Horizon (1964–…): Season 49, Episode 8 - The Creative Brain: How Insight Works - full transcript

We all know it...

..when it happens.

The moment when the light
seems to go on in your head.

The instant when you experience
a flash of inspiration.

Scientists are beginning
to understand

how these moments come about.

They've devised a series
of puzzles...

and brainteasers...

..to try and unravel how these
moments of creativity happen.

And now they're able
to see inside your brain

and witness the creative spark...



as it happens.

This is incredibly exciting.

Now we have the tools
and are starting to really uncover

what creativity is,
what goes on in the brain

when people
have moments of creativity.

And what they're discovering
has the power to make you...

and every one of us...

more creative.

In the early-morning
Californian sunshine...

..a team are preparing
an experiment.

It's been designed
by Jonathan Schooler...

That is awesome!

..to test how creative you are.

And I can see myself.



If you look at the
advancement of humanity,

it fundamentally
depends on creative innovation.

..anyone who has a notion of how
it could be done.

Yeah. Move three of the quarters...

He's fascinated by one
part of our creativity.

The moment when leaps of
imagination, great and small,

seem to arrive...

..as if from nowhere.

UNINTELLIGIBLE CHATTER

This young guy gets it!

Very good.

If you just look at all
the different major advancements,

there's some fundamentally
creative insight.

Just look how long it took for
people to invent the wheel, right?

It's not obvious. Someone
obviously had to come up with it.

For a mind game,
it takes some setting up.

A metal pyramid is hoisted
to balance perfectly on this.

A hundred dollar bill.

The question is, how can you remove
this hundred dollar bill

without causing the pyramid
to topple?

It's trickier than you might think.

You can't just pull it out.

You can't grab it from beneath.

How to get
that hundred dollar bill out.

You have nothing to cut with?

No, unfortunately not.

You can't cut it in half.

Maybe you've got it.

You need to think outside the box.

Think outside the pyramid
at this point.

But if, like most of us,
you need a clue...

..Jonathan's team will shortly
bring in something that might help.

LAUGHTER

In the past decade,
there's been a surge of interest

in trying to understand
how insight works.

The moments when... You've got three
almost completed triangles.

..without thinking methodically
and logically,

we come up with a flash of insight.
Ta-da!

Congratulations! Look at that.
There's three and four.

I think insight is a really, really
important aspect of creativity.

Typically, what an insight involves

is overcoming some particular
assumption.

And so the insight involves
suddenly realising,

"Oh! There's another way
of going about it."

Cool. Thanks for doing it.

And that is a critical element of
the creative process in that regard.

This is a goat. OK? It's got legs...

Jonathan and his team use
a seemingly simple set of puzzles

to try and measure this ability.

Moving just one of these sticks
makes a different goat shape.

But which one is it?

Ah! Maybe this.

You're very close.

Hm...

Did you get it?

Ah! A-ha!

Ta-da! There it is!

It's this one.

We do a lot of dull research
in psychology, I have to say.

But this is one area in psychology
where people really enjoy doing it.

They just get a thrill out of solving
these problems, trying to solve them.

And when they get that a-ha!
experience, they just love it.

Thank you very much.
I appreciate it.

The thing about these insight
moments is that they're fleeting,

elusive and really hard to study.

Move three of the quarters
and only three

to create the same triangle, but
facing in a different orientation.

Take this one.

You have to move three coins
to turn the pyramid upside down.

But if you were able to do it,

Jonathan thinks something
very distinct

was just happening in your brain.

Ah! You got it!

All these little puzzles are just
one way of trying to understand

why and how
insight works in our brains.

Back at the pyramid, the team
are setting up some word clues

which may help you figure out
how to remove the banknote.

They're using this experiment

to try and find out
if one hemisphere

is more heavily involved
in generating insight.

The left side of the brain,

traditionally associated
with logical thinking and language,

or the right side, often linked
to spatial awareness and intuition.

