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Intro. [Recording date: December 19, 2021.]

Russ Roberts: Today is December 19th, 2021, and my guest is author and educator, Lorne Buchman. He is the president of ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, and the author of Make to Know: From Spaces of Uncertainty to Creative Discovery. He hosts the podcast Change Lab: Conversations on Transformation and Creativity. Lorne, welcome to EconTalk.

Lorne Buchman: Thank you, Russ. Good to be here.

1:04

Russ Roberts: Our topic for today is your book Make to Know, which is about creativity and art, but we're going to get into other topics as well, including leadership and how to live with the uncertainty of life. You start your book with the creation of the Apple Store, which is maybe of surprise to some people. I mean, come on, what's so creative? It's just an interesting retail space, isn't it?

Here's how you describe the Apple Store:

The wide-open spaces, the community display tables, the Genius Bar, the invitation to engage with products by virtue of their presentation alone, the choice materials and fixtures strategically deployed, the glass and the wood, the precise use of color, the intuitive layout of the whole--all of it, one would think, must have sprung, like Zeus birthing Athena, from the head of Jobs. [Russ: That being Steve Jobs.] But is that how it came about? We know the Apple Store transformed the retail landscape at the turn of the 21st century in the United States and abroad. What was the actual process that led to this remarkable outcome?

I'm on your side: I would've thought it was just Steve Jobs had a vision, this beautiful aesthetic vision, very distinctive, very different, very Apple-ish. Is that what happened?

Lorne Buchman: No, it's not what happened at all, not if you talk with Tim Kobe, who was the lead designer of the project. He has a design firm called Eight Inc. And, he had done some projects with Apple and specifically with Steve Jobs before that, most notably the launch of the Macintosh at the Macworld event and really designed a really beautiful display. As he says, he let the products be the hero. It wasn't gussied up. It was very beautifully displayed and Jobs really appreciated that because it allowed the products themselves to shine.

But, Tim had an idea that it was really time for Apple to come out with its own retail outlet, because it was getting confused among other products in more general technology stores. And, Jobs really was quite anxious about the fact that the people who were selling his products didn't really understand them or know them or didn't present them with the kind of focus that he wanted. And so, it all converged and Tim wrote a white paper and it just sat for a while.

And, then one day they received a call from Andrea Nordeman, who was Jobs' longtime assistant and said, 'He would like to talk to you about that retail stuff.' And, Tim said, 'Well, that's fine. He can let us know a good time for him to meet with us.' And, she said, 'Well, he's in the car on the way. He'll be there in 15 minutes.' It's an important part of the story because already there was a surprise in the process; and ultimately the story is one of several surprises.

And, you would assume that the Apple store was something that came from a very clear vision: that a genius--and deservedly he deserves that title--a genius like Jobs would come up with. But in fact, it was nothing of the sort. He had a notion and that was it. And, in they went, into a long and wonderful iterative process of experimenting and making and playing and engaging materials and solving problems, and all around the frame of what Apple was and the values of Apple's. That was a north star; and I make a distinction between what a north star might be and what a vision might be.

But, ultimately what that story really tells us is: this very familiar space with all those elements that you just read is actually something that came through a process of making--of creating, of iterating, of testing, of failing--and that from the beginning, it was not a manifestation of some already-existing vision. It was a story about what making itself could reveal.

And, I tell that story at the beginning, because we're all so familiar with that space. We have assumptions about Jobs, we have assumptions about what Apple is, but in fact, they knew that store only through the making of it, and it whets the appetite for the questions and issues I really want to explore in the book.

6:14

Russ Roberts: Just two pieces of it that I found particularly interesting: One was Mickey Drexler, who is founder of the Gap, his insight, which he had an idea for the store that didn't turn out to be very useful, but he had an idea for how to get there from here that was very powerful, this idea of a prototype. So, talk about that, and then also talk about the granite on the outside of the store, which is just a sweet Jobsian kind of obsessive detail.

Lorne Buchman: On that store in Chicago, you mean?

Russ Roberts: Yeah. Yeah.

Lorne Buchman: Yeah. Well, what Drexler did, which Jobs really appreciated, is he suggested that they actually build a full scale model of the store. And they rented--they secretly rented--this space in Cupertino, and they would do full mock-ups of what the store might look like, and how the displays would work, and how the lighting would work, and how materials would be activated. And, Jobs credits Drexler for that idea because that allowed for the kind of making I'm talking about. And, they would get together and they would build all these mock-ups and engage with them and reshape them and experience them. And, they went through that process of really figuring out what it needed to be until they finally opened the store. And, the first one in Virginia, I believe.

Russ Roberts: The part about that prototype mock-up--again, not what we think of as a mock-up, but more like a to-scale mock-up.

Lorne Buchman: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Russ Roberts: Instead of just saying, 'Well, on that computer-generated thing, did you move around the tables?' They actually had--they built the tables. They built the store. Very Jobsian in the way that you always feel like expense was no object with him. Like, most people would say that 'This is a ridiculous idea. You don't need to actually build it. You can get the idea of it. Use an artist's rendition. Come on.'

But, the part I found fascinating--one of the things; there were a number of interesting things--but one of the things that was fascinating was that in some of the prototype stores, the photographs of the product, which have always has been exquisite for Apple, were more attractive than the actual product on the table. And that couldn't be. So, what did they do with that?

Lorne Buchman: So, they--

Russ Roberts: Because it looks like they were lying. They were deceiving you with their print ads or these billboards with these gorgeous products, when in real life they don't like anything like that.

Lorne Buchman: Exactly. And, that was such--again, a discovery of the making. It was only because they could see that in real life and evaluate the relationship that they were able to come to that conclusion.

And so, they did all kinds of work with lighting and with various different, you know, processes that made sure that what they were presenting in real life matched the beauty of those photographs. Because you're right: what they discovered was that they would look like they were trying to pull a fast one on their customers, right? That the photographs would look so much better, and they would come in and then ultimately they would look at the real thing and experience disappointment instead of excitement.

Russ Roberts: So, talk about the granite in the Chicago store.

Lorne Buchman: So, the granite and story about that is they were working--Tim tells the story. They wanted to use a particular kind of granite and they were experimenting with it and they were staring at it, I think he said for five or six hours, just staring at the granite, wondering how it would work. And, all of a sudden Jobs perks up and says, 'You know, we're such idiots. We're sitting here in sunny California looking at dry granite. It rains in Chicago.' And so, they all scrambled and got buckets of water and dumped them on the granite and saw what happened when it became wet and when the water was dripping, and all of the various different ways in which it would present when it was going to be like it would be in Chicago, in the rain. And, it was through that, that they came up with the kind of final answer of the material that they wanted to use.

An old beachcomber trick: Items on the right were coated with clear nail polish.

Russ Roberts: I can't tell you how many rocks I brought back from the beach that disappointed me when I got home. I've often thought I should get--you know how they spray the vegetables in the grocery to make them look good and keep crisp?--

Lorne Buchman: Mm-hmm (affirmative)--

Russ Roberts: I needed a rock hydrator for my beach collection.

But, actually, there's a deep metaphor there. We don't have to go into it, but I think there's something there.

Lorne Buchman: Yeah, and it's a wonderful example of how, and we can talk about this a little bit more, about how engaging with materials, which is one of the four serious principles I try to explore in the book, is such a significant part of the making. And, what the materials tell you, and how they talk back to you, and how you engage and work with them in a way that allows you to come to a point of knowing and discovery that's critical to the project.

11:16

Russ Roberts: I should mention that the book is the result of many, many interviews with artists from different domains: painters, songwriters, authors. And, I found myself thinking a lot about materials. I think for some people--like, my dad, his materials were a pencil. He never got comfortable using a word processor. His materials were a pencil and a yellow pad of paper. For me, it's a keyboard. I love how a keyboard unleashes my creativity. And, because my handwriting has deteriorated as I've done less of it over time and as I've gotten older, the idea of creating with a pencil would be very painful for me. Might--it would have some advantages, I should add. And, actually I've started to do physical note-taking in meetings with a pen and a little notebook, which changes things in ways that you don't anticipate.

But, then when you think about, quote, "real artists," meaning artists with media of various kinds--paintbrush, chisel, all that stuff--to some extent, and I didn't appreciate this until I read your book, they help the artist in their own way. Meaning, there are probably people who could be artists in the painting sense, but the brush doesn't unleash for them, whereas the pencil or pen or keyboard does, so they become writers. And, I just think the world of materials is underappreciated.

Lorne Buchman: Yeah. It's a great point. It's a really, really good point. And, you know, there's the tool, and then there's the experience of the actual engagement with the material itself.

And the tool is a very important element to that in exactly the way you just explained.

So, you're right: there will be some who find that they can--and they speak like this--enter a dialogue with the material, through the pencil, or as one of the artists in the book says, 'It's the charcoal and the paper and me, and we're all having a conversation.' And, the charcoal makes an imprint and it moves that material of the paper and then the paper responds and says, 'Okay, you give me this, I'll give you that. Now let's take it here.'

And, that's just a beautiful articulation of what I mean with how the discovery process is enabled through that engagement with the material itself.

Russ Roberts: I had a friend in graduate school--it's a different kind of artistry. He was waxing eloquent about a professor we had, who was incredibly prolific and phenomenally creative as an economist. And, he told me one day--my friend, my co-graduate student--he said, 'You know he writes all of his papers with a fountain pen?' Which is very unusual. I mean, most academics in economics don't use a fountain pen. In fact, I've never seen an economist use a fountain pen except for one who collects them. I don't know if he writes his papers with them. But, he said, 'He writes all his papers with a fountain pen.' Then he paused and he said, wistfully, 'I wish I had that pen.' And, he had an understanding in some dimension that the tool unleashed something in this very, very creative person.

Lorne Buchman: Yeah. And, I would add, Russ, too, just so the listeners get a scope of this, if you take that fundamental principle and then you extrapolate it to--well, we talked about writing and painting--but sculpting. Alexander Calder, the great--'I think in wire,' he says. I mean, that sums up so much of what I mean. That engagement with his material allows him to think in a very particular kind of way. It's not thinking necessarily only in the intellectual realm, but it becomes part of a larger sensibility and also very significantly an engagement of the body. So, we have to shift our focus there to understand really what he means when he says, 'I think in wire,' and how making is and can be in of itself a kind of ideation process that can push the perimeters of what we know.

Or, somebody making a film or somebody in performance and improvisation. Improvisation is such a wonderful illustration of what I mean, because to improvise, the process of the making and the thing made are one and the same. And, when that happens, you get a really wonderful make-to-know moment, that the making and the thing created are exactly on par.

So, you think about that remarkable concert that Keith Jarrett gave in the 1970s in Köln, right? And, not having a clue what he was going to do for that concert. And, there's a huge backstory to that, too. I don't know if you know about it, but they brought the wrong piano and it was broken and he left; and this young enterprising woman came and convinced him to come back. And, he sat down, he figured out what parts of the piano were working.

I mean, it's a fantastic story. You can find certain references to it. There was a story about it recently on NPR [National Public Radio], 'recently' being in the last couple of years. And, he created one of the greatest concerts in the history of improvised live concerts. I mean, it was an unbelievable achievement; and it was completely from the spontaneity and the energy of the moment and the making of the moment that allowed it to happen. But, in that story--

Russ Roberts: And the constraint of the bad piano--

Lorne Buchman: And, the constraint. Beautiful.

Russ Roberts: which you talk about. We might come back to that, but that which seemed to be a handicap unleashed him.

Lorne Buchman: Right, exactly. And, to that point, just to help the listeners, designers and artists talk about constraints not as things that limit, but as things that open possibility; and it's a really interesting kind of paradox that goes on there.

And so, you think about the fact that Jarrett was able to achieve this remarkable kind of thing; and how did he do it and how did he push the perimeters? And, it's really important--and this becomes a very important point in the book, too--that Make to Know isn't building the plane as you fly. Make to Know is--I don't mean that it's some kind of variation, fancy variation on 'we make it up as we go along.' That's not the point. And the reason is that we bring so much to our process of making. We bring our experience. We bring our education. We bring our values. We bring our priorities. We bring our ethics. We bring the questions that stir us.

But, all of that really forms the scaffolding on which we stand as we reach into places of the unknown, as we reach into uncertainty.

So, what Jarrett did on that fateful day was he brought incredible skill. Gladwell's 10,000 hours comes to mind--a kind of way of really building very precise skill and ability. And, that in turn becomes, again, that scaffolding to reach into uncertainty.

So, people often ask me, 'Well, amateurs make to know as well,' and that's a really important principle. The difference is the scaffolding. The difference is the level of support. The difference is--you know--how much and how far one can reach based on one's own experience, one's skill base, one's knowledge--which is, again, the business I'm in of educating artists and designers and helping them build that scaffolding, and, equally the courage--because they have that scaffolding to reach into places of uncertainty, where they can discover and where there's a way of finding again what making art feels[?].

19:56

Russ Roberts: Yeah, I think about a couple things. I'm thinking about, from our discussion of materials, a musician who can play more than one instrument and how their music on one instrument is so radically different. Often they put in more time practicing piano, say, rather than guitar. But, a lot of people can play both and they comfortably move back and forth. And, I've never thought about how the instrument changes their musical creation.

On the example of the courage and the intuition--I don't think you use that word actually, but that's the word that kept coming into my mind, that there's intuition. I think for a lot of people, they think of it as a negative thing: It means guessing or just a hunch. But, it actually is, I think a honed skill that comes from experience, wisdom, knowledge. It's not just whatever feels right at the moment.

And, as you get older and you do hone your craft, I think great artists know what to push, when to pull back.

A very modest level in my case--I often digress on EconTalk or in my lectures. For me, it's a way of, I don't know, it does something for me. I hope it does something for the audience. But, there's an art to knowing when you've gone too far, when you need to keep yourself quiet. And, it's an intuition. It's something you learn. It's not a science, obviously. It's a craft and it's important.

Lorne Buchman: And you can go too far. But, I would say, if you can keep it in balance, the digression ultimately enhances the fundamentals or focus of the conversation.

And, I learned that through the interviews I conducted for this book, of the--and it manifested in a couple of different ways. One, a couple of the artists talked about how they doodle in meetings, and that distraction or digression allows them to focus on what's going on in the meeting in a much more focused and precise way.

Or, the single most frequent statement made by the artists and designers that I interviewed was, 'I thought of the idea in the shower.' And, I mean, I have that experience, too. But there's something about--we think it's all happening right in the studio, in the actual engagement as we're writing. But so often it happens, artists and designers report, when they're in the shower, when they're washing the dishes, when they're driving the car, when they're out for a walk.

And, the interesting distinction that I think they make and that I learned from them is: it's not like they've stopped the creative process to do these things--that they understand there's a whole art. There's a spectrum, a range of engagement and activity that's all part of it and you can't separate it off, but you bring it in and allow yourself to have the benefit of that change of context or that mundane process that actually is feeding into something in a very important way.

Russ Roberts: And, we've talked about this on the program before: that a lot of problems that we have--intellectual problems, work problems, relationship problems, creativity problems--that we're trying to solve, get solved when we're not consciously working on them. And that there's a remarkable power of the brain to make advances while we're thinking or doing other things. And, in fact, often it's the doing of the other things--the shower, the walk--that frees up the brain to work in the background. You know, it's that the process is still going.

I wrote a poem the other night in my sleep; I hope it turns out. I woke up to it--a little bit like Coleridge, probably not quite as good as Coleridge, but I honed it--

Lorne Buchman: I'm sure you get very close.

Russ Roberts: What?

Lorne Buchman: I'm sure you get very close.

Russ Roberts: Oh yeah, for sure. But, I literally wrote it in my waking, where I was not really awake. I was still half-, three-quarters asleep. And, really, it was an amazing experience. And, of course, it happens in all kinds of ways in daily life.

