The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius

leondumoulin.nl: The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius (Audible Audio Edition): Nancy C. Andreasen M.D., Kate Reading, Dana Press: Books.
Table of contents

Delusions, for example, are most often misperceptions or misinterpretation of external information. While full-blown delusional behavior is clearly not good for creativity or any other productive result, novel interpretations and perceptions of the world can lead to creative breakthroughs. Andreasen spends some time on the creative process as described by brilliant historical figures. Many describe it as a sort of altered state of consciousness where thoughts and insight come in a rush that is quite different from a normal reasoning process.

She also steps lightly into the nature vs. Some highly creative individuals exhibit such behavior at an early age and without any particular environmental variables which explain it, but their parents often have no apparent history of extreme creativity. Sometimes, it seems, the genes just come together in the right way to produce a creative prodigy.

She describes research that shows brains can be changed by training and use, and then suggests some activities both for adults wanting to improve their brains and for parents seeking to give babies and young children a boost. These are interesting and logical, but whether they will turn anyone into a Leonardo da Vinci, or even an effective copywriter, has yet to be demonstrated.

If you want to understand creativity better, or are responsible for fostering creativity in your work environment, invest a few hours in The Creating Brain. Roger Dooley is the author of Brainfluence: He is the primary author at Neuromarketing , and writes at Entrepreneur and Forbes. Learn more at RogerDooley. The emotional and intellectual support of a patron is an important nurturing resource that counters those inhibitory forces. Almost all periods of great creativity, populated by many creators, have been times of economic prosperity.

Please take a minute to fill our survey. Your answers will help us improve our site.

This may not be a mandatory component of a creativity-enhancing environment, but it is certainly helpful. Economic prosperity feeds creativity in several ways. It provides the accumulation of intellectual resources in which ideas can be stimulated, in which they can bubble and ferment—the collections of earlier art, the libraries, the salons, and the gardens where people can meet and discuss and argue. It provides the funds for their raw materials —the marble, the paint, the paper, the wood, the glass. It provides the funds to commission artists and pay them for their work.

As great cities form and remodel themselves architecturally because of economic prosperity, a visual atmosphere is created that is itself inspiring. So was a critical mass of creative minds, free and fair competition, mentors and patrons, and at least some economic prosperity. The environment into which an individual is born makes a difference. Had Leonardo or Michelangelo been born two hundred years earlier or later, we would never have had the body of work that they produced.

Anatomical dissections would not have been possible at an earlier time. Patrons and prosperity would not have been there to support them. Without Lorenzo, Michelangelo would not have been a sculptor. Had Julius II not commissioned the Sistine ceiling, Michelangelo would not have turned his hand to fresco.

As I sometimes say though I hardly rank with the geniuses I have been describing , if I had been born one hundred years ago, I would never have been a neuroscientist or a physician. Neuro-science did not exist, and only rarely were women allowed to study medicine, or even to attend college. Where does creative genius come from? How does it arise? These are both questions that everyone would like to answer. Our case studies also shed light on these questions. Think about how the brains of Leonardo and Michelangelo were created. A human being, for example, is somehow produced by forty-six chromosomes and about thirty thousand genes, give or take a few.

Somehow these genes must orchestrate the creation of cells and their differentiation so that they form diverse body organs, such as the liver, the kidneys, and the brain. Within the brain there are also many different types of cells. At this moment we still know very little about how genes affect the development of the brain in the uterus before birth, or during childhood, adolescence, and adult life. We are almost totally clueless about how genes become translated into complex human traits such as creativity or personality or cognitive style. Lots of people are studying the genetic regulation of small parts of the process.

But we do not know much yet about how genes affect the interconnectedness of the trillions of neurons in our brains and the quadrillions of synapses that talk back and forth to one another. For now, we have to rely on speculations and hunches, combined with crude empirical methods, such as family studies of heritability.

What we perhaps can say is that Mother Nature gives creative people brains that are well designed for perceiving and thinking in original ways. And very likely the gift given by Mother Nature is an enriched ability to make novel associations and to self-organize in the midst of apparent disorganization or even chaos.