We took advantage of a fact,

which is that if you flash
information

to the right visual field,

it goes initially
to the left hemisphere,

and if you flash information
to the left visual field,

it goes initially
to the right hemisphere.

The word clues on the right side
of the screen

are primarily interpreted
by the left side of your brain.

The words on the left by the right
hemisphere of the brain.

Do you see anything that helps?

Perhaps not.

Well, how about now?

Can you burn it?
Yep. That is the correct answer.

So the answer is
you light the bill on fire

and it'll burn down and it's gone.

The insight is...

that you don't have to take it out
whole.

But what's so revealing
is that it really does matter

which side the clue, burn,
is played to.

What we found, remarkably,

is that the right hemisphere
was actually more sensitive

to the hints
than the left hemisphere.

So when we presented information
to the left visual field,

people were more likely
to solve the problem.

Jonathan's found that
the right side of the brain

is more likely than the left
to make that connection

that leads to a sudden flash
of insight.

Puzzles have become
a rather important way

of starting to understand
how insight happens.

But for scientists,
it's just the beginning

of a much more ambitious attempt

to understand all the different
mental processes

that together help to make us
creative.

How they work in our brains.

Because if we could understand them,

we might all become
a bit more creative.

The ability to think
in novel and useful ways

has been one of the defining
features of the human species.

I think creativity has been
essential to the success of humans.

It helped us to fly to the moon,

to cure illnesses, to develop

microprocessors -
I think you can see it everywhere.

Until recently, research into
creativity has focused on what could

be seen from the outside, observing
human behaviour and psychology.

Now, the tools of
neuroscience allow us

to look inside the brain, to try and
capture inspiration as it strikes.

Mark Beeman is one of the pioneers
of this new science.

He's setting out to try and discover
the neural correlate of creativity.

That's the bit of your brain
that corresponds to these creative

moments of insight.

The difficulty of solving insight
in the lab is we can't just take

the next Archimedes or
the next Einstein and stick

her in a brain scanner and wait for
her to have a great "aha" moment.

Even if she was willing
we would need more than one "aha"

moment or eureka moment to study,

because a lot of things are going
on in the brain all the time.

So he's come up with a systematic
way to induce lots of insights.

Take a look at these three words.

What word goes with -
pine, crab, and sauce?

Can you figure out
what connects them?

How are you trying to solve
this problem?

Are you testing out one
word after another?

That's the analytical way.
But you might also suddenly "get it"

in a flash of insight.

Pine, crab, sauce.

Did you get it?

It's apple.

But more importantly,
did you get there by methodical,

logical thinking?

Or did lightning strike?

Hi, Laura. Thanks for coming in
today, I'm Dasha.

We'll be doing the EEG setup now.
If you can just move your hair back.

In his lab, just outside Chicago,
Mark's team are getting ready

to try and capture these
insight moments.

For two millennia,
since Archimedes shouted "eureka,"

people have believed
that there's some kind of different

processing that allows them
to sometimes have these novel ideas.

But because it feels different
doesn't necessarily mean that

there's different brain activity,
there's been arguments about that.

Mark's PhD student, Dasha, places
an electroencephalogram,

or EEG cap, on a volunteer.

This will measure her brain
activity as she solves the problems.

Fire. Correct. Insight.

We're examining Laura's
brainwaves as she's trying to

solve problems and then she tells us

whether she solves the problem
analytically or by insight.

Sun. Yes, that's correct.

So we're relying on her to be
able to tell us

how she's solving the problem.

Analysis.

He records data from every
one of these fleeting insight

moments using two very
different scientific tools.

FMRI is very good
at picking up where in the brain

something's happening,

and EEG is very good at telling us
when it happens.

Can. Correct. Analysis.

He's now analysed
hundreds of hours of brainwaves.

And what that shows is that we
really are thinking differently

when we have a creative moment.

Writer. Correct. Insight.