24:27

Russ Roberts: I want to focus on an issue we've left in the background because, you know, for listeners who haven't read the book yet, it really focuses on what you're talking about. Which is: that our culture's view of great artists are: A genius, a madman, or a person who--historically, a person who's got a hotline to the divine. So, we talk about divine inspiration. We talk about the 'mad genius,' even. And we think that this process of great art, of magnificent art, is the--for people with, you know, a magical gift to foresee a beautiful work of art.

You talk about this--I've always loved this example, now I think it's grossly misleading, but I used to always love it--that Michelangelo wanted to sculpt an angel, or my favorite would be David, his sculpture in Florence, which I think is just one of the great moments of human creativity. And, the story is: How did he do it? Well, he took a block of marble and he cut away everything that wasn't David. Meaning, he had this vision that he fulfilled through the artistic process.

And, I think--you know--Beethoven heard the symphony and he's deaf, so he hears it in his mind and he just writes it down.

And, I think, as you point out, that's our cultural--that's a very romantic view of art and human creativity. And, I think we're suckers for it, we love the idea of it. But, as you point out, it's really remarkably misleading. Why?

Lorne Buchman: Well, I'd like to contextualize that just a little bit to say that in the hundreds of conversations I've had about the principle of Make to Know over the course of several years, no one has looked at me quizzically and said, 'I don't get what you mean.'

And, that kind of concerned me, because I thought, 'Well, am I just saying the sky is blue, here? I mean, is there anything to this?' Which prompted me to really try to explore how, in Western culture anyway, we think about creativity.

And that's exactly--what you cite is exactly what I tried to address--is that there seemed to me to be three dominant narratives about the creative process. One, the obsession with genius. Two, an obsession with the artist as mad. And three, the focus on the fact that there are an elect few who can channel the gods--the muse in Homer.

But, none of that had to do with making. Right? It had to do with something else, something outside.

And, as I try to explore in that essay, that narrative is so dominant, that it has limited our capacity to talk about the relationship of making and knowing.

And, it has also limited our capacity to think of ourselves--us normal, rank and file human beings--it's limited our ability to think of ourselves as makers of our lives, as creative humans, who are engaged in that kind of process every day.

And, it's so interesting to see how much that persists. Right? I mean, it really does go back to Homer. The obsession with genius goes back, goes through a really interesting evolution, which is, it used to be that you were visited by a tutelary god who was of a genius. Right? And, then through Kant and the romantics, it became: You are the genius. And so, it became the difference between having genius and being genius; and this kind of deep obsession with that.

Now, let me say, I actually believe there are geniuses among us. I am not saying genius is an illusion. What I am saying--

Russ Roberts: Homer was probably one of them--

Lorne Buchman: Likely.

What I am saying, however, is our focus on that has limited our sense of what the creative process is; has imposed a narrative and vocabulary that has actually not allowed us to explore this other idea of the relationship of making and knowing. And, that work and that study for me, allowed me to realize that even though it's a very familiar concept, Make to Know, it's actually unrecognized and hasn't really been explored or expounded in ways that I hope the book began.

29:42

Russ Roberts: So, I just want to reiterate the sort of fundamental lesson at the heart of the book, which I think applies to lots of things way beyond art, certainly on how to live. You have many, many quotes from artists that capture this idea of make to know. You have W. H. Auden, the poet: 'No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.' Pablo Picasso: 'To know what you're going to draw, you have to begin drawing.' Philip Roth: 'You begin every book as an amateur gradually by writing sentence after sentence. The book, as it were, reveals itself to you. Each and every sentence is a revelation.' And, finally, a more general one--not quite an artist, maybe not quite at the level of those, but maybe he should be considered--Bill Watterson, the creator of "Calvin and Hobbes." He said it very beautifully. He says--I love Calvin and Hobbes, by the way; I'm a sucker for it, big time--"The truth is most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive."

And, I think there's a modern tendency to think of our lives as an algorithm to be followed or a plan to be created. And, I've talked about this many times on the program: That, that's often not what we do, and maybe not even a good idea. And, I think most people would say, 'Well, it's not what we do, but we should be. You should discover where you're headed first.' And, I think the Watterson image, that we discover where we are headed when we arrive, is profound. And, it applies to, of course, much more than just art.

Lorne Buchman: And so, here's where things become really interesting in the overlap with my life and with how I think we can get stuck in the way we live.

A huge motivation for me to write this book, frankly, was for my students at an art design college who tell me--and the faculty back this up--that they get paralyzed when they don't have it all figured out from the beginning. And, they can't start doing their work-- because that dominant narrative of the artist as manifesting great vision--which maybe Michelangelo did, I don't know, but some do--and this is, you know, but most artists and designers don't talk that way. But that students felt stuck that they couldn't actually engage until they had it all figured out and all the details so that they were in fact, doing work that wasn't making to know. It was manifesting a vision.

And, as I alluded earlier in our conversation, I think working toward an existing vision, can be--it doesn't have to be all the time--can be actually narrowing and limiting as opposed to expansive.

And, the whole idea here is to help our students become expansive and to trust in a process of engaging materials or solving problems or improvising that allows them to make those great discoveries as they move forward.

And, art design education, therefore, to a significant extent, becomes helping them realize, helping them discover in the making, helping them understand what making might reveal as opposed to feeling like they have to have it all figured out from the beginning.

And, then you--it's not a difficult step to take, to say, 'Well, how many people do we know in our lives, or true for ourselves, where we can't get started because we don't have it all figured out?' We don't have the vision. Right? We haven't done all that we believe is necessary in a kind of preparation for something?

Well, if you shift the language in the make-to-know realm and you say, 'Well, we have urges, we have questions, we have desires, we have curiosity, we have ways in which we want to go into something and begin to explore it.' Some poets talk about it as a stomach ache. Whatever the entry point is, we need to move into places of uncertainty.

And, that's scary, for sure. And it's unsettling and destabilizing.

But, what I learned from artists and designers is that while it is a very scary place, this thing we call uncertainty, it is also a deeply creative place. And, when all is said and done, uncertainty is the cost of great beauty and discovery.

34:41

Russ Roberts: And, if you're not careful, I think you think, 'Well, that's great for Keith Jarrett, who went into that concert without any preparation of what he was going to play or how he was going to play it and had a mediocre or a broken piano with certain limitations; and that's fine for a great musician, a great sculptor, a great whatever. But not for me.' I mean, 'I've got to have the comfort that the thing I'm majoring in, in college, is going to have a good salary, and then I've got this career arc that I can plan and it'll turn out this way.'

And, I think there's some comfort obviously to having that vision. But, most of us, our visions, life doesn't turn out the way we planned.

And, I think most people would--a lot of people respond to that by saying, 'Yeah, but it's better to plan than not to plan.'

And, what you're saying, or the way I understand what you're saying is: Maybe not. Maybe it's better to plan on not having a plan.

And it doesn't mean--and I think this is why I think this approach scares people--it doesn't mean, 'Just randomly try different stuff.' Or, 'I'll just go wander off into this field.' No, it's not that. But it's not the extreme on the other side of everything set in stone--to take a sculpture metaphor. Sorry.

Lorne Buchman: No. Actually what you just said is enormously helpful. And, here are the principles that I think are important. I think what we learn here is that discovery is not something we can control: We can only make the conditions for its realization. And so, it becomes a question of: Well, what is the planning that you're talking about? Is it a manifestation of an already-predetermined vision, or are you planning in a way that you're setting up that scaffolding or you're creating the frame? I talk a lot about frames for improvisation. They don't come out of nowhere. There has to be a context.

There was a context for Jarrett, a very wide one. Miles Davis riffing on a Gershwin tune is also a frame or a frame you can think about in terms of theatrical improvisation.

Improvisation requires a frame. It's not just something--but that's the point. And, then what happens within that frame and how does the breeze blow through it and how do you move within it, as opposed to something that is rigidly set or some matrix that controls everything?

So, that's one really important piece of all this, is that we understand that part of our work is to create the conditions that allow for discovery--or if you prefer the other metaphor, scaffolding that we stand on--that allows us to reach into uncertainty.

But, the other piece of it, too--and this is so important--and I think about artists like Ann Hamilton and Diana Thater and others that I talk about in the book where they plan in incredible detail, but what they're planning, again, is not the final result. What they've planned is the conditions that allow them to be ready.

Russ Roberts: An analogy, for me, is: Doing this interview, this conversation, I have a set of questions I've written down, but if all I did was read the questions and let you answer them, it would be a different experience. I am open to what you're going to bring up outside your book; you've already done it a few times. And, that's what I'm paying attention to, not, 'Oh, wait a minute, we've got to get to Question 7 here or we won't finish the interview.' And, conversations should be like that. I'm not saying all interviews should be like that. There's something to be said for the very planned interview.

But, that readiness idea, there's really two aspects to it. One is the conditions, the tools, that you've got the tools with you to do your work, whether they're your intuition or your physical tools--obviously it matters. I think about my--I love photography. I've spent a lot of money on expensive cameras in my life, and I don't have any of them with me. I didn't bring them to Israel. I brought my iPhone 12 and I love the pictures I get from it.

Every once in a while I wish I had my Fuji, but I've got my camera with me: I've got it in my pocket all the time now. And, I try to learn to work within that constraint. It has obvious constraints compared to a larger camera.

So, that's one sense of readiness, is the tools and the atmosphere. Maybe it can include things like getting a good night's sleep, reading something in advance to be prepared. Right? I didn't just say, 'Well, I know the idea of this book, let's just explore it.' I've got to read the book. I got to do the work. It's not all improvised. So, I think that's important, but the second kind of readiness is--

Lorne Buchman: May I just interrupt for a second?

Russ Roberts: Yeah.

Lorne Buchman: Or, in order to improvise, you need to do the work. That's really what I'm saying.

Russ Roberts: Yeah, exactly. Because otherwise, it's not very good and it's not--

Lorne Buchman: And, great improvisers are incredibly ready and incredibly skilled. And, you can't be a great improviser without those, quote-unquote, "10,000 hours."

Russ Roberts: Right. I'll just play random notes and maybe it'll work.

40:08

Russ Roberts: But, the other point I was going to say is that readiness, I think in life, is to be open to the unexpected. And, again, I think it's so hard, as you mention, it's frightening: 'Just tell me where the path is. After I finish law school, I'm going to have that opening job. I'll work a lot of hours, it'll be hard, but then I'll make partner.' And, you have that vision. But, the readiness to be open to something different is really hard, because it's scary. We like to plan. I get it, we all get it.

But, I think, again, this isn't about--for me, it's not about, 'Take risks in your career,' although that's not a bad idea. It's really more about, 'Pay attention.' Because things are knocking on your door that you might miss if you're not paying attention. And that's a different kind of readiness for me that you're talking about, and it's really beautiful.

Lorne Buchman: Yeah, I love that. I think you're absolutely right. And, so much of this is creating the conditions for us to pay attention, in optimal ways.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. It's not--there's nothing casual about what you're talking about or--

Lorne Buchman: Nothing casual. And it's--yeah. Right. And that's why I say, without really thinking about the depth of what is implied by make to know, you can kind of write it off initially as, 'Oh, it's kind of casual,' or you know--

Russ Roberts: Fooling around. Just fooling around. See what comes next.

Lorne Buchman: Yeah, exactly. It has nothing to do with that. Nor is that very interesting.

Russ Roberts: I've sometimes quoted Faulkner and you have different versions. I don't think you quote Faulkner in your book along those lines, but you have different versions of it.

Lorne Buchman: Everybody else though, yeah. Yeah, it's too bad I missed Faulkner.

Russ Roberts: What?

Lorne Buchman: It's too bad I missed Faulkner. Yeah, go ahead.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. So, I mentioned before on the program that he liked to pull a fast one on interviewers and say things, just to provoke them. And, he'd tell one interviewer one thing and another interviewer the opposite, because he was bored or he didn't respect them. Whatever the reason was, I don't know. But, at one point he said, 'Writing a book means, 'Oh, it's easy. You just follow around your characters with a pencil and paper and write down what they say.' And, he obviously did a lot of readiness. He thought a lot about what he was going to--the setting he was going to put those characters in and what would be the central, maybe, issue they were going to grapple with.

But, there's a lot of truth to that. And I think it's mirrored in the interviews you do. It's certainly something I've felt many times: that, the thing you're creating, the thing you're making takes on a life of its own.

And, just a famous example that I misunderstood for years: I was always told, I always thought that Flaubert, the French novelist, he wouldn't write down a sentence until it was perfect. And, then he just wrote down that one and then he wrote down another one that was perfect, and eventually he had a perfect book.

That's not how he did it. Boy, did he revise, did he let the book change while he was working on it, did he not plan.

Or Elizabeth Bishop whose poem I love called "One Art," that starts, 'The art of losing isn't hard to master.' That poem went through 17 revisions. We have her notes. They're wildly different. And you see the poem take on a life of its own. Its form changes. It becomes a certain way. And then all of a sudden she's stuck with that form and she just moves forward with it and it--she loses control.

That idea that the artist loses control of their work is a mystery. It seems--it's a paradox. 'It can't be. What do you mean? How could they have lost control? It's their book, they can write whatever they want.' But, you find out after a while, you can't. And, talk about that, because it's such an extraordinary thing.

Lorne Buchman: It's beautiful. Thank you. You know, just that example, the Faulkner example you gave, in fact, one of the provocations or one of the things that I love, that really got me to think about this book and ultimately to write it is exactly that, when novelists say, 'I created the shell of my characters and then they told me what they wanted to say.' I mean, that to me is, you know, a very clear statement about the discovery that can happen through the making--and the attentiveness of the artist, of the writer in this case--to what the book is saying. Or that hilarious line by Umberto Eco in the postscript to The Name of the Rose--

Russ Roberts: SPOILER ALERT for the readers who have not read The Name of the Rose, because it's going to give something away. Go ahead. Those who are worried about that, can skip over the next 20 seconds. Go ahead.

Lorne Buchman: who said, 'I didn't know Jorge was the murderer until I put him in the library.' That's beautiful.

That's exactly the point, right?, of what it means to--as a couple of artists have said to me, 'The words are so much smarter than I am. I just need to listen to them. I need to listen to the process.'

So, it's not so much about a loss of control as it is what you said earlier, it's: What are you paying attention to? What are you listening to? how are you engaging in a way that is giving you that message?

I just recently heard the poet Hirshfield, Jane Hirshfield, talk about her process. And, she said a couple of things that were really interesting. One was, 'If I'm not--first of all, I have no idea what I'm going to write when I sit down to write a poem. And if I do, it's not going to be a poem.' And, the second thing she says is, 'If I don't discover something in the writing of the poem, it won't be a poem. It will be a draft of something. And, only in the discovery will it start to take on the dimensions of--if I've learned something, if I've found something through the making of it, will it have the power of what I think a poem needs to have as it stirs our insides and rearranges us there.'

And, the third point I would make, too, is: the novelist Aimee Bender talks about the fact that if there's not a sense of discovery, if there's not an engagement that is honest and true, the reader knows that. And, there's a wonderful kind of communication with writer and reader, where, when you're reading something or when you're engaged with any work of art, really--I don't think it has to be limited to words or to the book--that consciously or unconsciously, you're always sensing something. And, if there's an honest kind of process of discovery that's happening on the artist's part, on the creator's part, the reader knows that somehow and will be that much more deeply engaged. And, I just love that. I love the mirroring that happens. And, part of what Make to Know teaches us is the importance of that, the significance of that, to how others will respond to the work that we create.

47:42

Russ Roberts: Yeah. And, I think mediocre art--art that doesn't break our hearts or inspire us, mediocre art--has no surprises because it fits the genre. I think I've talked about this recently: you know, country music, there's a certain expected ending, even plot-twist. And we listen to it because we find that comforting. And, there's nothing wrong with that. I'm a big fan; I love country music, by the way. There's many country music songs that actually do make me cry, so I have to take back what I said before. But, those type of genres don't get the respect that the kind you're talking about do. Maybe they should.

