Your Brain and Creativity

Happiness Feeds Innovation

31st of January ~

Can we say that The Myth of the Tortured Genius has outlived its day? Wikipedia has an article about Tortured Artists and their stories are well known. “It’s completely a myth,” says Tom Wilbeck, Associate Dean of Student Affairs at The Art Institute of Houston. “Clinically speaking, there’s really no evidence that most accomplished artists are mentally unstable or have come from an unstable background.”

I suppose the Myth of the Happy Genius just isn’t as fascinating.

                                  Photo by mrfitz

Teresa Amabile and her colleagues have good news for all you reasonably content, untortured creative people. Happiness does more for innovation than does melancholy and ennui.

In a 2005 Administrative Quarterly article they describe research performed by tracking electronic diary entries of employees for 5 months. Here’s how they defined Creativity: the production of novel, useful ideas or problem solutions. Amabile describes that “positive feelings–joy, love-are positively related to creativity, and negative emotions-anger, fear, sadness–are negatively related to day-to-day creativity”. Even better, good moods can increase the flow of creativity for up to three days.

Is anyone surprised?

These and more findings are in Amabile’s latest book The Progress Principle which I’ve admired earlier.

That Wonderful Smug Feeling

30th of January ~

This morning I took a 4-mile hike (otherwise known as a walk in the woods). The setting was Mt. Tabor Park–a volcanic cinder cone right in the city of Portland. Oh yeah–we did some hills. Best of all, in the depths of winter, we had sunshine for great moments of time.

Like many of you I am working to increase my activity for all kinds of reasons. While I was clearing my office clutter with feng shui I came across an excellent list published by Oprah a few years ago:

12 Get-You-Off-the-Couch Reasons to Exercise
1. Physical activity helps you lose weight by burning calories, boosting resting metabolism, and buffering you from bone and muscle loss that can result if you diet alone.
2. High levels of physical activity can decrease your risk of colon cancer by 40 to 50 percent.
3. Exercise helps you get better sleep. In one study, people who walked more than six blocks a day had one-third fewer insomnia problems than their less active cohorts.
4. Walking 30 minutes five days a week can increase your life span by one and half years. Make that running, and it may add up to four years. That’s the conclusion of a 2005 study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, which showed that it’s never too late to increase longevity.
5. Half-hour aerobic sessions three to five times a week have been shown to cut symptoms of mild to moderate depression nearly in half. One study suggests that exercise can be as effective as drugs in treating major depressive disorder.
6. Brisk walking for just an hour or two a week can reduce the risk of breast cancer in postmenopausal women by nearly 20 percent. And for those who already have the disease, walking three to five hours a week may reduce the chance of dying from it by as much as 50 percent.
7. Aerobic exercise, such as a half hour of rapid walking five days a week, has been shown to cut the risk of catching a cold nearly in half in postmenopausal women.
8. People who work out have more energy than nonexercisers, according to researchers at the University of Georgia, based on a review of 70 studies. That boost, on average beats the effect of stimulant drugs.
9. Working out – resistance training in particular – helps maintain, and even modestly increase, bone density to reduce the risk of osteoporosis.
10. An active lifestyle halves the risk of developing heart disease. Walking up to 12 miles a week (translation: 30 to 50 minutes a day) significantly improves heart health, according to a Duke University study. And if you’re at high risk for diabetes, working out only about 20 minutes a day, combined with a low-fat diet, can reduce the chance of developing the disease by 58 percent.
11. Just working out 15 minutes three days a week may reduce the risk of developing dementia and Alzheimer’s disease by 30 to 40 percent, according to a study last year in the Annals of Internal Medicine. For healthy older adults, a six-month program of exercise can reverse the age-related loss of brain tissue that begins around age 40 by two to three years, especially in regions responsible for memory and higher cognition.
12. Working out improves your sex life – by not only enhancing self-esteem but also strengthening the cardiovascular system. One study found that women who cycled vigorously for 20 minutes before watching an erotic film had significantly greater vaginal response compared with when they were inactive.