There are differences
when people tell us

they solved it by insight versus
when they tell us

they solved analytically -
they are doing different

things, behaving in
different ways, having different

ideas in their mind, different
parts of their brain active,

both at the moment that they solve
it and leading up to that moment.

In a sense,
he's found the creative spark.

Not just how it happens,
but where it happens.

The part of your brain where
these moments occur.

It happens here - the anterior
superior temporal gyrus.

We have one on either side.

During a flash of insight,
the left doesn't really react.

But the right side does.

Insight.

A striking increase in
high energy brainwaves,

called gamma waves, erupts
from this one spot.

The brain's two halves may
look like a mirror image.

Yet this aspect of creativity,

insight, does seem to happen
in the right hemisphere.

That's because there is a subtle,
but very real structural difference.

So it turns out neurons actually
do differ on the left

and right hemisphere, very subtly in
the ways that they're wired.

The dendrites, the pieces of
neurons that collect

information, actually branch
differently in,

at least some neurons, on the left
and right side, characteristically

having broader branching on the
right hemisphere, so that each

neuron is collecting information
from a broader source of input,

and this allows them
to find connections

that might not be evident otherwise.

Brain cells on the left
have short dendrites,

useful for pulling in
information from nearby.

But the cells on the right
branch out much further

and pull together distant,
unrelated ideas.

So it's here that novel connections
between concepts can get made -

in a flash of insight.

It's not just that these
moments of creative insight

feel subjectively different.

They are objectively
different in your brain.

The moment of insight
feels instantaneous.

John Kounios has discovered
it's anything but.

He's interested in understanding
the sequence of brainwaves that

precedes an insight.

He's looking at what's happening
before the gamma wave spike

that marks the moment when an
insight pops into your awareness.

So at the "aha" moment there's
a burst in the right temporal lobe,

just about above the right ear.

If you go about half a second
before that,

or more like a second before that
or more like a second before that,

there's a burst of alpha waves
in the back of the head

on the right side.

Now strangely enough, the back
of the brain accomplishes

visual processing.

And alpha is known to
reflect brain areas shutting down.

The effect of this preceding
burst of alpha waves seem to be

to shut down parts of your
visual cortex.

You have all of this visual
information flooding in.

Your brain momentarily shuts down
some of that visual information.

It is sort of like closing your eyes,

but in our experiments some are not
allowed to close their eyes,

so the brain does its own blinking,
and that allows this very

faint idea to bubble up to
the surface as an insight.

An insight begins
with an idea rumbling around

your unconscious mind.

And the effect of these alpha waves
is to cut off distractions,

helping you summon that
new idea into awareness.

Think of it this way,

when you ask somebody a difficult
question you often notice

they will look away or they might
even close their eyes or look down.

They'll look anywhere but at
a face, which is very distracting.

If your attention is directed
inwardly,

then you're more likely to solve
the problem with a flash of insight.

So if you want to have
more insights,

perhaps cutting off the distractions
of the outside world -

just for a short time - could
help increase your creativity.

2,000 years after Archimedes
shouted eureka in the bath,

we now know that insights
don't in fact come from nowhere.

They unfold through
a chain of events in your brain.

It begins with a problem,
one that logic can't solve.

Yet, in your unconscious mind,
an insight is stirring.

Suddenly. A blast of alpha waves.

Your brain blinks.

Seconds later,
a burst of gamma waves.

And this is what you experience
as the moment of insight.

But insight on its own
is just one of the mental

processes that make up creativity.

Scientists are also turning
their attention to a different

aspect of creative thinking.

A study that has its roots in the
turmoil of the Second World War.

At the height of the conflict,
tens of thousands of US planes

were in the skies.

With enemy fire,
breakdowns and accidents rife,

surviving as a pilot took
a special kind of skill.

One that caught
the attention of JP Guildford,

a psychologist working
with the air force.