But, it just strikes me that part of it is, when I'm reading a great work of art, I don't know how it's going to end. And, I could think of a number of novels I've read recently--I'm not going to name them--where the ending was so disappointing because it felt like they couldn't figure out how it was going to end, so they just killed off a character and that's how it ended. And it just didn't--part of it is I didn't want them to do that. I felt cheated. But, part of it was just like, it didn't feel authentic. It didn't feel organic. And, I think a lot of what you're talking about is the organic nature of great art. That, it emerges--to take our economics example from Hayek and others. It emerges. It isn't top down. It's bottom up.

Now how can that be? Because, what could be more top down than the author? And, what we're suggesting here is that the author actually lets it blossom.

I think this plays a role also in interpretation. When I think about a great work of art and somebody comes up with an interpretation that's, say, different than what most people think it means and you say, 'I don't think that's what the author meant.' And, my answer to that often is, 'I don't think the author meant something necessarily. The author created something for you to explore alongside the author.' And, sometimes you see something the author didn't see that's part of the story. It is part of the narrative that the author unconsciously built, allowed you to find. And, if you learn something from that, the fact that it's, quote, "not what the author meant," as if the author only meant one thing--I mean, come on.

Lorne Buchman: Right. And, what I would add to that is the kind of honesty or courage of the creator in all of that and how that moves us or touches us as readers or observers.

As you were speaking, I was reminded of an acting teacher I had many years ago, at Stanford actually, who said to me, 'If an actor is not somehow telling a secret about themselves, nobody will be interested in their performance.' And, whether that secret is conscious or unconscious and whether the observer or the spectator in the theater or on the film is really responding consciously is not the point. The point is that there is a level of honesty and spontaneity that's coming through that engages us in a great acting performance. I think that's the same principle of what we're talking about here. That statement has stayed with me in all kinds of ways. I find it incredibly compelling and really absolutely true when I begin to think about the great performances that I've witnessed in my life.

Russ Roberts: Yes. Say it again and then I want to comment on it.

Lorne Buchman: That unless a performer is telling a secret about themselves on some level, consciously or unconsciously, nobody will be interested in their performance.

Russ Roberts: When you say that, it reminds me of one of the most remarkable evenings I ever had in the theater, which was the show Next to Normal, which is a deeply depressing--sometimes uplifting, but, just, I've never felt anything like it in the theater. And, the star of that show, when I saw it in Washington, was a veteran musical performer, Rachel Bay Jones. And, it's about a woman struggling with serious mental issues. And, at the end of the first act of that show, I couldn't move and just sat in my seat. My wife had to go to the restroom, so she got up. I mean, this was at intermission. And, she said in the ladies' room--in the women's bathroom--nobody was talking. They were so overwhelmed by the performance and the show.

And, part of what you're getting at with that quote is that to portray that person, you have to tap into the most vulnerable parts of yourself. And, I think what makes great acting--I'm going to say it a different way than your quote--but there's an inherent vulnerability of standing in front of an audience live, where you don't get a retake, and exposing yourself really emotionally as this show makes you do. And, it's a tightrope. Everything about it is dangerous--emotionally dangerous.

And, when you see it done well, it gives you access to another human being. Which is weird. Because, for all I know, Rachel Bay Jones is a totally happy, well-adjusted human being. That would make her unusual: most of us aren't; we're complicated. And, she, in that performance exposed her humanity for us to share. And, it's a intimacy that only great art can create. And, live, it's especially exhilarating, an amazing thing.

Lorne Buchman: And, it's an argument for Make to Know, because unless you're in the making--if you're acting to manifest some vision that's already in your head--as I did, when I talk about that experience I had when I was in college: Why I'm a terrible actor is I have a sense of what the character needs to be, and then every time I'm in rehearsal or performing and I'm not meeting that vision, I start panicking and I start getting out of character and I start losing the whole because I'm so in my head.

Whereas, an actor who is performing in the kind of way you just described, an actor who's telling a secret about themselves, an actor who is opening up their vulnerability is in a making process. They're not manifesting an already-thought-about vision because that would create a rigid, artificial performance. Whereas, one that is alive in the making and it allows for the discovery to happen through the making is the kind that has the power that you just elucidated.

Russ Roberts: And, I never thought about it: we use the word 'wooden' for an actor that is just delivering the lines and fitting a particular style that they think is appropriate as opposed to organic, which is not wooden, it's alive. It's more like a tree. A tree's not wooden. It has wood in it, but it's not wooden.

Lorne Buchman: Right. And, this illustrates why--the manifestation of vision or working toward vision can be a very narrowing, limiting, rigid, wooden way of creating. Whereas creating conditions and going to uncertainty and allowing discovery to happen, gives it an energy and a power and a humanity that is essential to great art.

55:39

Russ Roberts: And, you talk about in the book, and give us some insight into this because it's a world that most of us have no access to: in your youth you were a director, a theatrical director. And, I think most of us think of the director as the person who tells the actors what to say, where to stand, and how to say the lines. And, if they don't deliver the line right, we say, 'Once or more with feeling. Come on, do that better,' and 'Stand over there,' and, 'You should be puzzled at this point, because the script says puzzled.' And, that's what I always assumed directors do, but you found out it's more interesting and complicated than that.

Lorne Buchman: Yeah. And, actually it became my training, my work at Stanford and then in the Theater Department of Berkeley, all of that was I was directing. It's an amazing metaphor in a lot of ways. But to me, the work of the director is--again, you have a notion and idea surrounding a project, a text, a performance, whatever the case may be, and then you begin to work with a community.

And, the work of the director really has everything to do with exploring that notion, that idea, through a making process that we call 'rehearsal,' that we call engaging in character, the many levels of what happens along the way. And, then you begin to take that idea and it becomes better. It becomes better because there's a collaboration. It becomes more interesting because there is a conversation: there is a making process that happens within the context of the theater. And, the work of the director is to work with the community to shape that idea.

And, then, as the rehearsal period comes to an end and opening night looms, what the director has to do is hand over that to the actors--and the crew and the designers, etc.--but they're the ones who actually have to take ownership of that. They have to hold it in order to be able to create the most important moment, and that's between a spectator and a performer. And nobody's thinking about the director at that particular point. What the director has done is created a context for that to happen.

And, before we conclude, I'd like to get to that project in Holland because it so beautifully articulates what a make-to-know of leadership or directing can be. Right? And, I said, just to complete that, too, is that being a theater director and thinking about directing that way has created the greatest preparation I can imagine to be a college president. The work is exactly the same for me.

It is about having values, commitment, a sense of what it means to educate people well--in this case, artists and designers--to work with a community, this time not of actors and designers, but of faculty, of students, of trustees, of alumni, with these ideas, engaging in conversation, making sure that we are staying at the edge of what we understand, breaking the perimeter, breaking the boundaries, and helping shape those notions so that they are collectively that much stronger, that much more interesting, that much more compelling for educational purposes.

And, then at the end of the day, that most important moment, which in the theater was spectator and performer, now is between faculty and student, or student and student, or faculty--whatever the learning moment is. And, the president is, like the director, nowhere to be found. That's not the role. But you've enabled something. You've created a context for something to happen. You've drawn what's best in people to have that engagement, but they ultimately own it. And, therefore the learning can be as alive and as dynamic and as human as possible.

59:42

Russ Roberts: Well, I appreciate that career advice as a fellow college president. I want to say one thing about directing, and then I want you to close with the Holland story that you mentioned and that you talk about in the book. The thing about directing--sometimes an actor will praise a director. I have always wondered, 'Yeah, they just want to get the next gig.' But I think they are actually--I'm sure there are many directors who are actually deeply appreciated by the artists, the actors that work for them.

And, again, I'm talking about directors, but we think about actors as, 'Oh, they just say the lines.' But of course, as you point out they're doing something else. But, we often hear from an actor that, 'Oh yeah, so and so, that director really brought out the best in me.' And, I've always naively thought that meant, 'Oh yeah: they got me to say the line the right way,' or, 'They put my body or my facial expression in the right place,' or, 'They gave me something to think about.'

And, what you're really saying, and I think this is profoundly important for leadership generally, in all aspects of life, is a good leader puts people in a position to succeed and creates that preparation we were talking about earlier--that environment, that collaboration that you were talking about as a director.

And, it's not about telling them how to hold their face or when to pause or how to look at the other actors when they're delivering their lines. It's about creating a space for them to collaborate with each other and letting go.

And, that's that letting-go part that's so hard for, I think, the people at the top of an organization like a president or any type of leadership and management. Because, to take a famous quote that gets attributed to modern people, but it's actually at least as old as the 19th century--I think the late 19th century, early 20th century; I'm going to get this date wrong--but, the Panama Canal, the person who was in charge of the Panama Canal project said, 'There's no limit to what you can accomplish, if you don't care about who gets the credit.' I've heard that attributed to lots of modern politicians and other people, but it's a very old insight and it's a very deep insight.

And, what you're saying is: If you want your ensemble to live, to come to life, to be truly great art, organically, you have to let them go and you have to release them and you have to be content with setting the stage for them--to serve a bad pun--but set the stage for their work to blossom, and then letting it go where it's going to go, as opposed to dictating where it goes. I'm sure there's directors who--I assume there's some that did have an authoritarian aspect, but--

Lorne Buchman: Right. And, just to take this full circle and then it's a great segue to the Holland story. But, just to take this full circle: If you're not doing what you just described and instead saying, 'You need to do it this way, and this way, and this way,' you are again--the parallel is clear--you're telling them to manifest a vision not even theirs, the vision of the director. Right? And, then you have all the risks associated with that kind of wooden performance, that lack of context for discovery to happen that's going to really stir the souls of the people that are watching.

So, that's about[?] leadership. And, when you think about a make-to-know leadership, the--I put so much of this together when I discovered this story about this intersection in Holland. And, do you want to say something first? Sorry.

Russ Roberts: Mm-mm (negative). No, go ahead. It's a fantastic story. I love it. For an economist, it's a great story. For a Hayekian, it's a great story. For an artist, it's a great story, and for a leader. Go ahead, tell it.

Lorne Buchman: Exactly. So, the last chapter of the book really takes the make-to-know concept and tries to explore implications for how we live. And, when it comes to leadership, I came across this story that had a profound effect on me, and it goes like this:

There was a very dangerous intersection in a town in Northern Holland. And, there were cars crashing into each other. There were pedestrians that were being hit. There were bicyclists that were being injured. And, the more the problems ensued, the more the various different traffic engineers put up more signs--tried to kind of narrow the possibility for danger--'Slow down' here, and 'Don't cross' here' and 'Keep your distance' there.

Russ Roberts: And, 'Watch out for bicycles'.

Lorne Buchman: And, watch out for them, yeah. And, the more signs that came up, actually the worse it got. It was a terrible situation.

And, a traffic designer by the name of Hans Monderman came along; and he had a very different approach and a different thought process and was inspired by watching people on a crowded skating rink and how--except for the couple of jerks or something like that. But, basically people behaved actually very well and didn't really bump into each other, as if there were some kind of instinct that people had to be careful and to watch out for each other. Or a flock of birds or a school of fish, and how they moved together in this precise choreography.

And so, his whole philosophy was: Don't put more onto this intersection. In fact, take away. Open up the space. And, ultimately he designed a roundabout; and they took all signs away and they completely redesigned the intersection and it became a roundabout. And, immediately cars came in--and this is where the principle of uncertainty is so significant--as they were approaching the intersection, they weren't sure what was in front of them and so they naturally slowed down.

The accidents--the car crashes--stopped happening entirely, the pedestrians weren't hit. The bicyclists weren't injured. And, what the roundabout did was allowed, really, people to start owning--just what I was saying about the actor, too. They started to own--they were makers in their safety in that place of uncertainty. And, it brought out that instinct and what was best in them to create a safe environment.

So, you extrapolate that to what it means to be a leader, a make-to-know leader. The best we can do as leaders, I think, is to create roundabouts--create those structures that allow people to be makers in the process of what the organization needs to be, the values that need to be realized, the learning that needs to happen to engage in that world from the best part of us and with the instincts that are going to allow us to thrive optimally. And it's just, to me, a fantastic metaphor of what you can extend as you think about Make to Know, and as you think about what our work is as leaders.

Russ Roberts: And, we have an essay from years and years ago, that Dan Klein wrote on the skating rink as an example of emergent order. We have lots of other examples like that. They're all about bottom up versus top down.

And, there has to be a top-down element to leadership. Obviously that person had to think of the roundabout. They didn't just say, 'Well, we'll just take away all the signs, everybody will figure it out.' Although they do that in certain parts of the world: it works shockingly well, given how you might think it would work. But, there was leadership there of top down, but then the rest, it was really that, that top down structure allowed the bottom up to emerge and for people to take responsibility for their own interactions with each other. And, in almost all those--

Lorne Buchman: It's almost like--and, just to take it to that point we were making earlier, it's scary not to have the signs. It's scary not to have the voice of authority saying, 'This is the way to do it.' It creates a place of uncertainty that is destabilizing. But, when it works, it also brings out the creative. When it works, it brings out, again, what's best in people.

And, it's a different way of defining authority, is another way of saying what you're saying, too: that, the authority is not 'I have the answers'; it's not a follow-the-leader kind of paradigm. It's: 'I'm helping this community create a structure so that it can thrive in the best possible way.'

Russ Roberts: My guest today has been Lorne Buchman. His book is Make to Know. Lorne, thanks for being part of EconTalk.

Lorne Buchman: Delightful. Thank you.

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Lorne Buchman on Creativity, Leadership, and Art - Econlib

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When we see Michaelangelo's David or the design of the Apple Store, we assume a genius with a predetermined vision was the key to the outcome. Yet as Lorne Buchman, author of Make to Know, tells EconTalk's Russ Roberts, great art is more about embracing the process of exploration and the results that emerge in the process [...]

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8 Traits of Flow According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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8 Traits of Flow According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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8 Traits of Flow According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes 'Flow' as a state of complete absorption in the current experience. Read all about flow theory here.

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What's the difference between creativity and innovation?

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Department of Cognitive Neurology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany

University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany

Max Planck Institute for Neurological Research, Cologne, Germany

The term "predictive brain" depicts one of the most relevant concepts in cognitive neuroscience which emphasizes the importance of "looking into the future", namely prediction, preparation, anticipation, prospection or expectations in various cognitive domains. Analogously, it has been suggested that predictive processing represents one of the fundamental principles of neural computations and that errors of prediction may be crucial for driving neural and cognitive processes as well as behavior. This review discusses research areas which have recognized the importance of prediction and introduces the relevant terminology and leading theories in the field in an attempt to abstract some generative mechanisms of predictive processing. Furthermore, we discuss the process of testing the validity of postulated expectations by matching these to the realized events and compare the subsequent processing of events which confirm to those which violate the initial predictions. We conclude by suggesting that, although a lot is known about this type of processing, there are still many open issues which need to be resolved before a unified theory of predictive processing can be postulated with regard to both cognitive and neural functioning.

