Neuroscience: Creative Class

Originally published in Reader's Digest Canada. Read the full text here.

School Your Brain on How Best to Innovate

These days, creativity means many things: a personality trait, a way of being in the world and a multi-million-dollar industry. We worship at its feet without fully understanding what’s in play. We recognize it in Jackson Pollock’s chaotic canvases or Google’s complex algorithms, even though these products have almost nothing else in common.

Neuroscientists aren’t certain where creativity resides in the human brain. Harvard Medical School neurologist Alice Flaherty argues that creativity comes from interactions between the frontal lobe (associated with generating ideas), the temporal lobe (responsible for vetting and revising them) and the limbic system (which enables motivation), but there are likely more factors involved. In 2010, researchers in Japan found that subjects who scored high on a creativity test also had well-developed white-matter tracts, the pathways that enable disparate brain regions to communicate with one another. Their work suggests that the characteristic doesn’t exist in any specific brain centre-rather, it’s everywhere at once.

Despite its elusive nature, creativity now commands high social capital. In his work, Toronto-based urbanist Richard Florida talks about “creative class” cities, prosperous urban locales in which these innovative thinkers (marketers, designers, engineers and entertainers) form the backbone of the economy. Last year, he estimated that 4.3 million Canadians, roughly 30 per cent of the country’s work force, were employed in creative fields.

It may be surprising, then, that humans were once thought to be almost completely incapable of truly creative pursuits. In ancient Greece, innovation was mostly thought to come from the gods. It wasn’t until the Renaissance that creativity was seen as an attribute that humans-albeit only a small cohort of artists, poets and musicians-could possess.

We’re now learning that this trait isn’t just for the lucky few. “There’s a misconception that creativity is something we either have or we don’t,” says Alberta psychologist Jim Henry. “It’s a natural thing that can happen for all of us when certain elements are present. If they are present, creativity has the chance to occur. If they are present in abundance, creativity has the chance to flourish.”

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