He noticed that in an emergency,
some aircrew had the ability to

"think outside the box" -
to come up with novel,

creative insights that
saved their lives.

Guilford was among the first
to believe that

intelligence alone
had been overrated.

And that what he was studying
in the airmen was undervalued.

He called this talent
divergent thinking.

A form of creativity.

And he came up with a way to test
it, one that is still in use today.

Venice Beach, California.

It's a hangout of the curious,
the creative and the eccentric.

Today Professor Rex Jung is here to
test just how creative they are.

And here it is.

This is the tool of creativity
that we are going to use today.

It's a brick, a common brick.

It's known as the divergent
thinking test.

Sir, do you want to take a test
of creativity?

Of diverging from known ideas to
come up with something novel.

So you take a common object
like a brick,

and you ask people to think
of as many creative ways

they can think of to use this thing.

Sir, a creativity test?
You look like you're ready to go.

Come on. Name's Coleman. David.

Caveman. Caveman? Yeah.

So come on over here...

It's simple, but powerful,

one of the most commonly
used creativity tests.

..my bag of tricks.

I'm going to give you a minute
to tell me as many new

and useful creative uses for
this brick that you can think of

in the next minute. Go.

Hammer. Building doorstop.
A paperweight.

A brick wall. Protection.

Art! Er...

Each idea is given a score.

From one, for the mundane
or obvious...

A building block. A dam.

Making a castle.

..to five for the most imaginative.

Excellent.
Making a really heavy shoe.

To make a humungous hole.

The more highly inventive new ideas
you come up with,

the more of a divergent thinker
you are.

Thank you very much.
Great. Thanks for your time.

HE HOWLS LIKE AN ANIMAL

Measuring creativity for scientific
research now involves a series of

different tests, and Rex has devised
his own broad measure of creativity.

He's been able to see how it
compares to IQ,

the traditional
measure of intelligence.

One of the things that got me

interested in studying creativity
was it doesn't appear that

intelligence
and creativity are isomorphic,

are the same thing, it appears that
there's overlap between the two,

but that they're somewhat different
constructs from each other.

There's something very
different that is

going on in the brain of people
who are creative as opposed to

people who are acting intelligent.

So creativity and intelligence
seem to be different processes

on the outside.

Rex is one of the first scientists
to look inside,

and examine the structure
of the brain,

to see what makes
people highly creative.

For some time, scientists have
understood the basic neural

mechanisms of intelligence.

It's about the fast and efficient
firing of neurons

in the grey matter.

The mystery is what's happening

when you come up
with creative ideas?

And here's where Rex started to
find differences.

This beautiful image is of the
white matter of your brain.

So this is the most
sophisticated image we have,

this is an image of the
white matter fibre tracts.

Looks like a big spaghetti ball,

but it actually makes
a little bit of sense.

Each of us has 150,000 kilometres
of these connections.

It's an intricate wiring system that
connects regions of your brain.

So these are the
actual roadways going

in different regions of
the brain,

connecting up different
neural networks.

His studies showed that
there was indeed

a difference in the brain
structure of highly creative people.

It's about the white matter.

What we learned was
somewhat surprising, in that

unlike intelligence, where more is
invariably better,

more tissue, more white matter
connectivity, more biochemistry.

In creativity the picture was
the opposite of what

we predicted, where less is better

in terms of higher
creative capacity.

But why should less white matter
mean more creativity?

It seems that because certain
areas of the brain are less packed,

less organised,
that nerve traffic is slowed down.

So instead of having this very
efficient pathway

going from A to B, you have
lots of different directions,

lots of different pathways
that ideas can,

can flow, and in this idea space,
it's more likely for new ones

to collide with each other and be
brought into conscious awareness.

This cognitive slowdown, which makes
it more likely for ideas to

connect with each other,
seems to be an important

part of the mechanism that
underlies divergent thinking.

Rex believes he has started to see
the difference

between what's going on inside us

when we display our intelligence
and our creativity.