In 1637 the Art of Worldly Wisdom taught us that "even knowledge has to be in the fashion" ( Gracian, 1991 ). The experience of working in neurosciences similarly illustrates that different times bring different research areas to the front, and these, in turn, promote certain concepts and ideas that draw a lot of attention and drive the field for a certain period of time. Such "knowledge in fashion" typically fundamentally changes the way we conceptualize cognitive and neural processing by opening new paradigms, new interpretations and new perspectives. We suggest that the concept of a predictive brain can be considered as somewhat "in fashion" at the moment. It is an old idea being brought back to life in numerous areas of research where it is triggering small or larger-scale paradigm shifts. Terms such as prediction, prospection, anticipation, expectation, preparation as well as violations of expectations or prediction errors are being more and more present and exploited in our daily science. And, yet, although many researchers agree when emphasizing the pivotal role of prediction in both cognitive and neural processing, few would show the same level of concurrence with respect to the endorsed terminology, definitions, exemplary phenomena considered representative for such processing or the mechanisms suggested to underlie their occurrence. In fact, while some views and frameworks which have been put forward within this field can be considered mutually independent, others could be described as complimentary or occasionally even opposing. Therefore, it is of relevance to try and mutually compare these different views as this may reveal not just the widely emphasized and agreed-upon benefits of predictive processing, but also differences or even inconsistencies between approaches as well as the open questions which remain to be addressed within this field.

In a very broad sense, predictive processing refers to any type of processing which incorporates or generates not just information about the past or the present, but also future states of the body or the environment. Such directedness towards the future has long been recognized as relevant and beneficial for different aspects of information processing, such as perception, motor and cognitive control, decision making, theory of mind and other cognitive processes in humans as well as, in a more rudimentary form, animals. Historically, the investigation of anticipatory mechanisms and representations started almost in parallel in the contexts of perceptual and motor processing. One of the first proposals that expectations are intrinsically related to actions was formulated in the 19th century within the ideomotor principle which has recently been revisited by theories suggesting the existence of shared or common codes between perception and action ( James, 1890 ; Prinz, 1990 ; Hommel et al., 2001 ; Stock and Stock, 2004 ). Several decades later, similar ideas emphasizing a close interaction between sensory and motor processing have been suggested within the field of motor control. This was primarily motivated by initial investigations aimed at resolving a very fundamental question of how our visual world remains stabile despite constant image displacement introduced by eye and head movements. Early in the 20th century, Mach and Uexkuell offered a theoretical solution to this question which suggested that motor activity directly influences sensory processing, an idea which was already present in the thinking of Bell, Purkinje and von Helmholtz ( Bridgeman, 2007 ). This was experimentally confirmed in 1950 when the terms "efference copy" and "corollary discharge", concepts which are today widely accepted in the context of forward models in the motor and other cognitive domains, have been first introduced ( Grüsser, 1995 ). While these approaches postulated how action selection depends on anticipated action outcomes and demonstrated how motor commands can be directly incorporated into sensory processes, early psychological experiments conducted by Wundt, Lange and James demonstrated how executing such actions becomes more efficient when these are based on appropriate perceptual expectations ( LaBerge, 1995 ). In this view anticipation was treated as a form of attention which was regarded beneficial as it allowed more pertinent reactions in the immediate situation. James even conceptualized sensory anticipation as "pre-perception" of an event, given that it reflects the pre-activation of relevant brain structures which reduces the need for very elaborate processing following the actual event presentation ( James, 1890 ). In addition to this, the current research on prediction in perception has been greatly influenced by von Helmholtz who argued that sensory systems evolved in order to infer the causes of changes in sensory inputs ( Friston and Stephan, 2007 ), thus equating perception with recognition, namely inference about the state of the world. Although it is theoretically conceivable that such inference could be accomplished though different types of computations, it has lately been demonstrated that it, in fact, incorporates predictive mechanisms supported by recurrent neural processing ( Friston et al., 2006 ; Bar, 2007 ). During the early decades of psychological research the importance of expectations was also emphasized for other cognitive functions such as, e.g., learning ( Tolman, 1948 ) as well as behavioral sequencing, namely serial ordering of behavior across different hierarchical levels ( Lashley, 1951 ).

Although suggestions regarding the importance of predictive mechanisms originate from very early phases of both psychology and neurosciences, until recently they have not been strongly advocated in the majority of frameworks of cognitive and neural processing. Specifically, typical approaches in delineating cognitive processes postulate a rather serial process, starting with sensory, continuing with executive and "higher cognitive" functions and ending in overt behavior. Such thinking stems from the original behaviorist conceptualizations which emphasized the linear progression from sensory stimulation to overt behavior, a view which was also present in early information-processing cognitivist theories. And, even though the extreme behaviorist stimulus-response view of human behavior is today rarely or almost never advocated, different cognitive processes are today still dominantly studied in isolation. In addition, although rarely explicitly postulated, it is often assumed that a given process of interest starts with the output of some earlier, lower-level process and terminates once it provides input to the next processing stage. For example, one typically assumes that executing movements follows sensory processing and decision making while object recognition occurs once low-level visual processing is finished, providing input for higher-level cognitive functions. Although such hypotheses are not labeled as "reactive" or "non-predictive", they are in many ways challenged by conceptualizations promoted by explicitly defined predictive frameworks. These introduce paradigms and findings which indicate high inter-dependence of processes which are typically investigated in isolation, such as action and perception. In addition, although they do not question the importance of the feedforward information flow, these approaches primarily emphasize the relevance of feedback and recurrent processing. This does not imply that feedback or top-down biases represent exclusively predictive phenomena or that they are incompatible with more traditional views on cognitive or neural processing. After all, the ideas regarding constant exchange between incoming sensory data and existing knowledge used for postulating hypothesis regarding sensations have been advocated in the "analysis by synthesis" views formulated in the early days of cognitive psychology ( MacKay, 1956 ). Regardless of this, however, the importance of top-down processing is emphasized much more within predictive approaches which often aim at determining how previous knowledge influences and guides current event processing. These approaches show how, given the levels of ambiguity and noise which is always present both in the environment and our neural system, such prior biases become crucial for facilitating and optimizing current event processing, regardless of whether it concerns recognizing objects, executing movements or scaling emotional reactions. They allow us to act, not solely react once all relevant information has been presented and fully processed, by making predictions about what to expect next while talking into account the current context and previous experiences integrated across different timescales.

In the previous paragraph, a general predictive approach to cognitive and neural processing has been compared, but not directly contrasted with classical behaviorist and early information- processing views on neural and cognitive processing. In addition to this, predictive frameworks can also be more directly contrasted with approaches which emphasize postdictive or retrospective processing mechanisms. Generally, such views suggest that efficient processing of events in ambiguous contexts does not need to result from effective preparation, but retrospective use of information regarding events which occurred following those of interest. However, although experimental evidence indicates that the brain uses such postdictive mechanisms in certain contexts ( Whitney and Murakami, 1998 ; Eagleman and Sejnowski, 2000 ; Enns and Lleras, 2008 ), there is no unified retrospective or postdictive framework which may be contrasted with the predictive ones. And, although the suggested predictive and postdictive mechanisms represent mutually opposing phenomena, there is evidence that both types of processes may coexist in certain situations (e.g., Soga et al., 2009 ). Such contexts also clearly indicate how prediction may be dissociated from memory, a function with which it is intrinsically deeply related. As suggested before, prediction crucially depends on previous experience and builds on memories of various kinds. It does not, however, include mnemonic encoding nor can it be reduced to mnemonic recall. Furthermore, it does not necessarily have to occur in all contexts where previous experiences are available for generating expectations about the future. In contrast, predictive processes cooperate and actively build on mnemonic ones and, in that sense, help to generate goal-directed and adapted behavior.

Many Terms, How Many Meanings?

All throughout the history of cognitive (neuro)science, different terms, e.g., anticipation, expectation, prediction, prospection or preparation, have been used with respect to predictive processing. Although these do not necessarily transmit the same meaning, they are rarely clearly differentiated. For example, LaBerge (1995) defined the terms "anticipation" or "preparation" as elevated levels of processing in sensory or motor areas occurring prior and facilitating the processing of the expected perceptual or motor event. In contrast, the term "expectation" reflects a memory component as it refers to an item stored in either working or long-term memory which includes the information regarding the spatial and temporal characteristics of the expected event ( LaBerge, 1995 ). Given that such representations can also be coded in rather abstract or verbal forms they do not necessarily presuppose a pre-activation of the relevant sensory cortices. A somewhat different distinction is offered by Butz et al. (2003) who compared the usage of the terms anticipation and prediction. According to this view, these terms convey partially different meanings: while prediction refers to a representation of an event (potentially comparable to the previous specification of the term expectation), anticipation describes the impact of predictions on current behavior, e.g., decisions and actions based on such predictions. Even though not completely specified, these are still somewhat more clearly defined when compared to the widely used term "prospection". Gilbert and Wilson (2007 , p. 1352) define prospection as an ability to "pre-experience the future by simulating it in our minds" which may, however, lack the detail and richness of genuine perceptions. Given that these simulations often do not mimic events of interest in a very reliable and realistic fashion, they are prone to errors which reflect mistakes in representing the context or content of simulated events. For example, such simulations are typically shortened and essentialized when compared to real events. In addition, while often being based on specific exemplars which are not representative for the target scenario, they also tend to be run in a comparative and decontextualized manner ( Gilbert and Wilson, 2007 , 2009 ). Thus, although prospection can include some aspects of both expectation and anticipation, it is not clearly specified in which extent and under which conditions. Therefore, this term is more suited to refer to a more general orientation towards the future in a sense that stored information is constantly used to imagine, simulate and predict future events ( Schacter et al., 2007 ). This specification may, however, not be quite in line with the view endorsed by Schütz-Bosbach and Prinz (2007) who define prospective codes in event production and simulation as representations of present events which contain information pertaining to their future effects or goals. In this sense, prospective codes describe specific effects associated with a certain event and are therefore similar to the previous specification of expectations. However, prospective coding as used in this context should not be confused with the account of predictive coding which describes how causes are mapped to their sensory expressions (e.g., motor command to sensory consequences of such a command), a process not necessarily synonymous with forecasting ( Friston et al., 2006 ; Kilner et al., 2007 ).

In addition, although some aspects of predictive processing have traditionally been regarded as specific forms of attention, it has recently been suggested that these represent fully distinct phenomena in the sense that expectations guide visual processing based on prior likelihood in contrast to attention which prioritizes sensory processing based on the motivational relevance of presented stimuli ( Summerfield and Egner, 2009 ). Although appealing, such separation may not be warranted as attention unifies a broad range of phenomena aimed not just at selecting motivationally relevant stimuli, but also maintaining relevant activity and, importantly, preparing for the incoming events ( LaBerge, 1995 ). Such broad conceptualization is not just a historical relict, but also reflects the fact that all described phenomena [selective attention, sustained attention (vigilance) as well as preparation], reflect focusing or enhancing the processing of currently relevant information in contrast to, e.g., arousal or alertness which represent non-specific activation phenomena ( Oken et al., 2006 ). Therefore, when comparing the terms prediction and attention, it may be of use to clearly specify the aspect of attentive processing to which predictive processing is being compared. Among these different aspects, selective attention bears the most similarity with prediction and these can partly overlap in some underlying neural mechanisms, although they may also be characterized by different temporal course, type of information used for biasing information processing or other features.

In summary, although a wide range of terms exist for describing the basic phenomenon of foresight, these are not consistently used and are often interchanged. This is somewhat problematic, as the lack of systematization in terminology may become reflected in the lack of systematization in understanding the phenomenon of interest. Overall, there seems to be an agreement that the term expectation describes the representations of what is predicted to occur in the future. We suggest that the process of formulating and communicating these expectations to the sensory or motor areas which become activated prior to the realized event could, in turn, be summarized under the term anticipatory or preparatory processing. While this type of processing describes expectations formulated on short timescales, consideration of potential distant future events could be termed prospection. The term prediction has previously been used to describe both a single event expected within a certain context, and the overall process of postulating such "single predictions". Given this ambiguity, the term prediction (predictive processing) could preferentially be used for describing the general orientation towards the future which includes a wide range of predictive phenomena, although in some contexts it may also serve as an appropriate synonym for expectation (Figure 1 ).

Nature and Strength of Prediction

In the previous paragraphs we have introduced the basic terminology which describes different facets of predictive processing and indicated some inconsistencies in its usage. However, even if this terminology was to become more uniform and agreed upon, it would still not solve all existing problems in this area, as a more elaborate systematization which could account for differences between different levels, timescales or types (e.g., implicit and explicit) of predictions would still be lacking. Specifically, the nature and strength of predictions varies greatly in different contexts and may be influenced by different factors, e.g., the strength of the relationship between different events, frequency or context of their occurrence, etc. While in some situations expectations can be formulated in a rather unspecific manner and be restricted to a selected set of event features, e.g., sensory modality or location of an incoming stimulus, in others they may be very specific and pertain to the exact stimulus identity as well as the timing of its appearance. In addition, although a separation between implicit anticipations expressed through habits (behavior) and explicit ones which include representations of the predicted future states has been suggested ( Pezzulo, 2008 ), it is still not clear whether these should be considered as a dichotomy or if it would be more appropriate to posit a continuous distribution of representations characterized by different degree of explicitness. Furthermore, prediction can take place on different temporal scales. First, expectations can be formulated based on the knowledge gained through long-term experience ( Bar, 2007 ) or learning triggered by short-term exposure to non-random patterns ( Schubotz, 2007 ). Second, it is possible to predict events which are expected to occur in different moments in the future, e.g., those expected to occur within seconds-range in contrast to those which may occur in the distant future. Long-term prediction is usually used "offline" and is not necessarily coupled with any immediately relevant or running process in contrast to short-term prediction which is more likely to be used "online" for regulating the ongoing behavior, as exemplified in motor control where it is coupled to the current sensorimotor cycle ( Pezzulo et al., 2008 ). Consequently, prediction occurring on shorter timescales is typically more accurate when compared to long-term planning. In this context it is important to note that the timescale of prediction should not be confused with the concept of temporal expectations, namely a foresight of when something will occur ( Nobre et al., 2007 ), which interact with expectations about other event properties in order to optimize our behavior. In addition, it is possible to generate multiple expectations pertaining to different points in space and time, as done in hierarchical predictive systems ( Pezzulo et al., 2008 ) which capture the hierarchical organization of cognitive processes, the neural system and behavior ( Dehaene and Changeux, 1997 ; Friston et al., 2006 ; Grafton and Hamilton, 2007 ; Kiebel et al., 2008 , 2009 ). Furthermore, it has been shown that multiple expectations pertaining to the same event occurring at one point in time may also be formulated across different brain systems. For example, Ritter et al. (1999) demonstrated how rare predictable tones may be classified as violations of expectations at a preattentive, lower level of cognitive processing and, in the same time, as expected events at a higher level. Expectations of such different type and specificity could be mediated through different mechanisms or, alternatively, be based on the same types of processes partially implemented within different brain regions. Understanding how such different types of predictions are coded in the brain will be crucial in understanding their mutual relations and potential interactions. In summary, in describing different aspects of prediction, it is always important to clearly specify as many features of such processing as possible. As indicated in this paragraph and Figure 2 , there exist numerous factors which may be of relevance in this context. Although it may sometimes be difficult to clearly specify all of them, it is nevertheless important to try, as this may substantially aid general understanding and future progress within the field.

Prerequisites and Benefits of Prediction

Prerequisites of prediction

While the majority of previous examples indicate how temporal structure of incoming events affords predictability, spatial or more abstract relations between events can also become important sources of predictions. Such relations can be conceptualized as context frames, namely contextual structures which provide sets of expectations about the identity of stimuli and thus facilitate perception and action ( Bar, 2004 ; Fenske et al., 2006 ). More elaborate long-term predictions or simulations of the future can, on the other hand, be based on recombinations of past events and concrete episodes contained within the individuals' episodic memory ( Schacter et al., 2007 ) and used for creating "memories for the future" ( Ingvar, 1985 ).

