Redwood Neuroscience Institute's Stanford Theoretical Neuroscience Lecture featured William Calvin from the University of Washington.
The general theme of his talk was creativity. "How you do something
you’ve never done exactly that way before, yet get it right the first
time?"
His answer: You can have competitions between categories, between
movement programs, between relations, between analogies. That’s what a
Darwin Machine in neocortex could buy you: a general process for
quality creativity at various levels.
Some of the most interesting work on the neurobiology of creativity is
being conducted by Dr. Rosa-Aurora Chavez from the National Institute
of Psychiatry in Mexico City. To determine if there was a genetic
component to creativity, she took blood samples from 100 recognized
artists and scientists. Her findings showed that highly creative
individuals had increased expression of specific serotonin transporter
and dopamine receptor genes.
She then performed functional neuroimaging experiments on a dozen of
these creative minds, concluding that creative individuals had
significantly higher activation in the right and left cerebellum,
frontal and temporal lobes, while they performed creative tasks.
Creativity research has important implications for business innovation
and investment. While standard IQ tests and college entrance exams
focus on convergent thinking, i.e. finding the right answer, creative
individuals excel at divergent thinking, i.e. discovering multiple
potential solutions. The typical behaviors of creative individuals,
such as novelty seeking and harm avoidance, as well as, high emotional,
sensual and physical over-excitability, often result in the abandonment
of projects.
In today’s rushed corporate world focused on quenching the financial
markets thirst for efficiency, there is little room for individuals who
do not predictably meet deadlines. Further research might validate that
sustained financial support of think tanks could produce more
innovations. Imagine if the Medici family had not backed Michelangelo,
a creative genius who is known to have left over half of his sculptures
unfinished.
How many cures for diseases and market opportunities have been missed
as a result of short-circuiting the creative process?
I have two comments on this -- the first is that "increased expression of specific serotonin transporter and dopamine receptor genes" does not always transfer into the same kinds of outward behavior, resulting in behaviors that can be said to be specific to creative individuals. That's why creativity tests rarely rely on psychological profiling of "typical behaviors." Highly creative inividuals can be found across all segments of the Meyers-Briggs and other psychological profiling tools. That's why researchers such as Teresa Amabile recommend the kind of creativity testing that actually requires that the testee produce some output that can be evaluated as creative or not.
A great opportunity for neurobiological research into creativity would be to discover the whole range of ways in which the highly creative people of various personality types express their creativity.
My other comment -- the divergence that's so important in creativity actually has two components -- fluency and originality. Fluency is the ability to come up with lots of potential solutions. Originality is the ability to come up with potential solutions that are substantially different from each other yet are still part of a potential solution set, will still solve the problem. I'd love to see neuroimaging data that could pinpoint the differences in brains that are merely fluent with solutions, vs. brains that are adept at truly original thinking.
Renee Hopkins Callahan started IdeaFlow and serves as chief blog-wrangler. She is 