And it's all,
in a sense, about speed.

Intellectual functioning,

the research is showing that
the information is travelling

the shortest pathway, the quickest
pathway that it can get,

from point A to B.

This is very important that you
can have a fast and short pathway,

to get from point A to point B.

But creativity is different.

It's not about speed and efficiency.
Creativity is slow, and meandering.

These winding roads,

I think, are analogous to
the pathways in the brain that are

coming together less frequently, so
you don't know quite where they're

going to end up, but it could end up
some place very interesting.

But this is certainly a less
travelled road than the...

than the highway that we were on,

it's a slower, more meandering
pathway and I think that's

how it works in the brain.

It would be wrong to think that
brain structure alone

made you creative.

But Rex's work shows -
for the first time - that there is

a neurological basis to divergent
thinking, to creativity itself.

The city of Baltimore.

Here, another aspect of creativity
is emerging for science to study.

It's just always been a deep
obsession of mine. I dream about it,

I go to bed thinking about it,
I wake up thinking about it.

I always wonder how is it
that sound can produce beauty.

Thank you.

Charles Limb has the night off work.

He'll be spending tonight the same
way he spends all his spare time.

Listening to music.

I think that jazz is probably
one of the most creative art forms

in all existence,
in all forms of music.

From the perspective
of creation of new ideas,

it doesn't get much
better than jazz.

Charles is fascinated by the way
ideas flow so fast

when jazz musicians improvise.

This piece of music will never
be played the same way again.

From a basic melody,
they're creating something new,

making it up on the spot.

What they are doing
is a real talent.

But it is, in a sense,
something we all have.

That's exactly what
Charles is researching,

here at John's Hopkins
hospital in Baltimore.

One of the intriguing things about
creativity is that it exists in

everybody in both high
and low levels,

so maybe somebody's
not used to thinking

of themselves as an artist,
yet if they think about their daily

behaviour, most of it is unscripted,
most of it is improvised,

they don't actually plan every
second what they are going to do.

So to really understand
how we improvise,

Charles is studying the best
musicians he knows.

Charles. Mike, hi, how are you?
Good. Thanks for coming in.

And that's why Mike Pope has
come into the lab.

We're going to be doing a functional
MRI of your brain

while we're improvising,
and while we're...

Charles's plan is to use FMRI
to image what's

happening in his brain
as he improvises.

So here we are. So this is it?
So this is the scanner room,

where we're going to be
doing your brain scanning.

We've got his plastic piano.

You're going to be able to play this
in the scanner.

This is the thing you spent all
the time working on?

Two years to make it work. Why
don't we get you situated then?

All right. Sounds good.

Creativity is probably
the combination of ordinary

mental processes combined in ways
that we hadn't described before,

that somehow allow us to gain new
insights and to generate new ideas.

I think that's creativity
in a nutshell.

Can you see your hands?
Yeah, sure can.

Am I allowed to turn a little bit,
like that? Uh-huh. Yeah. Go ahead.

For Charles, it's a chance to
explore the secrets

of one of his jazz heroes.

I really hope that we can
gain some incredible insights

in how the brain innovates.

But on the other hand, as far
as my own personal joy in a

science experiment,
I don't think I can do anything more

enjoyable in science ever,
for the rest of my life.

It's really bizarre!

The computer plays
a recorded melody.

Then Mike starts to improvise.

Charles plays too, to make
Mike feel a bit more at home.

I hope I can keep up with him,
he's really pretty, pretty special.

But Mike's improvising is
just too fast.

HE LAUGHS

The result of this experiment have
been really exciting. We saw

changes in the pre-frontal cortex
of the brain,

that's the frontal
lobes of the brain,

that's the portion of the brain
that kind of makes us human.

One of the main roles of this large
area at the front of the brain

is in conscious self-monitoring.

Watching what you do
and what you say.