Benefits of prediction

As previously mentioned, the benefits of preparation have been recognized very early both in the motor and the perceptual domain. Behavioral experiments conducted by Wundt showed that attention and expectations related to the upcoming stimulus can shorten perception time, while Lange demonstrated beneficial behavioral effects following the correct anticipation of a response ( LaBerge, 1995 ). Ever since the 19th century, more and more advantages of predictive in contrast to pure reactive processing have been postulated. Llinas (2002) argued that predictions identified at different levels of processing save resources and allow the perceiver to prepare the appropriate reactions. They can lead to faster recognition and interpretation of events encountered in the environment ( Bar, 2007 ) by limiting the repertoire of potential responses to such events. Given that the information relevant for planning and executing appropriate reactions are available sooner, measurable benefits of anticipatory processing include an increase in accuracy, speed or maintenance of information processing ( LaBerge, 1995 ). In addition, expectations allow us to construct a coherent and stable representation of the environment which is usually not easy, given the available, often impoverished (noisy and delayed) information ( Kveraga et al., 2007a ). Moreover, they may guide top-down deployment of attention, improve information seeking as well as subsequent decision making ( Butz and Pezzulo, 2008 ). Thus, in a way, prediction allows us to act, and not solely react to events occurring around us.

On a more general functional and behavioral level, the ideomotor principle suggested that anticipated sensory consequences of one's actions can trigger and guide behavior ( Hommel et al., 2001 ), which has been supported by studies showing that representations of events or actions include the anticipated effects of those events as well as intentions behind the actions ( Kerzel et al., 2000 ; Schütz-Bosbach and Prinz, 2007 ). Thus, Schütz-Bosbach and Prinz (2007) suggested that both perception and production of such events rely on prospective codes which incorporate information about their future states. Kunde et al. (2007) similarly argued that anticipation constitutes a necessary prerequisite for action because any action or response needs to start with a response-related anticipation. In this view, voluntary behavior in general is initiated and controlled by a representation of its expected outcomes ( Hoffmann et al., 2007 ), illustrating how anticipation lies in the foundations of goal-directed behavior ( Pezzulo, 2008 ). The initiation of such behavior could additionally be facilitated by simulations of the expected emotional consequences of actions (premotions) which can also be used as a basis for additional predictions ( Gilbert and Wilson, 2009 ).

Importance of Prediction Across Neurocognitive Domains

In an attempt to define unifying mechanisms across different systems, simulation theories of cognition have emphasized the role of internal simulations or emulations not just within one, but across many different cognitive domains, arguing that these can mostly be reduced to covert simulations based on internal models ( Hesslow, 2002 ; Grush, 2004 ). A crucial representational status with respect to such simulation processes, especially with respect to different aspects of social cognition, e.g., action understanding or language, has been proposed for the so-called "mirror neuron system" ( Gallese, 2007 ). Although potentially appealing, many of such large-scale interpretations which incorporate a wide range of cognitive functions are still somewhat underspecified with respect to the mechanisms and neural architecture underlying different types of processes. In addition, even the terminology which these endorse is still not used in a systematic fashion. For example, simulations and emulations have previously been differentiated with respect to the type of phenomenon (goals and/or algorithms used by the original process) ( Moulton and Kosslyn, 2009 ) or process (related to body or the environment) ( Poirier and Hardy-Vallee, 2005 ) they mimic, as well as brain regions and networks they engage ( Grush, 2004 ). Furthermore, simulations based on internal models which are assumed to incorporate all details related to the mimicked events should not be confused with those which underlie general forecasting of (distant) future events ( Gilbert and Wilson, 2007 ). While the first type of simulations might be implemented in the motor system and used, for example, for understanding the actions of others ( Jeannerod, 2001 ), the latter is based on a somewhat flexible recombination of past episodes and primarily relies on processing within memory-related systems ( Schacter et al., 2007 ).

On a comparable scale of relevance, but much more computationally specified, Friston (2005) proposed a pivotal role of expectations across different levels of neural processing: not only is the common code of brain functioning a predictive one, but our predictions act as a form of self-fulfilling prophecy. According to this view, predictive processing is inherent to all levels of our hierarchically organized neural system. In addition, predictions are suggested to drive our perception, cognition and behavior in a sense that we do not only passively match expected to incoming events and objectively evaluate the accuracy of our expectations, but actively try to fulfill those predictions by preferentially sampling corresponding features in the environment. This implies that the suggested impact of predictions may also be disadvantageous as these may constrain our processing and behavior, always keeping us within the limits defined by our previous experiences. If true, this might suggest that a more reactive strategy based on detailed consideration of all incoming information might qualitatively be more advantageous. However, it has been suggested that this is not the case ( Friston and Stephan, 2007 ). Furthermore, exploration and novelty have rewarding properties of their own ( Bunzeck and Duzel, 2006 ; Knutson and Cooper, 2006 ) which may result in balancing between exploratory and exploitative behavior across different contexts. In summary, it is becoming more and more clear that anticipation and expectations do not just represent isolated phenomena, but one of the main unitary principles of cognition characteristic not just for humans but also animals, e.g., dogs, snakes or insects ( Roitblat and Scopatz, 1983 ; Rainer et al., 1999 ; Webb, 2004 ). This may justify recent claims according to which the mind itself can be conceived of as an anticipatory device ( Pezzulo et al., 2007 ). As described in more detail in the Section "Introduction," such conceptualization is far from behaviorist stimulus-response models of human behavior or later cognitivist metaphors of the mind as a computer, namely a highly efficient, primarily feedforward processing machine.

Mechanisms of Prediction

Anticipatory or predictive processing is directed towards the future and, at the same time, highly dependent and grounded in the information from the past. This bridging over different temporal points and taking advantage of the past in order to improve behavior in the future is suggested to be the core capacity which makes our cognitive brain so efficient ( Kveraga et al., 2007a ). Given that prediction is inherent to many different levels and types of processes, it is not easy to identify common neural mechanisms supporting such processing across all contexts. While some of these effects could be mediated in a somewhat indirect manner through changes in alertness and attention ( Brunia, 1999 ), most of them should be considered direct. Specifically, prediction is associated with a wide range of neural phenomena within different brain networks, e.g., changes of neuronal threshold in sensory cortices ( Gomez et al., 2004 ), long-range phase synchronization ( Gross et al., 2006 ), changes in connectivity across brain regions ( O'Reilly et al., 2008 ) or existence of preparatory-set cells in the prefrontal or parietal cortex ( Quintana and Fuster, 1992 ). Generally, as will be shown in the following sections, predictive processing has been related to almost all brain regions and networks. Such results should not be surprising, given the wide range of contexts which afford predictions.

Sources and sites of predictions in perception

In addition to understanding preparatory effects in relevant sensory cortices, it is important to describe how these effects are initiated and controlled. In an attempt to answer this question, Gomez et al. (2004) suggested that frontomedial cortical areas, namely the supplementary motor area and anterior cingulate cortex, represent the best candidate areas responsible for initiating the process of preparing for perception (and action) by recruiting specific sensory (and motor) cortices needed for subsequent processing. An important role of orbitofrontal as well as medial prefrontal cortex in formulating expectations about incoming visual objects which is crucial for object recognition has also been suggested by Kveraga et al. (2007b) and Summerfield et al. (2006) . On the other hand, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was hypothesized to be implicated in sustaining the activation of the sensory (and motor) cortices ( Gomez et al., 2004 ). Similarly, Brunia (1999) suggested a crucial role of prefrontal cortex in organizing anticipatory behavior by activating cortico-cortical and thalamo-cortical loops to sensory (and motor) areas after the preparatory set had been established. Once formed, the preparatory set could be communicated through changes in brain's oscillatory activity, specifically increases in phase synchronization of neuronal populations in executive areas triggering the increased effective synaptic gain of neurons in target sensory population ( Engel et al., 2001 ). Along these lines, Liang et al. (2002) have shown that synchronized activity in prefrontal cortex during anticipation of a visual stimulus predicts characteristics of early visual processing and behavioral response. Therefore, these authors argued that synchronized oscillations in prefrontal cortex represent a plausible candidate for sustaining visual anticipation, proposing that such anticipatory control develops as a consequence of accumulating prior experience.

Everything previously mentioned within this section suggests that one useful way of conceptualizing predictive processing in perception may include distinguishing between "sources" which formulate expectations and "sites" to which these are then communicated. And, although this distinction may generally prove to be useful, it may not always be easy to incorporate. For example, it is by now well established that predictive processing is not a phenomenon restricted to two levels of brain processing (one source and one site), but one which occurs across multiple levels of hierarchy. According to the predictive coding model, visual processing can be described as an integration of top-down expectations and bottom-up stimulus information occurring across multiple levels within a hierarchical architecture ( Rao and Ballard, 1999 ; Friston, 2005 ; Friston and Kiebel, 2009 ). In this view, top-down expectancy biases are communicated through cortical feedback connections, while feedforward ones convey error signals which indicate the goodness-of-fit of predictions and incoming stimulus information, namely the difference (residual error) between top-down and bottom-up signals. While the importance of prediction errors in this framework will be described in the later sections, at this point it is important to notice that most levels within such a hierarchy can be considered as both sources and sites of predictions. Furthermore, it is not always so that high-level associative areas have to be responsible for generating predictions about the incoming input. As indicated by research related to the auditory mismatch negativity event-related component, predictions generated by representations of rules could also be formulated within a sensory, in this case auditory, system itself ( Schröger, 2007 ; Winkler, 2007 ).

Internal models mediate prediction across many domains

The brain as a prediction device

In summary, there are different ways of conceptualizing and differentiating the role of different brain areas in prediction. One way is to differentiate between sources and sites of predictions, as shown in the example of perception. In this view, higher-level areas such as lateral, medial, orbital prefrontal and premotor regions could be considered as sources which formulate expectations and communicate them to lower-level, typically sensory areas. However, as previously elaborated, this view can only be considered as a very rough simplification. Furthermore, it may be useful to consider numerous dimensions which have previously been discussed and suggested to be relevant in defining the nature of predictive phenomena. This includes, for example, the timescale of prediction, as some regions may be more relevant for short-term, e.g., the premotor cortex, in contrast to others which are important for prediction across different timescales, such as, e.g., the prefrontal cortex. In addition, the cognitive domain, e.g., emotional, perceptual or motor, or the nature of predicted features, e.g., object identity or the context within which it is usually encountered, can be considered as crucial in determining the sources within which such expectations are formulated. An alternative way of determining which levels and types of predictions are associated with certain brain areas is to specify more holistic models. Previously described predictive coding model can be viewed as such. Within this framework the brain is seen as a "Bayesian inference machine", constantly building models of the environment and the body, allowing the brain to predict their respective future states ( Knill and Pouget, 2004 ; Friston and Stephan, 2007 ). Importantly, such general nature of brain processing can then account for many phenomena across domains and processes, e.g., perception, attention, action or learning ( Friston, 2005 ; Friston and Stephan, 2007 ). An important aspect of this and other models of prediction relates to testing the validity of posited expectations by comparing them to the realized events. Potential outcomes of such testing will be described in the following section.

When Predictions Meet Reality

Although the process of formulating expectations is interesting in its own right, it is also quite fascinating to consider what happens once the external event occurs, especially in cases where it does not meet the initial expectations. In the previous sections it was suggested that expected stimuli (matches) are processed in a more efficient manner than the unexpected ones (mismatches), as indicated by more accurate and faster reactions to these events. However, efficiency should not be confused with relevance or associated priority. On the contrary, given that these represent pure confirmations of correctly formulated expectations and signal correct learning, matches carry little informational value and are therefore not relevant for the system. Consequently, an expected event does not need to be explicitly represented or communicated to higher cortical areas which have processed all of its relevant features prior to its occurrence. In contrast, errors of prediction have much greater value ( Friston and Stephan, 2007 ), as they may signal unsuccessful learning, a major change in the surroundings or noise and smaller changes in the body or the environment, corresponding to normal (plant or world) drifts which typically occur over time ( Grush, 2004 ). Therefore, registering and further processing events which deviate from predictions is important, but "costly" as they draw attentional resources needed in order to check their behavioral relevance ( Corbetta et al., 2002 ) which will determine their subsequent treatment. For example, errors of prediction which are irrelevant for the current mental set or reflect noise in the environment can be registered and ignored, allowing the individual to reorient himself to the task at hand ( Escera et al., 2000 ; Corbetta et al., 2002 ). However, when these are relevant and informative, e.g., in situations where one fails to learn the relevant contingencies or the environment suddenly changes, they can trigger an update of one's knowledge ( Winkler et al., 1996 ; Winkler and Czigler, 1998 ) and behavioral adaptations. Therefore, the cost associated with processing these events may in the end turn to be beneficial, as it can lead to an adaptive reaction to the changing environment. Such significance of deviant events for cognitive processing and behavior is reflected on the level of our nervous system which is highly sensitive to novel events, changes in the environment and other types of errors in prediction ( Corbetta and Shulman, 2002 ; Friston et al., 2006 ).

The question of how errors of prediction are processed online relates strongly to the general issue of the integration of top-down and bottom-up information which has been posited to rely on error-minimalization mechanisms ( Grossberg, 1980 ; Mumford, 1992 ; Ullman, 1995 ; Friston, 2005 ; Kveraga et al., 2007b ). According to the predictive view, expectations mediated through feedback connections represent top-down information which are compared and integrated with bottom-up signals communicated through feedforward connections, a process accomplished through specific synchronization patterns visible across different levels of the hierarchy ( Kveraga et al., 2007b ) and changes in connectivity between relevant regions ( den Ouden et al., 2009 ). It has already been described that mismatches which are detected through such a comparison elicit more pronounced responses which get communicated to the next level in the hierarchy using feedforward connections. The size of such mismatches (prediction error) is suggested to reflect surprise which the brain tries to minimize in order to maintain present and future stability ( Friston and Stephan, 2007 ). In contrast, matches produce non-salient responses and their overall processing is suppressed. In this view, postulated predictions act as a form of perceptual filter, as their accuracy determines which information is suppressed at an earlier processing stage (match) and what is communicated to a higher level (mismatch). It has been suggested that this conceptualization may be incompatible with current theories of attention which posit an enhancement of stimulus-driven activity that it is consistent with top-down bias communicated through feedback connections ( Desimone and Duncan, 1995 ; Summerfield and Egner, 2009 ). However, it has recently been demonstrated that this may not be the case, as the predictive coding model can be considered mathematically equivalent with a particular form of biased competition model of attention ( Spratling, 2008a , b ).

It is plausible to expect that the near future will being a formulation of an unifying framework bridging seemingly contradictory attentional and predictive phenomena, given that both of these reflect comparable processing biases implemented within the same hierarchical brain architecture. An additional open issue concerns the differences in dynamics of processing events which confirm and violate previous expectations. Although it was previously mentioned that more elaborate processing should follow the presentation of mismatches, Summerfield and Koechlin (2008) have suggested a more refined hypothesis according to which match-suppression should occur in lower-level hierarchical areas in contrast to match-enhancement which is to be expected in higher-level regions. In accordance with this, these authors demonstrated how processing expected stimuli preferentially engages ventral prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortex ( Summerfield and Koechlin, 2008 ). However, the importance of these regions has previously been identified in the completely opposite context of detecting violations of expectations ( Nobre et al., 1999 ; Petersson et al., 2004 ; Petrides, 2007 ), leaving this issue to be settled in the future. And, although it has been suggested that the search of representation (prediction/match relevant) and error (mismatch signaling) neurons will be an important challenge for the future ( Summerfield and Egner, 2009 ), it is still not clear whether error-codes signaling a breach of expectations necessarily have to be implemented within single neurons, or if such signals could be implemented within dendrites of certain neuronal populations ( Spratling, 2008b ). In addition to identifying neural regions which preferentially process matches and mismatches, future research may benefit from investigating neural synchrony between relevant cortical regions across different levels of hierarchy ( Kveraga et al., 2007b ) as a potential complementary signature of (un)successful matching between top-down and bottom-up information. Clearly, much more research will be needed in order to clarify these issues.