To this excellent list I will add two more reasons:

13) Your brain works better when it’s oxygenated. Christin Anderson, MS, wellness and fitness coordinator of the University of San Francisco, explains that exercise affects many sites within the nervous system, “This is pure science — stimulate your nervous system and function at a higher level.”

14) You get to be smug because YOU exercised.

The Beauty of the Grown-Up Brain

11th of June ~

Barbara Strauch belongs to a book club. She remembered that she needed to order the next book and, so, got online and ordered The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. A week later she had a free minute and remembered that she need to order the next book club book, so she got online and ordered The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. Not much later she ran into her friend, a neurologist, who is also in the book club (smart book club!) and he mentioned that he’d picked up that month’s selection, The Alienist by Caleb Carr.

As it happens their book club was actually reading The Archivist by Martha Cooley.

Barbara is not an idiot. She is a journalist and tells this story in an introductory chapter of The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain. I have had that same feeling. “Am I losing my mind?! And why did I come into the kitchen just now?”

Indeed, there are certain cognitive functions that wane as we age (such as processing speed and the ones that help us remember names) but the good news is that our brains are at their peak in middle age. Let me write that again because it makes me happy: OUR BRAINS ARE AT THEIR PEAK IN MIDDLE AGE.
And it “may stay there longer than any of us dared hope” according to researchers.

(Brain by Barbara Wyeth)

During middle age (generally defined as ages 40-68) [...wait. 40??] our brains begin to reorganize. They start to act and think differently. Among the strengths of the midlife brain Strauch notes:
* it cuts through the muddle to find solutions; the brain knows what to ignore, when to zig, when to zag.
* our brain stays cool and adjusts
* changes are taking place that allow us to see a fuller picture of the world–even be wildly creative
* our ability to make accurate judgements grows stronger
* our brains build up patterns of connections; these are interwoven with existing layers of knowledge that allow recognition of similar patterns.

After all, it was a middle-aged man and crew who safely landed the plane in the Hudson River and senior boat captains who quickly sped to the rescue.

So, do not despair. Yes, your brain is changing–mostly for the better.

Are You as Smart as You Used to Be?

6th of October ~

Try these questions:

January February March April January February March May January February March June January February March ________

What’s next?

January February Wednesday March April Wednesday May June Wednesday July August Wednesday _______

What’s next?

1 4 3 2 5 4 3 6 5 _____

What’s the next number?

How did you do?

These are the kind of logic and reasoning questions that researchers use to test our cognitive processes. Barbara Strauch, author of The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain, includes them in a chapter that illustrats that our brains are getting a little slower as we age but they are also better.

WHA?

I know–you may not believe it. But there’s research behind it.

The Seattle Longitudinal Study, run by the very serious-looking Doctors Schaie and Willis, has been publishing some remarkable findings. Since 1956 they have tracked residents of Seattle to track how the brains are holding up. The fascinating and heartening news is that the middle-aged participants (aged 40-64) actually tested BETTER than they did when they were younger in four areas:

Vocabulary (women do slightly better here)
Verbal memory (women do slightly better here)
Spatial orientation (the men do slightly better here)
Inductive reasoning

Snap! Our brains are are awesome.

Maybe Maggie….but why do I go into the kitchen and forget why I went there?

Of course, there are some declines with age. Processing speed declines (a little more slowly in men). The two cognitive areas that declined for the Seattle Study participants are number ability (how fast can you do math) and perceptual speed (hitting a button when a light comes on–reaction time).

Still, as Strauch goes on to explore, the study holds fascinating implications for, say, aging in the workplace. As the explosion of brain research continues we’re dispelling myth after myth about the aging brain. Which means fewer limits to meaningful contributions as we age.

Your Brain and Creativity — Third Thought Third Thought