Jazz musicians, I think, naturally
have to take a risk musically and

to promote that ability
to take risks,

have to turn off
a little bit of the gatekeeper.

And so we saw the shutdown of the

pre-frontal cortex
in these musicians.

Kind of the opposite
of what you would

do at a cocktail party when
you are very focused on saying

the right thing or making sure
you don't say something silly.

Charles is now widening his research
to study other kinds of improvisers.

We've actually recently

looked at freestyle rap, and we've
looked at illustrators, cartoonists.

And we're seeing that the
pre-frontal cortex in both of these

settings seems to
decrease in some component,

when you switch from a memorised,
or a non-creative component,

to a generative, improvised
component.

It's all part of
Charles' grand ambition.

He's out to discover

whether there is a deep creative
potential that lies within us all.

These art forms are different,
yet they share a

basic process in the brain, and
so I have in my mind, long-term,

this idea that if you were able
to define these circuits,

we might be able to enhance them
in many ways,

that in the end, humans might be
better at being creative.

I think obviously this is
the kind of work that will take many

lifetimes to really consolidate,
but I'm just glad to even start

some of these experiments,
to try to answer these questions.

Research that began with mind games
and brain teasers has started

to unlock some of the secrets
of what makes you creative.

The connected - but different -
processes of insight.

Divergent thinking.

And improvising.

But crucially they have revealed
there is indeed a neural

correlate of creativity, a signature
of creativity in your brain.

And now we're discovering
that this research

could be rather helpful
to all of us.

SHE SQUEALS WITH DELIGHT

In the skies above Holland,

Simone Ritter is experiencing
something new.

Until today,
she had never set foot in a glider.

What she's doing forms
the backbone of her research

to make all of us more creative.

Simone has a theory...

Well, this virtual reality lab.

The most important equipment
is this backpack here.

OK, so, if you could wear it...

She believes that new

and unexpected experiences
can boost your creativity.

So she's devised
an experiment that is designed

to alter your cognitive habits.

So maybe you already recognise
where you are? I'm in the cafeteria.

Yeah, right. Erm,
and what you will do is,

you will first walk around
a little bit,

just to get used to the equipment.

Just walk around, you have
a lot of space.

The location looks familiar.

But Annika has stepped
into a virtual world that cannot

exist in reality.

One designed to startle,
and shake her up.

OK. And now you see a table
on the left side, do you?

Yeah, with a suitcase. Yeah.

Could you please walk towards the
table and towards the suitcase? OK.

SHE MUTTERS

SHE GASPS AND LAUGHS

OK. It gets smaller.

In this virtual world
the laws of physics are subverted.

The suitcase grows smaller as
she approaches it.

The bottle flies upwards,
defying gravity.

After three minutes... I'm here.

..she's completely disorientated.
There's a pole.

It's great. It's funny,

but it's also an experience
that opens up your mind.

And that's what we, what we want.

Welcome back to the real world.

Simone's aim is to disrupt what
she calls our functional fixedness.

That's a mental block, where
your thinking gets stuck in rut.

If you experience something
unexpected, this will also

influence your cognitive patterns -

you would break old cognitive
patterns,

you would overcome
functional fixedness,

and this will help you to make new
associations between concepts.

But is she right?

Annika, like the other
participants in Simone's study,

takes an online version of the
divergent thinking brick test.

And what she's discovered is that
experiencing this strange new

virtual world has
a very real effect.

The results showed an increase

of ten to 15 percent
in creativity scores.

The first lesson is that unexpected

and unusual experiences help you to
think more flexible and creative.

And that this is one way to help
you to think different,

to approach problems
in a different way.

And I would advise people to
look for unexpected experiences.

But most of us don't have
virtual reality suites at home.

How could this apply
to our everyday lives?

Simone has devised something new,
something far more commonplace,

that we can use to
increase our creativity.

This is the real university canteen.

Here the day begins like any other.

Starting with a classic
Dutch breakfast -

the chocolate chip sandwich.