In conclusion, anticipatory or predictive processing potentially reflects one of the core, fundamental principles of brain functioning which justifies the notion of "the predictive brain". Even if this statement is too strong, the relevance of prediction in cognitive and neural processing can still not be overestimated. Prediction allows us to direct our behavior towards the future, while remaining well-grounded and guided by the information pertaining to the present and the past. Furthermore, predictive processing represents one of the key features of many cognitive functions and is mediated through a wide selection of mechanisms expressed in numerous cortical and subcortical levels. Such benefits are widely acknowledged and have in recent years been greatly investigated.

However, although a lot is known about this type of processing, numerous open questions remain. Many of these can be identified with respect to each specific account or model incorporating or positing predictive mechanisms. Even more importantly, it seems even more difficult to reconciliate manifold views and theories which emphasize the importance of different brain systems implicated in predictive processing or bring together findings stemming from different domains, especially those aimed at exploring expectations of various types, specificities and temporal structure. An even bigger challenge will include comparing and reconciling predictive with non-predictive mechanisms of brain and cognitive functioning: as mentioned before, predictive mechanisms are rarely contrasted with clearly opposing approaches and some predictive phenomena may be rather similar to functions which have traditionally not been seen as predictive. Bringing these together will be an important experimental and theoretical task for the future.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

The authors thank Heike Schmidt-Duderstedt for help with the figures.

Poirier, P., and Hardy-Vallee, B. (2005). "Structured thoughts: the spatial-motor view," in The Compositionality of Meaning and Content, Vol. II. Applications to Linguistics, Psychology and Neuroscience, eds E. Machery, M. Werning and S. Gerhard (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag).

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The term "predictive brain" depicts one of the most relevant concepts in cognitive neuroscience which emphasizes the importance of "looking into the future", namely prediction, preparation, anticipation, prospection or expectations in various cognitive domains.

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Explains interactions between neural systems underlying the creative cognition.

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Department of Psychology and Methods, Jacobs University Bremen, Bremen, Germany

Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Clinic Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

Department of Health Psychology and Neurorehabilitation, SRH Mobile University, Riedlingen, Germany

Having a creative mind is one of the gateways for achieving fabulous success and remarkable progress in professional, personal and social life. Therefore, a better understanding of the neural correlates and the underlying neural mechanisms related to creative ideation is crucial and valuable. However, the current literature on neural systems and circuits underlying creative cognition, and on how creative drives such as motivation, mood states, and reward could shape our creative mind through the associated neuromodulatory systems [i.e., the dopaminergic (DA), the noradrenergic (NE) and the serotonergic (5-HT) system] seems to be insufficient to explain the creative ideation and production process. One reason might be that the mentioned systems and processes are usually investigated in isolation and independent of each other. Through this review, we aim at advancing the current state of knowledge by providing an integrative view on the interactions between neural systems underlying the creative cognition and the creative drive and associated neuromodulatory systems (see Figure 1).

Introduction

Consequently, creativity is a multidimensional domain that could be executed in the arts, science, stage performance, the commercial enterprise and business innovation ( Sawyer, 2006). Following Baas et al. (2015) who defined the roots of creative cognition in the arts and sciences, creativity is not just a cultural or social construct. Instead, it is an essential psychological and cognitive process as well ( Csikszentmihalyi, 1999; Sawyer, 2006; Kaufman, 2009; Gaut, 2010; Perlovsky and Levine, 2012). Even so, many experimental investigations on creativity have reported various findings that often seem to be inconsistent and scattered. One of the principal reasons for that could be due to the wide variety of the experimental approaches in the domain of creativity research and the immense diversity in measuring and interpreting creative performance ( Fink et al., 2007, 2014; Abraham, 2013; Zhu et al., 2013). In this review article we will discuss the relation between creative cognition, creative drives and their underlying neuromodulatory circuits (see Figures 1, 5 and Table 2). We will first elaborate on how different cognitive functions support creativity and on their neural basis as revealed by structural and functional brain imaging studies. Second, we will detail the link between mood and motivation as drives for creative performance and the role of dopamin (DA), noradrenaline (NE) and serotonin (5 HT) as key neuromodulatory systems. Next, we will discuss studies on pathological brain conditions which provide further evidence on the role of the neuromodulatory systems. Finally, based on this integrative view, we will list some open questions and provide suggestions for future research directions.

Figure 1. A schematic overview of the neurobiology of creativity as outlined in this review. It symbolizes the brain systems and neuromodulatory pathways underlying and modulating creative cognition and creative drive in health and disease. The creative cognition is based on various cognitive functions such as cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control, working memory (WM) updating, fluency, originality, and insights. The creative drive includes several factors that influence creativity such as emotion motivation, reward and other factors such as mood states, regulatory focus, and social interaction. The neuromodulatory pathways include the noradrenergic (NE), the dopaminergic (DA) and the serotonergic (5-HT) pathways.

Figure 2. A schematic overview of the link between creativity and different mood states (after Baas et al., 2008, 2013; De Dreu et al., 2008). It illustrates how activating and deactivating mood states (i.e., valences, motivational state), and regulatory focus influence creativity. A " >" symbolizes a higher influence in the condition left as compared to the right of the symbol. Symbols ± symbolize positive and negative influences, while an "X" symbolizes no influence revealed.

Figure 3. A schematic overview of the different networks in the brain involved in three dimensions of creativity (after Boccia et al., 2015): musical (red colored symbols), verbal (blue colored symbols), and visuospatial (green colored symbols). Filled symbols represent left hemispheric brain regions, open symbols represent right hemispheric regions. For simplicity, several separate foci within brain regions are represented by one single symbol. Brain regions are abbreviated as follows: PFC, prefrontal cortex; PCC, posterior cingulate cortex; IPL, intraparietal lobule; TC, temporal cortex; OCC, occipital cortex; Th, thalamus; CeC, cerebellar cortex; and CS, central sulcus. Black arrows symbolize the interaction between the executive control (EC) network and the default mode network (DMN) according to Beaty et al. (2017).

Figure 4. A schematic overview of the neurobiology of different facets of creativity as proposed from animal studies (after Kaufman et al., 2011). The creative animal model consists of three levels with increasing cognitive complexity: novelty, observational learning, and innovative behavior. The first level comprises of both the cognitive ability to recognize novelty, which is linked to hippocampal (HPC) function, and the seeking out of novelty, which is associated with the mesolimbic DA system. The second level refers to observational learning, which could range in complexity from imitation to the cultural transmission of creative behavior. Observational learning might critically depend on the cerebellum and the PFC. The third level is represented in the innovative behavior, which relates to specific recognition of a particular object characterized by novelty. This innovative behavior may be reliant upon PFC.

Figure 5. A schematic overview of the effects of the two DA pathways (the nigrostriatal and mesocortical DA) on the creative drives and the creative cognitions [i.e., executive functions (EFs)]. Both pathways influence creativity via the dual process model, which is composed of a resistance and cognitive flexibility. The prediction of creativity through EFs (i.e., shifting, inhibition and WM) requires an optimal balance between deliberate (controlled) processing and spontaneous processing. On the other hand, there is a link between reward (i.e., promises, training, and intrinsic interest) and creativity through the action effect binding. Moderating effects of mindset (cooperative and competitive) and cognitive resources on creative drives (i.e., mood, motivation, and emotion) is also illustrated. Numbers refer to references as indicated in Table 2.

Table 1. Potential candidate genes for creativity.

Table 2. References related to corresponding numbers in Figure 5.

Creative Cognition Is Rooted in Executive Functions (EFs)

The field of creative cognition deals with the understanding of the cognitive processes underlying creative performance. A pioneering study by Mednick (1962) linked creativity to associative thinking. This interpretation was not directed to any specific field of application such as art or science. Instead, it was attempted to define processes that underlie all creative thought. Rossmann and Fink (2010) extended Mednick's theory by investigating the relationship between individual differences in processing associative information and various aspects of creativity.

Along with a variety of creative psychometric tasks, these authors provided a slightly modified variant of Gianotti et al.'s (2001) list of word pairs and asked the participants (university students) to rank the semantic associative distance between the words of a given pair. This list comprised pairs of indirectly related (e.g., cat-cheese) and unrelated word pairs (e.g., subject-marriage). In comparison to the less creative group, the more creative group reported smaller distances between unrelated word pairs, which can be interpreted as that they found creative associations between usually unrelated words.

Within a latent variable model approach, Benedek et al. (2014) explained the association between fluid intelligence and creative cognition through a general executive component. According to Benedek et al. (2014), creativity was predicted by working memory (WM) updating and inhibition, but not by mental set shifting. Further, WM updating and the personality factor openness represented a related factor of the shared variance between creativity and fluid intelligence ( Benedek et al., 2014). Fleming et al. (2016) described associations between another personality trait, i.e., conscientiousness and mental set shifting, but not response inhibition nor WM updating. Level of conscientiousness influences whether people set and maintain long-range goals, deliberate over preferences (i.e., choices) or behave impulsively, and take obligations to others critically. It was associated with cognitive competencies which are related to rigid (i.e., inflexible) control over impulses (i.e., inhibition), and therefore might inhibit creativity. Mok (2014) highlighted the possibility for creative cognition to be originated from an optimal balance between spontaneous and controlled processes. It was hypothesized by Dietrich (2004) that the principal distinction between spontaneous and deliberate (i.e., controlled) modes of processing is the approach utilized to depict the unconscious novel information in WM. For example, the spontaneous process happens when the attentional system does not actively choose (decide or select) the content to become conscious, enabling unconscious thoughts that are relatively further random, unfiltered, and unusual to be represented in WM. On the other hand, deliberate insights are prompted by circuits in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and therefore tend to be structured, rational (logical), and corresponding to internalized values and belief systems. A delicate balance between further spontaneous processing vs. more controlled processing may likely enhance creative cognition to the extent that default activity does not become suppressed due to the substantial need for controlled processing ( Mok, 2012).

Cassotti et al. (2016) discussed how a dual-process model of creativity could expand our knowledge concerning the creative-cognitive associations. This dual-process model resembles the proposed model to account for reasoning and decision making ( Evans et al., 1993). According to the dual pathway of creativity model ( Nijstad et al., 2010), there are two qualitatively peculiar pathways to creative performance: the flexibility pathway and the persistence pathway. The flexibility pathway suggests stimulating creativity through a flexible switching between categories, approaches, and sets while the persistence pathway leads to creativity through hard work, systematic and effortful exploration of possibilities, and in-depth exploration of just a few categories ( Nijstad et al., 2010). Lu et al. (2017) also revealed that cognitive flexibility could enhance two critical forms of creativity (DT and CT) by reducing the cognitive fixation, which, however, at the same time reduces the creative benefits of cognitive persistence. Combined, during the process of task switching, there is often an implicit tradeoff between flexibility and persistence ( Nijstad et al., 2010). When task switching strengthens flexibility, it reduces persistence and vice versa ( Lu et al., 2017). Also, supported and directed effort can further improve creative performance (e.g., Lucas and Nordgren, 2015).

Concerning inhibitory control, it is acknowledged that this executive function (EF) might be a core process involved in creative problem solving and idea generations ( Cassotti et al., 2016). During generating creative thoughts, individuals of all ages (i.e., children, adolescents, and adults) tend to follow the path of least resistance. In the meantime, proposed solutions are constructed based on the most common and accessible information within a distinct specialty, which leads to a fixation effect. Given these points, the ability to think about the novel (original) ideas necessitates: (1) inhibiting spontaneous solutions, that cross to mind rapidly and unconsciously; and (2) exploring original (novel) ideas using a generative type of reasoning.

The Link Between Mood States, Motivation, Reward, and Creativity

How do Mood States Influence Creativity?

Consequently, mood shifts are crucial in scaling creativity. Along the same line, De Dreu et al. (2008) argued that activating moods (e.g., anger, fear, happiness, elation) induce more creative fluency (i.e., number of ideas or insights) and originality (i.e., novelty) than deactivating moods such as sadness, depression, relaxation, and sereneness do ( Figure 2; see also, Yang and Hung, 2015). According to De Dreu et al. (2008), activating moods could affect creative fluency and originality through enhancing cognitive flexibility when the tone is positive while enhancing persistence when the tone is negative (see also, To et al., 2015). Despite the previous findings, which related decreased creativity to an avoidance motivation and prevention focus when in a negative mood ( Baas et al., 2008, 2013), an intriguing investigation by Roskes et al. (2012) explicated the contrary. For instance, they indicated that avoidance motivation could stimulate creativity through cognitive effort. However, this finding is incompatible with the dual process model of creativity ( Nijstad et al., 2010), which suggests that both flexible and persistent processing styles could construct a creative output. In other words, avoidance motivation has often been related to decreased creativity since it elicits a relatively inflexible processing style ( Baas et al., 2008, 2013). Adjusting these disagreements, Roskes et al. (2012) viewed that people with an avoidance-motivated behavior are not incapable of being creative; instead, they have to compensate for their inflexible processing style by a demanding and constrained processing. Therefore, it is a matter of compensation. Noteworthy, Roskes et al. (2012) reported that whether the individuals are avoidance motivated or approach motivated, their creativity could be enhanced under certain circumstances. These circumstances necessitate their creativity to be directed to a role for goal achievement, which motivates them to exert an additional effort of high-cost cognitive function.

Moreover, cognitive flexibility (as measured by a switching task) could have a mediating impact on the association between the positive emotion and the insight problem solving, but not between the positive emotion and DT. Bledow et al. (2013) revealed a strong influence of the dynamic interaction of positive and negative mood on creativity. Extraordinary creativity, for example, necessitates that a person should experience an episode of negative affect. This episode should be followed by a reduction in negative affect and an increment in positive affect. This process is termed "an affective shift."

Does Reward Matter in the Case of Creativity?

A number of researchers highlighted the strong connection between reward and creativity ( Eisenberger and Selbst, 1994; Eisenberger and Cameron, 1998; Eisenberger et al., 1998, 1999; Eisenberger and Rhoades, 2001; Baer et al., 2003; Chen et al., 2012; Muhle-Karbe and Krebs, 2012; Volf and Tarasova, 2013; see, Figure 5 and Table 2). In the following subsection, we will detail this relationship. Muhle-Karbe and Krebs (2012) highlighted the impact of reward on the action-effect binding, which underlies the ideomotor theory. They defined this theory as the formation of anticipatory representations about the perceptual outcomes of an action, i.e., action-effect (A-E) binding, thus, presenting the functional basis of voluntary action control.

A startling study proposed that reward training could improve generalized creativity ( Maltzman, 1960; Eisenberger and Selbst, 1994; Figure 5 and Table 2). This enhancement requires the presence of a high degree of divergent thought and a reward. Eisenberger et al. (1998) argued that the assured reward improves creativity if there is an explicit positive relationship between creativity and reward (either currently or previously, i.e., it does not matter when). Besides, Eisenberger and Cameron (1998) focused on reward, intrinsic interest, and creativity. Herewith, the contribution of behavioral processes and cognitive-induced motivation represented possible determinants of the reward effects, which were crucial factors for enhancing creativity. Progressing in reward and creativity, Eisenberger et al. (1999) depicted the consequences of earlier experiences of a promised reward for creativity. They investigated how creativity (measured by a DT task) could be boosted by the distinction of a positive association between reward and creative novel performance. The demand for such novel performance in one task (whether associated with reward or not) established the promise of reward as a cue for creative performance. Herewith, the reward could either increase or reduce creativity depending on how it was supervised. As for the incremental effects of reward on creativity, Eisenberger and Rhoades (2001) questioned whether two-ways reward could enhance creativity. Based on their study, the reward required a contingent relation to creativity. This relation strengthened the extrinsic motivation. Hence, the expected reward for exceptional performance could boost creativity by enhancing the perceived self-determination and, consequently, the intrinsic interest. Later on, Chen et al. (2012) highlighted the interactive influences of the level and form of reward system design on group creativity, and how this interplay could assist in mastering the identified obstacles in the prior research.