Help us improve dana.org

The creative brain may appear unexpectedly, in people who simply seem to have been given innate gifts. Or it may appear within a hereditary context, in people who seem to have a genetic endowment that makes them creative. Within them they have a creative drive and passion that cannot be suppressed.


  1. How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing (Lifetools: Books for the Gener!
  2. ;
  3. This Also Passed.
  4. .

How does this occur? At present no one knows. Perhaps distant forebears whom we do not know about were creative, and they provided some creative predisposition. Perhaps an incredibly rich environment made a difference. Perhaps, as Vasari might argue, the gift came directly from God. In the case of Leonardo and Michelangelo, we know only about their immediate family history. Nothing that we know suggests any family history of creative contributions for either man on either side of the family.

However, being from the merchant class may require more spunk or drive than being from the leisure class. In early childhood both were noticeably and precociously talented. Leonardo drew, and he sang using the lute—and did both very well. Michelangelo excelled at drawing. Both had brains that were innately gifted with an ability to observe the world around them and reproduce the images created in their minds by transforming them onto paper, without ever being taught to do so.

It was in their nature. In terms of formal education, neither had much. Did this actually enhance their creative capacities, by freeing them from preconceptions about the world or from rigid rules and structures? Did growing up in a more rural area help them to become more creative, by giving them a greater spatial extent of land and sky and a greater diversity of animal life to study than they might have had as city dwellers? At an early age they must have been honing their mental capacities to perceive and record three-dimensional relationships, simply by seeing and thinking and making mental manipulations of their observations.

On this base they would later build their interests in anatomical dissection and rendering the human body accurately, their ability to solve architectural and engineering problems that eluded others, and of course their skills as painters and sculptors. Both became apprentices to great artistic masters of the time.

In short, they were launched on the careers that they would follow for the remainder of their lives.

Each apparently realized, at a very young age, that he was a genius. Each was driven to be original, independent, and creative. Fortunately, neither had either.

The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius

Each continued to develop, to modify and to use his brain, in slightly different ways, depending on the political and social forces surrounding him. In terms of heredity, many other prototypical geniuses we have seen in these pages are not dissimilar, in the sense that they had innate gifts. Our largest source of evidence for the heritability of creativity is anecdotal accounts. In Hereditary Genius , Galton himself summarized multiple pedigrees that contain at least two creative people. For comparison he included two types of athletes: Hereditary Genius is not perfect, but it is a highly informative compendium of pedigrees of gifted families.

Even today, almost years after publication, it still makes interesting reading. The Bach family, for example, is perhaps the most powerful example of creativity running in families. Its creative members extend over eight generations, beginning in and ending in The greatest was, of course, Johann Sebastian Bach. But in addition to him, there were more than twenty eminent musicians in the Bach family.

Galton described many other examples, but these are some of the best known. Andrew was a physiologist who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on nerve impulses and muscle contraction. The brothers William and Henry James are another example. Their father was a nineteenth-century American intellectual who was a close friend of Thoreau and Emerson. William became a distinguished philosopher and psychologist. Henry became an equally famous novelist. Families are selected because they provide positive evidence for heritability.

But anecdotal accounts do not tell us how often there is no evidence for heritability.


  • The Fundamentals of Municipal Bonds.
  • .
  • Book Review: The Creating Brain - Neuromarketing.
  • The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius - Nancy C. Andreasen - Google Книги.
  • Your gateway to responsible information about the brain.
  • .
  • .

    • In addition to determining the extent to which the writers suffered from mental illnesses, I also examined the extent to which their parents, brothers, sisters, and children had mental illnesses, and the extent to which they were creative. The results are very interesting, and they can be interpreted as providing partial support for a hereditary contribution to both mental illness and creativity.

    The 30 writers had a total of relatives, and the 30 controls a total of The relatives of writers also had a higher rate of mood disorder than the controls, 18 percent in relatives of writers and only two percent in relatives of controls. So it appears that both mood disorder and creativity were familially transmitted. When summarized in a numerical list that shows the patterns of creativity and illness in the writers, controls, and families, the difference between writers and controls is striking. This can be shown in a patterning chart.

    Only nine of the writers had family backgrounds that had neither creativity nor mental illness, whereas the majority of the controls 18 were free of a hereditary association with either trait.