We all know how to make a sandwich.

But what's about to happen here is

what Simone calls
"schema violation".

A disruption of a normal
pattern of thought or behaviour.

The computer gives
step-by-step instructions.

The volunteer, Thomas,
follows each prompt.

Then, he's prompted to do
something differently.

Yeah, as you can see
he was really surprised,

because now he has to put the
chocolate chips on the disc.

That's not the way
they normally do it,

they first put the butter
on the bread.

The resulting sandwich
is pretty standard.

But he got there by
a different, unexpected route.

This sort of activity also boosts

your creativity test scores
by up to 15 percent.

Just performing such
an activity where you see OK,

it doesn't have to be
like I assume it to be,

but it can also be done differently,
in a new way, in a different way.

Also it enables you think different,
to break cognitive patterns,

to overcome functional fixedness,
and this helps you to make new

associations between concepts, which
is really important for creativity.

Thankfully it doesn't have to
be a chocolate chip sandwich.

It's about disrupting any routine.

We don't need virtual reality,
where we manipulate the laws

of physics, it can be as simple
as that, don't prepare a sandwich

in the normal order but just
switch one of the steps, and this

will make you more flexible - this
will help you to think creative.

So give yourself room
for creativity.

The effect of changing your
routines changes your brain.

Well-travelled neural
pathways are abandoned,

forcing new connections to be made
between brain cells.

And that means more new
and original ideas.

I'm back on the ground.

It's late afternoon
at Stearn's wharf.

Jonathan Schooler and his team
have one last experiment to run.

One which may help explain
one of the most enigmatic

mysteries about creativity.

Why you have your best ideas
when you are least expecting them.

It all begins with a familiar test
of divergent thinking -

the brick test.
You can start by having a seat.

We're going to do
a test of your creativity.

OK, so there's going to be
a couple of different phases

to this experiment today.
You're going to have two minutes

to generates as many uses as possible
for this brick that you can think of,

and you can be as creative
as you like.

I could write a note around it, and
put it through somebody's window.

OK. Erm, I could hit somebody over
the head with it.

Use the pattern as a stamp.

I could use it, like, to hold some
papers down, like a paperweight.

Now they take a two minute break.

Each person is asked to spend it
a different way.

The first volunteer is told just
to sit and do nothing.

The second person is given
a non-demanding task.

Arrange the blocks by colour.

Start with one colour,
and just sort them into piles.

The third person is given a very
demanding task.

Build a little model.

I want you to used these Legos to
actually build a house.

The volunteers don't know it,
but these two minutes are actually

the most important
part of the experiment.

This is when their minds are either
given a chance to wander, or not.

Would it be a bad thing
if I fell asleep right now?

We'd like you to remain awake.

After the break, they take
the divergent thinking test again.

Has their creativity changed?

We're going to return back to
this brick test,

and we're going to see again
in two minutes' time,

how many uses you can
come with, but new uses,

ones that
you haven't said originally.

Er, use it to, erm...

It turns out that people occupied
with the demanding task

do the worst on the second
creativity test.

Erm...

But what is surprising
is who comes first.

Not those left staring into space,
doing nothing.

But the people given a mindless,
easy task.

I could break it into pieces, and
paint different things on each one,

like flowers, or whatever,
and sell them.

I could cut it into four pieces,
and put it under the legs of the bed

to make the bed a little bit higher.

Mind wandering seems
to particularly facilitate

the creative process.

Now one interesting thing is,
you might think that just giving

nothing to do would have
also created similar mind

wandering benefits, but it seems that
not all mind wandering is equal.

That mind wandering that's
broken up by engaging

in a non-demanding task seems to be
more functional than the mind

wandering that happens when you're
given absolutely nothing to do.

So if you want to come up with
a creative solution to a problem,

don't just do nothing.

Do something undemanding instead.