Lastly, Volf and Tarasova (2013) argued about the impact of reward on the performance of creative verbal tasks. The promise of the monetary reward was favorable for creative thinking and original solutions. Interestingly, monetary reward-induced changes in brain oscillations, as measured with EEG, were characteristic of men but not women (i.e., a promise of a cash reward were correlated with EEG changes in men but not in women). For instance, in response to the monetary reward, men expressed an increase in both the θ2-rhythm asymmetry and the power of α rhythm. This finding reveals that women might refer to a tendency for a different effective strategy for processing verbal information to create a more original solution in the verbal task to receive a cash reward; thus, the promise of monetary reward is favorable for creative thinking and original solutions.

Where Bright Ideas Are Produced in Our Brains

Concerning the neural correlates of creative cognition, a number of studies referred to the PFC as one of the chief brain areas for new idea generation and inhibition of prevalent solutions ( Carlsson et al., 2000; Flaherty, 2005, 2011; Karim et al., 2010; Krippl and Karim, 2011; Mok, 2014; Cassotti et al., 2016). The prefrontal brain regions are known as components of a deliberate control brain network and inhibition controller, which is considered to be a central process for problem-solving and idea generation from adolescence to adulthood ( Cassotti et al., 2016).

1. Musical creativity expressed activation in a bilateral network consisting of the bilateral medial frontal gyrus (MeFG) and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), left middle frontal gyrus (MFG) and inferior parietal lobule (IPL), and the right postcentral gyrus (PoCG) and fusiform gyrus (FG), as well as bilaterally the cerebellum.

2. The network for verbal creativity was left-hemispheric dominated and comprised of several activation foci in the left MFG, inferior parietal lobule (IPL), SMG, middle occipital gyrus (MOG), and middle and superior temporal gyrus (MTG and STG), and the bilateral inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and insula, and the right lingual gyrus (LG) and cerebellum.

3. Visuospatial creativity relied on a slightly right-hemispheric dominated network including activation foci in the right MFG and IFG, the left precentral gyrus (PrCG), and the bilateral thalamus.

Another study revealed that DT was positively correlated with the strength of the RSFC between the mPFC and the MTG ( Wei et al., 2014). Further, cognitive stimulation through creativity training significantly increased the RSFC between the mPFC and the MTG. Besides, cognitive stimulation successfully enhanced cognitive performance in a novelty (originality) creativity task ( Wei et al., 2014).

An exciting study linked psychometric measurements of creativity [both DT and CA to cortical thickness in various brain regions in healthy young adults ( Jung et al., 2010)]. In detail, these authors suggested the following: (1) higher CA was positively correlated with volume of the lower left lateral orbitofrontal cortex (lOFC) and cortical thickness in the right AnG; and (2) a composite creativity index (CCI) was negatively correlated with cortical thickness in the LG while positively correlated with cortical thickness in the right PCC.

Concerning the relation between hemispheric brain lateralization and creative thinking (i.e., formulating and producing novel ideas), a meta-analytic evaluation by Mihov et al. (2010) implied relative dominance of the right hemisphere (RH) during creative thinking. However, moderator analyses revealed no difference in predominant RH activation for many creative tasks (verbal, figural, holistic, analytical, context-dependent and context-independent). Carlsson et al. (2000) also analyzed the connection between creativity and hemispheric asymmetry, by measuring regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) during rest and different creative verbal tasks. Highly creative subjects expressed bilateral frontal activation in the Brick task, a task in which participants were required to name potential uses of an object, while low creative subjects had unilateral activation. Importantly, in a word fluency test and the Brick test, the highly creative group expressed either an increase or unchanged CBF activity in the frontal region, while the low creative group showed a decrease in CBF instead.

Only a few animal studies also provided valuable insights into the link between brain and creative cognition. For example, a framework developed by Kaufman et al. (2011) suggested a three-level model of creativity (novelty, observational learning, and innovative behavior; see Figure 4). First, regarding novelty, the cognitive ability to recognize was proposed to be linked to hippocampal (HPC) function while seeking out for novelty could be connected to the mesolimbic DA system. Second, observational learning, which could range in complexity from imitation to the cultural transmission of creative behavior, was supposed to rely significantly, besides frontal brain regions, on the cerebellum. Third, innovative behavior such as creating a tool or exhibiting a behavior with the specific recognition that it is novel and different was described as being especially reliant upon the PFC and the balance between left-and-right hemispheric functions.

How the Neuromodulatory Systems Are Involved in Creative Performance

The Dopaminergic (DA) System and Creativity

The DA system is involved in various aspects of cognitive functions related to reward, addiction, attention, compulsions, and others. Recent studies imply that the DA system may act to coordinate the integration of information through selective potentiation of circuits and pathways ( Grace, 2010). Several lines of evidence support the crucial role of DA neurotransmission in human creative thought and behavior ( Flaherty, 2005; Reuter et al., 2006; Kulisevsky et al., 2009; Chermahini and Hommel, 2010; de Manzano et al., 2010; Inzelberg, 2013; van Schouwenburg et al., 2013; Lhommée et al., 2014; Surmeier et al., 2014; Zhang et al., 2014a, b, 2015; Zabelina et al., 2016; Boot et al., 2017; Kleinmintz et al., 2018), nevertheless, these studies remain sparse.

Recently, Boot et al. (2017) provided an integrative review on creative cognition and DA modulation in frontostriatal networks (see, Figure 5 and Table 2). Integrating results from different experimental tasks (i.e., creative ideation, DT, or creative problem-solving) and various study approaches (such as looking at polymorphisms in DA receptor genes, measuring indirect markers of DA activity, manipulating the DA system, or investigating clinical populations with dysregulated DA activity) proposed the followings: (i) creative cognition benefits from both flexible and persistent processing; (ii) an association between striatal DA, the integrity of the nigrostriatal-DA pathways, and flexible processing; and (iii) an association between prefrontal DA, the integrity of the mesocortical-DA pathway and persistent processing ( Figure 5 and Table 2). Altogether, while the literature indicates a functional differentiation between the striatal and prefrontal DA, it seems that the functional level of DA has to be moderate for both striatal DA and prefrontal DA to benefit creative cognition by facilitating flexible processing and enable persistence-driven creativity, respectively ( Boot et al., 2017).

Regional Gray Matter Volume (rGMV) of The Dopaminergic (DA) System and Creativity

Artistic Style Shifts, Dopamine (DA), and Creativity

Along with the same line, Lhommée et al. (2014) explained the possibility of inducing creativity through DA treatments in PD; however, this effect feasibility slowly disappeared after withdrawal of DA agonists, and only one of eleven patients remained creative after the surgery. Also, the reduction of DA agonist was significantly correlated to the decrease in creativity in the whole study population. Consequently, there is a strong link between creativity in PD and DA agonist therapy.

Genetic Research Reveals a Strong Association Between DA Activity and Creativity

One critical step towards a better understanding of creativity is to unveil its underlying genetic architectures. Many studies reported the first candidate genes for creativity ( Reuter et al., 2006; Runco et al., 2011; Zhang et al., 2014a, b; Zabelina et al., 2016; Grigorenko, 2017; see Table 1).

On describing the genetic basis of creativity and ideational fluency, Runco et al. (2011) referred to Reuter et al. (2006) who defined what they called the first candidate gene for creativity. Runco et al. (2011) replicated and extended the investigation of Reuter et al. (2006) for further accurate analysis of five candidate genes, which are: DA transporter (DAT), catechol-O-methyl-transferase (COMT), Dopamine Receptor D4 (DRD4), D2 Dopamine Receptor (DRD2), and Tryptophan Hydroxylase 1 (TPH1). In the study by Runco et al. (2011), participants received a battery of tests related to creativity. Multivariate analyses of variance indicated a significant association between the ideational fluency scores and several genes (DAT, COMT, DRD4, and TPH1). Therefore, in contrast to initial studies, the offered conclusion by Runco et al. (2011) suggested a clear genetic basis for ideational fluency. However, fluency, alone, is not sufficient to predict and guarantee creative performance.

Mayseless et al. (2013) reported an association between DT and DRD4 (7R polymorphism in the DRD4 gene). DT abilities were associated with DA activity while impaired DT has been reported in populations with DA dysfunctions. The authors concluded that individuals carrying the DRD4-7R allele scored significantly lower in DT (particularly on the flexibility dimension) compared to non-carriers of this allele.

Zabelina et al. (2016) observed that performance in two tests of creativity (i.e., the Torrance test and the real-world CA index) could be predicted by specific genetic polymorphisms that are related to the frontal (COMT gene) and striatal (DAT gene) DA pathways. High performance at the Torrance test was related to DA polymorphisms associated with higher cognitive flexibility and low to medium top-down control (9/9 or 9/10 DAT and Met/Val or Val/Val COMT genotypes, respectively), or, particularly for the originality component of the DT, with weak cognitive flexibility and strong top-down control (10/10 DAT and Met/Met COMT genotypes, respectively). Weak cognitive flexibility (10/10 DAT genotype) and weak cognitive control (Val/Val COMT genotype) were associated with high real-world CA.

An additional exploratory study on DA gene DRD2 and the creative potential (DT test) was provided by Zhang et al. (2014a). This study systematically explored the associations between DRD2 genetic polymorphisms and DT in 543 unrelated healthy Chinese undergraduate students. There were significant associations between specific single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), fluency (verbal and figural), verbal originality and figural flexibility. Extending on these findings, Zhang et al. (2014b) thoroughly examined the relationship between COMT, creative potential and the interaction between COMT and DRD2. Their study provided a shred of evidence for the implication of COMT in creative potential, which suggests that DA-related genes may act in coordination to contribute to creativity.

Based on these findings, one can conclude that human creativity principally relies on the interplay among frontal and striatal DA pathways. The dynamical interaction between these two pathways might assist to explain the inconsistencies due to the independent evaluation in measuring genes and creativity during the past decade.

Other Neuromodulatory Systems and Creativity

According to Flaherty (2011), the induction of creativity could rely on the goal-driven approach motivation from the midbrain DA system; however, fear-driven avoidance motivation could have an insignificant influence on creativity. Therefore, one could argue about the role of other neuromodulators in addition to DA regarding their influences on motivational behavior and creativity.

Researchers observed that when 5-HT and NE lower motivation and flexibility, they can inhibit creativity. For example, antidepressants (ADs) that inhibit fear-driven motivation (i.e., selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) could inhibit goal-oriented motivation as well. On the other hand, ADs that boost goal-directed motivation (i.e., bupropion) may remediate this effect. As for benzodiazepines and alcohol, they might have a counterproductive effect. Although DA agonists might stimulate creativity, their actions may inappropriately disinhibit this creative behavior through suppressing its motivational drive. Moreover, it was suggested that the presence of NE induces fluctuations in levels of other catecholamines, such as DA, which has been extensively discussed in the schizophrenia literature.

Noradrenaline (NE) System, and Creativity

Experimental evidence proposed a central role of the NE system in modulating cognitive flexibility ( Beversdorf et al., 1999, 2002; Folley et al., 2003; Heilman et al., 2003; Heilman, 2016; de Rooij et al., 2018). Beversdorf et al. (1999, 2002) investigated the influence of NE modulation on the performance in various problem-solving tasks during pharmacological treatments that either increased or decreased noradrenergic activity. The authors reported better performance in the anagram task (one of the problem-solving tasks that demand cognitive flexibility), following the uptake of propranolol (peripheral and central β-adrenergic antagonist) than after ephedrine (β-adrenergic agonist). Comparing the effects of central and peripheral NE antagonists, Beversdorf et al. (2002) further revealed that NE modulation of cognitive flexibility, in particular in problem-solving tasks, occurs by a central feedback mechanism. This is in agreement with an earlier reported influence of arousal on cognitive flexibility during creative tasks through the regulation of the central NE system ( Martindale and Greenough, 1973). Martindale and Hasenfus (1978) provided physiological evidence about enhancing creative innovation through maintaining a low level of arousal (i.e., the significant development of alpha activity in the EEG in the highly creative group during the innovative stage). Also, the reported central modulatory effect of NE on cognitive flexibility may relate to changes in the signal-to-noise ratio of neuronal activity within the cortex by suppressing the intrinsic excitatory synaptic potentials relative to the evoked potentials by external direct afferent input ( Hasselmo et al., 1997; Usher et al., 1999).

Serotonergic (5-HT) System and Creativity

Brain Illness and Creativity

Accumulated evidence suggests a strong connection between developing the drive of creativity and a number of brain illnesses (i.e., depression, bipolar disorder, psychosis, PD, temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and autism spectrum disorders (ASDs); see Flaherty, 2011, see also Flaherty, 2005; Carson, 2011; Abraham et al., 2012; Mula et al., 2016), other studies questioned the relation between madness and genius ( Kyaga, 2014).

Flaherty (2005) tested a wide range of subjects from normal to several pathological states and proposed a three-factor model to predict idea generation and creative drive. This model focused on the interactions between temporal lobes, frontal lobes, and the limbic system, in which the frontotemporal and DA control represents the source for idea generation and creative drive. The author summarized her findings as follows. First, the generation of the progressive idea (sometimes at the expense of its quality) is associated with alterations in the activity of the temporal lobe (i.e., hypergraphia). Second, deficits in the frontal lobe might diminish idea generation due to the rigid judgments about the value of the idea. These observations were most visible in verbal creativity, and approximately resemble the constrained communication of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), mania, and Wernicke's aphasia, rather than the sparse speech and cognitive inflexibility of depression, Broca's aphasia, and other frontal lobe lesions. Third, patients with FTD expressed an enhancement in non-linguistic creativity. Lastly, the mutual inhibitory cortico-cortical interactions mediated the proper balance between temporal and frontal activity ( Flaherty, 2005).

Abraham et al. (2012) examined distinct facets of creative thinking in many neurological populations as compared to matched healthy control participants. They reported a dissociation between patient groups with frontal, temporoparietal, and basal ganglia (BG) lesions for diverse aspects of creativity. The temporoparietal and frontolateral groups expressed lower overall creative performance while the temporoparietal group demonstrated reduced fluency in the AUT and a creative imagery task. On the other hand, the frontolateral group was less proficient at producing original responses. In contrast, BG and frontopolar groups showed remarkable performance in the ability to overcome the constraints demand by salient semantic distractors during generating creative responses.

On the association between creativity and psychopathology, Carson (2011) provided an advanced model of a shared vulnerability to intensify creative ideation. This model suggested an interaction between the biological determinants, presenting the risk for psychopathology, and the protective cognitive factors. The elements of shared vulnerability included the following: (1) cognitive disinhibition (it brings more stimuli into conscious awareness); (2) an attentional style (which is driven by novelty salience); and (3) a neural hyperconnectivity (which may increase associations between diverse stimuli). These vulnerabilities interact with superior meta-cognitive protective factors (i.e., high IQ, increased WM capacity, and enhanced cognitive flexibility) to maximize the range and the depth of stimuli. Hence, stimuli, which are acquirable in conscious mindfulness, could be manipulated and integrated to form novel (original) ideas.

Open Questions and Future Directions

The PFC, which is considered to play a critical role in creativity, has been extensively involved in the cognitive control of emotion; however, the cortico-subcortical interactions that mediate this capability remain elusive, in particular when it is related to creativity. Previously, Wager et al. (2008) declared that prefrontal-subcortical pathways mediate effective emotion regulation. This regulation was associated with the activity of the right ventrolateral prefrontal area (vlPFC) as a response to diminished negative emotional experience during cognitive reappraisal of aversive (i.e., unpleasant) images. Following this initial finding, researchers implemented a unique pathway-mapping approach to map subcortical mediators of the association between vlPFC activity and reappraisal achievement (i.e., a decrease in the expressed emotion). Their data proposed two distinct pathways that collectively defined half of the revealed variance in self-stated emotion. The first pathway [which was through nucleus accumbens (NAc)] anticipated more reappraisal achievement while the second pathway (through ventral amygdala) anticipated reduced reappraisal achievement. Here, one could ask whether the interaction between emotion and creative cognition could be predicted through similar pathways.

