make the brain better at detecting the remote associations that define the insight process.)
Consider an experiment that investigated the problem-solving abilities of neurological patients with severe attention problems.
(Most of these patients had suffered damage to the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain just behind the forehead.) Because of their injuries, these poor people lived in a world of endless distractions; their focus was always fleeting. Here’s a sample problem given to the brain-damaged patients:
IV = III + III
The task is to move a single line so that the false arithmetic statement becomes true. (In this example, you would move the first I to the right side of the V so that it reads VI = III + III.) Nearly 90 percent of the brain-damaged patients were able to correctly solve the puzzle, since it required a fairly obvious problem-solving approach: the only thing you have to do is change the answer. (A group of subjects without any attention deficits found the answer 92 percent of the time.) But here’s a much more challenging equation to fix:
III = III + III
In this case, only 43 percent of normal subjects were able to solve the problem. Most stared at the Roman numerals for a few minutes and then surrendered. The patients who couldn’t pay attention, however, had an 82 percent success rate. This bizarre result — brain damage leads to dramatically improved performance — has to do with the unexpected nature of the solution: rotate the vertical line in the plus sign by ninety degrees, transforming it into an equal sign. (The equation is now a simple tautology: III = III = III.) The reason this puzzle is so difficult, at least for people without brain damage, has to do with the standard constraints of math problems. People are not used to thinking about the operator in an equation, so most of them quickly fix their attention on the Roman numerals. But that’s a dead end. The patients with severe cognitive deficits, by contrast, can’t restrict their search. They are forced by the brain injury to consider a much wider range of possible answers. And this is why they’re nearly twice as likely to have an insight.
Or look at a recent study led by Holly White, a psychologist at the University of Memphis. White began by giving a large sample of undergraduates a variety of difficult creative tests. Surprisingly, those students diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) got significantly higher scores. White then measured levels of creative achievement in the real world, asking the students if they’d ever won prizes at juried art shows or been honored at science fairs. In every single domain, from drama to engineering, the students with ADHD had achieved more. Their attention deficit turned out to be a creative blessing.
The unexpected benefits of not being able to focus reveal something important about creativity. Although we live in an age that worships attention — when we need to work, we force ourselves to concentrate — this approach can inhibit the imagination.
Sometimes it helps to consider irrelevant information, to eavesdrop on all the stray associations unfolding in the far reaches of the brain. Occasionally, focus can backfire and make us fixated on the wrong answers. It’s not until you let yourself relax and indulge in distractions that you discover the answer; the insight arrives only after you stop looking for it.
Kounios tells a story about a Zen Buddhist meditator that illustrates the importance of these alpha waves. At first, this man
Consider an experiment that investigated the problem-solving abilities of neurological patients with severe attention problems.
(Most of these patients had suffered damage to the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain just behind the forehead.) Because of their injuries, these poor people lived in a world of endless distractions; their focus was always fleeting. Here’s a sample problem given to the brain-damaged patients:
IV = III + III
The task is to move a single line so that the false arithmetic statement becomes true. (In this example, you would move the first I to the right side of the V so that it reads VI = III + III.) Nearly 90 percent of the brain-damaged patients were able to correctly solve the puzzle, since it required a fairly obvious problem-solving approach: the only thing you have to do is change the answer. (A group of subjects without any attention deficits found the answer 92 percent of the time.) But here’s a much more challenging equation to fix:
III = III + III
In this case, only 43 percent of normal subjects were able to solve the problem. Most stared at the Roman numerals for a few minutes and then surrendered. The patients who couldn’t pay attention, however, had an 82 percent success rate. This bizarre result — brain damage leads to dramatically improved performance — has to do with the unexpected nature of the solution: rotate the vertical line in the plus sign by ninety degrees, transforming it into an equal sign. (The equation is now a simple tautology: III = III = III.) The reason this puzzle is so difficult, at least for people without brain damage, has to do with the standard constraints of math problems. People are not used to thinking about the operator in an equation, so most of them quickly fix their attention on the Roman numerals. But that’s a dead end. The patients with severe cognitive deficits, by contrast, can’t restrict their search. They are forced by the brain injury to consider a much wider range of possible answers. And this is why they’re nearly twice as likely to have an insight.
Or look at a recent study led by Holly White, a psychologist at the University of Memphis. White began by giving a large sample of undergraduates a variety of difficult creative tests. Surprisingly, those students diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) got significantly higher scores. White then measured levels of creative achievement in the real world, asking the students if they’d ever won prizes at juried art shows or been honored at science fairs. In every single domain, from drama to engineering, the students with ADHD had achieved more. Their attention deficit turned out to be a creative blessing.
The unexpected benefits of not being able to focus reveal something important about creativity. Although we live in an age that worships attention — when we need to work, we force ourselves to concentrate — this approach can inhibit the imagination.
Sometimes it helps to consider irrelevant information, to eavesdrop on all the stray associations unfolding in the far reaches of the brain. Occasionally, focus can backfire and make us fixated on the wrong answers. It’s not until you let yourself relax and indulge in distractions that you discover the answer; the insight arrives only after you stop looking for it.
Kounios tells a story about a Zen Buddhist meditator that illustrates the importance of these alpha waves. At first, this man
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