We don't know exactly why that is,
but one reasonable possibility is
by breaking it up,

by sort of thinking a little bit
about the task and

coming back and thinking a little
bit, and coming back,

sort of stirs the pot and allows
a special kind of unconscious

recombination that's particularly
beneficial for creativity.

You now have a good excuse
to get up from your desk

and walk away from the problem.

Well, one important lesson is that
if you're stumped, take a break

and allow the unconscious
processes to take a hold.

But it also suggests the kind of
break that you might want to take.

Rather than just sitting there,
you might want to take a walk,

or take or shower, or do something -
gardening.

Something that's not especially
demanding but still sort of occupies

your mind a little bit,

and yet nevertheless
enables the mind to wander.

The research does underline
the notion that

if you want to be more creative,
it is best not to be too focused.

At least, not all the time.

Mind wandering has a long history
in creativity.

But now we're starting to understand
just why it's so effective.

This is a question that Rex Jung
has been able to try

and answer in the last few years.

Beethoven liked to take
a long walk when he was

thinking about music,

I like to mow the lawn,
this repetitive action

that you're going back and forth,
and doing some physical

activity, occupying your body
but your mind can wonder freely.

He studied brain scan
after brain scan,

of people as their minds wandered.

He noticed a distinct change
in one area of the brain.

It's called the frontal lobe,
right above your eyes.

What he observed was something
he calls transient hypofrontality,

a kind of temporary sleep mode.

Where the frontal lobes
are slightly pulled back,

the brakes are slightly pulled
back off the system

and ideas are flowing more freely
and some of these ideas from the

subconscious can percolate into
conscious awareness more readily.

He's found that this temporary brain
state, when you're open to

creativity, is actually something
we can easily induce.

People can get there with
lots of different ways,

whether it's meditation,
or a long run, or a bath,

there's lots of ways
to down-regulate your frontal lobes

temporarily
and allow creative ideas to flow.

Rex has discovered the frontal lobes
play a powerful gate-keeping

role in our creativity.

But what's intriguing
is that in the research,

this bit of brain keeps on
turning up again and again.

It's now showing up in the work
of people studying insight.

It seems some people are
naturally hypofrontal -

their frontal lobes are a little
less active, all of the time.

People who tend to solve problems
with insight have a lower

base level of frontal lobe activity,

in other words their frontal lobes
are not controlling them,

focusing them as much.
It's more of a free for all.

I mean, different brain activity
doing all sorts

of different things at once.

And of course, we now know that this
transient dip in frontal lobe

activity is what helps you lose
your inhibitions when you improvise.

It's not that scientists
have located the ultimate

source of creativity.

But it is this area of the brain
with its ability to release

your mental handcuffs that is at the
forefront of current research.

For centuries, creativity has
been a subject considered

off-limits to scientists.

It's seemed too elusive,
too subjective to be studied.

Creativity and music, art,
improvisation,

all these things, they are magical
things to experience, but I know

that they are not magic, they happen
because we have brains that function

in a certain way that allow us
to do these things, and so I want

to make a distinction between the
fact that these experiences might

be transformative, for us they might
be profound life-changing things

we'll never forget, but that doesn't
mean that they can't be explained.

Now things are very different.

At last we have to tools
to explore it.

This is incredibly exciting.

Now we have the tools,
we're starting to really uncover

what creativity is,
what goes on in the brain

when people have moments of
creativity, and it is just incredibly

fascinating, the next ten, 15,
20 years are going to be amazing.

But for all that science has
revealed, we are still a long way

from coming up with a complete
understanding of creativity.

There's lots of these theories
rumbling around,

and what we're trying to do is put
together a theory of creativity,

and how it's manifested
in the brain.

We're getting close
but we're not quite there yet.

We have all these different
scientists

that have pieces of the puzzle,

but no-one's put it together quite
yet to make a beautiful picture.

But while we wait for that
beautiful picture to emerge,

in the meantime we can at least
all become a bit more creative.

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