Regarding providing an overarching experimental model for creative performances, one should consider the interactions between the factors described in this review (cognition, emotion, mood state, reward, and neuromodulators) and whether such interactions could mark creative signatures of individuals. In other words, getting more insight into the creative thinking and ideation necessitates the ability to identify: (1) the core cognitive, motivational, and emotional processes underlying creative thought; and (2) the brain circuitries and neuromodulators underlying the creative ideation.

Prospective research should further specify the neural mechanisms by which the neuromodulator systems influence the creative process. Particularly their modulatory effect on the creative cognition and the creative drive in pathological conditions such as depression, bipolar disorders, PD and schizophrenia remains elusive. DA requires additional exploration regarding the interplay between frontal and striatal DA pathways, the underlying genetic architecture and CAs in healthy and pathological conditions. On the other hand, research on creativity and the noradrenergic (NE) system is implicated in the stress-related modulation of cognitive flexibility in problem-solving, however there is a prominent demand to determine the range of cognitive tasks modulated by the NE system more precisely. Also, studies on the relation between the fluctuations in the level of NE, the level of arousal and its modulation signature on the creative process before and after treatment in pathological conditions such as depression, bipolar disorders, and schizophrenia remain dispersed and isolated. Concerning 5-HT, there is an ultimate need for elaborative research on the relationship between 5-HT and CAs since it is a fundamental mediator of emotional, motivational and cognitive elements of reward processing and representation.

Conclusion

In this review, we outlined how three factors crucially shape the creative mind: (1) creative cognition and the associated neural systems in human and animal models; (2) creative drives such as mood states, emotion, motivation and regulatory focus and how their interactions could shape the creative performance; and (3) the impacts of three central neuromodulator systems, i.e., DA, NE, and 5-HT, on the interplay between creative cognition and creative drives.

Specifically, we detailed how according to the dual pathway model ( Nijstad et al., 2010; Boot et al., 2017; Lu et al., 2017) the nigrostriatal and mesocortical DA pathways, influence creative drives ( Baas et al., 2008, 2013; De Dreu et al., 2008) and creative cognition, see Figure 5 and Table 2. As implicated by the dual process model, both pathways affect creativity via their influence on resistance and cognitive flexibility ( Cassotti et al., 2016). The prediction of creativity through EFs (i.e., shifting, inhibition and WM; Benedek et al., 2014; Radel et al., 2015; Zhang et al., 2015; Fleming et al., 2016) demands an optimal balance between deliberate (controlled) processing and spontaneous processing ( Mok, 2014). On the other hand, there is a link between reward (i.e., promises, training, and intrinsic interest; Maltzman, 1960; Eisenberger and Selbst, 1994; Eisenberger and Cameron, 1998; Eisenberger et al., 1998, 1999; Eisenberger and Rhoades, 2001; Baer et al., 2003; Chen et al., 2012; Volf and Tarasova, 2013) and creativity through the action effect binding ( Muhle-Karbe and Krebs, 2012). Both mindset (cooperative and competitive; Bittner and Heidemeier, 2013; Bittner et al., 2016) and cognitive resources ( Roskes et al., 2012) have moderating effects on creative drives (i.e., mood, motivation, and emotion). Moreover, we discussed potential candidate genes for creativity.

Herewith we presented our perspective to advance our knowledge about creativity research through evaluating an overarching model of the interactions between creative cognition (i.e., cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control, WM updating, fluency, originality, and insights) and creative drive (i.e., emotion motivation, reward and other factors such as mood states, regulatory focus, social interaction), and the underlying neuromodulator mechanisms ( Figure 1).

Lastly, we highlighted the possibility of implementing a neural network model as a predictive tool for the suggested integrated framework of creativity. For more insights on the computational model of creativity and emotion, see Perlovsky and Levine (2012) and Levine and Perlovsky (2011), respectively.

Author Contributions

RK and BG outlined the structure of the review and wrote the manuscript. AK participated in the conceptualization of the manuscript and the final editing.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the support by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and Open Access Publishing Fund of the University of Tübingen. This study was partly funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (D.27.14841).

Abbreviations

5-HT, serotonin; ADs, antidepressants; ALE, activation likelihood estimation; BG, basal ganglia; BVSR, blind variation and selective retention; CAQ, Creative Achievement Questionnaire; CCI, composite creativity index; COMT, catechol-O-methyl-transferase; DA, dopamine; DAT, Dopamine Transporter; DMN, default mode network; DRD2, D2 Dopamine Receptor; DRD4, D4 Dopamine Receptor; DT, divergent thinking; EBR, spontaneous eye-blink rates; EFs, executive functions; FTD, frontotemporal dementia; mPFC, medial prefrontal cortex; mTG, middle temporal gyrus; NAc, nucleus accumbens; NE, noradrenaline; PCC, posterior cingulate cortex; PD, Parkinson's disease; PFC, prefrontal cortex; RSFC, resting-state functional connectivity; STN, Substantia Nigra; TID, task-induced deactivation; TPH1, Tryptophan Hydroxylase; vlPFC, right ventrolateral prefrontal region; VTA, tegmental ventral area; WM, working memory.

References

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The Link Between Creativity, Cognition, and Creative Drives and Underlying Neural Mechanisms

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Having a creative mind is one of the gateways for achieving fabulous success and remarkable progress in professional, personal and social life. Therefore, a better understanding of the neural correlates and the underlying neural mechanisms related to creative ideation is crucial and valuable.

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Great pictures of brain

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Cell Signaling

The real work of your brain goes on in individual cells. The neurotransmitters travel across the synapse, carrying signals to other cells. Scientists have identified dozens of neurotransmitters. Alzheimer's disease disrupts both the way electrical charges travel within cells and the activity of neurotransmitters.

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Brain parts and functions in an interactive tour - learn about the effects of Alzheimer's and dementia on memory and other human brain functions.

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Creativity works best when the focus is on little ideas.

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How literacy transforms the brain.

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Inside the Letterbox: How Literacy Transforms the Human Brain

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Few issues are as important to the future of humanity as acquiring literacy. Brain-scanning technology and cognitive tests on a variety of subjects by one of the world's foremost cognitive neuroscientists has led to a better understanding of how ...

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Recent findings from creativity research focused on music.

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Current literature on creative cognition has developed rich conceptual landscapes dedicated to the analysis of both individual and collective forms of creativity. This work has favored the emergence of unifying theories on domain-general creative abilities in which the main experiential, behavioral,…

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Sudden comprehension that solves a problem.

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Fantastic interview regarding the moment of insight

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Insight--you know the feeling. It's that amazing idea, the solution that hits you like a bolt of lightning. It can come to you while you're mulling over a problem, or days later, when you're making a sandwich or mowing the lawn. And John Kounios has seen what your brain is doing when it has that "aha moment."

With support from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate, the Creativity Research Lab that Kounios heads at Drexel University uses electroencephalography (EEG) and other technology to record brain activity. The lab has been looking for something very specific: What goes on in the brain when a flash of insight hits.

What Kounios has found has overturned some long-held beliefs in cognitive science about how quickly the brain can snap from a state of not knowing something to knowing it completely. He's also made discoveries that shed light on exactly how ideas emerge--including how your brain briefly blocks out visual information to focus on finding an answer to a tough question.

And his work could yield benefits that extend past the academic realm. In the book that he and his research collaborator, Northwestern University psychology professor Mark Beeman, published earlier this year, "The Eureka Factor: Aha Moments, Creative Insight and the Brain," Kounios notes that moments of insight have resulted in major economic benefits. For example, inventors including Clarence Birdseye, who came up with a method for flash-freezing food, and Philo Farnsworth, the father of television, turned bursts of outside-the-box thinking into entire industries. Understanding how creative insight happens in the brain can lead to strategies for generating breakthrough innovations, he says.

Kounios discussed his work--and where it might be headed in the future--with NSF:
Q. What drew you to study insight?
A. Back in graduate school, I researched cognitive processes that changed suddenly versus gradually. Back in the 1980s, the view seemed to be that mental states changed only gradually--you don't snap from one state to another. Rather, these states flow continuously and overlap with each other in time. The cognitive science community seemed to assume that there were no exceptions to this view. What I thought at the time was that there didn't seem to be any evidence that this was always the case. A few years later my first graduate student, Roderick Smith, and I started looking for an extreme case of sudden-state changes. We figured that if there were a case of one mental state snapping to another, it would be insight, the "aha" moment.

In behavioral studies that we did in the 1990s, we found that was the case for insight. You go from a state of having no idea what a problem's solution is to a state of knowing exactly what the answer is with high certainty. There's nothing in between. Insight during problem-solving was the only type of cognitive task that we could find in which that was the case.

Later, around the year 2000, I met Mark Beeman--we were both at the University of Pennsylvania at the time. He did functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research and I was using high-density EEG. We decided to team up and do the first neuroimaging study that was able to isolate and study insight.
Q. Most people have heard the term "insight" and have some understanding of it, but what's the scientific definition?
A. The term "insight" has a general, conversational definition that's a bit different from the scientific definition. In popular use, the term insight means any deep understanding or realization. The scientific definition of insight is a new idea or perspective that is novel to the person and pops into awareness suddenly. The suddenness is an integral part of the definition. It can't be gradual.
Q. So it really is that distinct a shift.
A. Yes. The discrete, all-or-nothing change happens when you start working on a problem and don't know what the solution is. Later, at a specific point in time, when you have an insight, you go directly from not knowing anything consciously about the solution to completely knowing what the solution is.
Q. How does that work? Is your brain working things out even before you know the answer?
A. Yes. Before you have a conscious awareness of what the solution is, there is unconscious processing leading up to the eventual realization. And an insight doesn't have to be related to a particular problem that you were thinking about. In real life, people have spontaneous insights all the time that have nothing to do with any problem that you've been working on. You could be walking down the street and all of a sudden an idea pops into your head that solves a problem that you didn't even know you had. In that case, your brain may have been unconsciously processing ideas--for seconds, or for years. This is called incubation.

In insight problem-solving, the work of solving goes on unconsciously and the final product gets dumped into the consciousness. Even if you're not aware of it, your brain chugs along and can come up with that solution.
Q. How do you monitor a person for insight?
A. We recorded people's brain activity with EEG and fMRI while they solved little verbal puzzles. For each one that they were able to solve, we asked them whether the solution had just popped into their awareness or whether they had worked it out in a deliberate, conscious way. Afterwards, we went back and sorted the EEG recordings into two groups--those that involved a flash of insight and those that were solved more methodically. Then we separately analyzed the neuroimaging data corresponding to these two types of solutions. The most striking finding was that when participants had a flash of insight, there was a burst of high-frequency EEG activity in the right temporal lobe.
Q. What's happening in that area of the brain?
A. We believe that's the solution popping into awareness. The timing of that flash is just about when they reach the solution. The specific area where this is happening, the right anterior superior temporal gyrus, connects to other areas of the brain. People who have damage in that area, due to strokes or other reasons, have trouble connecting disparate ideas to understand jokes or metaphors. Getting a joke often involves a sudden insight. A joke often leads you down a path, and then you get to the punchline and it goes somewhere else--that's what makes it funny.

There was another key finding. A few hundred milliseconds before that flash was a burst of a different kind of activity in the back of the brain--a burst of EEG alpha waves. Those are lower-frequency waves. Alpha waves have been studied for about 80 years, and what we know about them is that they're a measure of inhibition of the visual system. They are the opposite of neural activity--when alpha is high, neural activity is low.

What we found is that just before an insight, a person's visual system is inhibited for a few hundred milliseconds. Think about it this way: when you ask people a difficult question, to concentrate on it, they often look away. They may look down at their feet or up at the sky, or even close their eyes to think, to focus. The brain does the exact same thing. When you present a difficult question, the solution may already be activated at an unconscious level. But there is a lot of distracting noise, so you can't easily retrieve it into awareness. The brain briefly blocks out visual information. That boosts the signal of the solution, allowing it to pop into awareness.
Q. What is your latest NSF-supported work showing?
A. My current NSF-supported project examines differences among people in the extent to which they use insight or a deliberate analytical strategy to solve problems. This work shows that these differences are pervasive. We compared the EEG activity of people who tend to be more insightful to those who tend to be more analytical and found that the brain activity of these two groups of people is different even when they are in a resting state with no task to perform.

At rest, the more analytical people have greater left frontal activity, suggesting greater control, focus and organization of thought. The more insightful people have more right parietal activity, suggesting broader attention and less focus. Right now, we're working on manipulating this resting-state brain activity by giving different types of thought exercises to our participants. We're finding that this can alter their cognitive style to rely more on insightful or analytical thought.
Q. Does your research suggest practical strategies for enhancing creative thinking?
Yes. We've explained the practical implications and strategies at length in non-technical language in our book "The Eureka Factor." Because insights are generated by unconscious processes that eventually deposit their results into awareness, conscious thought strategies are not a very effective way to enhance insight.

Insights are more likely to occur when a person's brain is in a particular state. This state is characterized by a positive mood and expansive, de-focused attention. In this state, there is more activity in a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate, which monitors other brain areas for conflicting ideas or tendencies. When the anterior cingulate is activated, then it can detect a weak, unconscious, alternative idea and signal other brain areas to switch attention to it, resulting in a sudden insight. But when the anterior cingulate is less active, then alternative ideas aren't detected and a person's scope of thought is limited to the most obvious, straightforward idea. This is like mental tunnel vision.

Research by us and by others shows that, in addition to a positive mood, there are ways to manipulate the environment to encourage the kind of expansive, de-focused attention that promotes insight. For example, large rooms with high ceilings allow visual attention to broaden. This effect is magnified further in the great outdoors. This, in turn, broadens conceptual attention to expand a person's scope of thought to include a wide variety of ideas and associations that can form the basis for an insight. In contrast, striking objects tend to grab and focus attention, thereby promoting analytical thought at the expense of creative insight. We discuss many other tools and strategies in detail in the book.
Q. You've gotten interesting results so far. You're working in an area with some clear societal importance, given the economic activity that can result from sudden insights, as we've seen before with inventors like Birdseye and Farnsworth. Where do you go next with this?
A. We're hoping to take this more into the real world. You might have great insights but be ineffective at turning them into tangible creative achievements. To do that, you need not only the insights but also the analytical skills to refine, test, develop and implement your ideas. Without both insight and analytical thought, you won't have a real-world product. We plan to look at how insightful and analytical thought combine to yield creative accomplishments.

Another project involves examining the emotional effects of insights. When you have an "aha" moment, there is a subjective emotional rush, which is probably why people like to solve puzzles, read murder mysteries and do research. There is extensive neuroscience research on what are called reward signals in the brain, such as occur when you gamble and win. Two of my doctoral students--Brian Erickson and Monica Truelove-Hill--and I have started to analyze our EEG recordings to look for such a reward signal, and the preliminary results are very promising.

What's really interesting about this, if it pans out, is that reward signals aren't limited to pleasurable outcomes of thought or behavior. It seems to be the case that particular ways of thinking are more pleasurable than other ways of thinking, even when the outcome--the solution to the problem--is the same. We're very excited about this new line of research.

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Insight--you know the feeling. It's that amazing idea, the solution that hits you like a bolt of lightning. It can come to you while you're mulling over a...

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Drawings by first neuroscientist- amazing.

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Neuropedagogy and art- great practical advice

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Seminal work

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Multiple examples of alternative creative learning

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Easy explanations of neuroscience and practical advice