Mindframe

How does your IQ affect your creativity? One might assume that having a super high IQ would garner you more powerful creative flights of fancy, and more control over the process, whether top-down or bottom-up. But as is so often the case with preconceived ideas, things are not always what they seem. We can trace the American fixation on IQ back to the beginning of our involvement in World War One. The U.S. War Department was searching for ways to rank their recruits by intelligence, and to identify who would be best suited for which jobs, from scouts to officers. For help in making these judgments, the military turned to psychologists like Lewis Terman of Stanford University. Terman had tweaked an intelligence test devised by the famed French psychologist Alfred Binet to create a new version called the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales. He initially promoted this as a tool for classifying developmentally disabled children, but the U.S. military was so impressed with Terman'...

In February’s blog post, How your Brain is Like an Ant Colony , we discussed how neural networks follow the concept of emergence: when it comes to connections between neurons, much of the order arises by neurons organizing themselves, without top-down direction. Arne Dietrich, the author of How Creativity Happens in the Brain , writes that some of those networks are hardwired and some are flexible and built in the moment. What determines the strength and intensity of a neural network include “a person’s unique past experience, opinions, preferences, and expertise." He explains that, in the same way "lightning follows the path of least resistance," the strongest connections send the fastest signals, taking over brain regions in a phenomenon called "spreading activation." The lack of an overall leader makes ant colonies fascinating. But if our own thoughts (activated neural networks) are all just a matter of signal strength, what is the self? How does sel...

Creativity as a whole is a hard thing to concretely study. However, a slightly easier question than "where does creativity come from?" is "how do epiphanies work?" Those sudden flashes of new ideas happen when your brain connects up associations that don't normally go together, like bacon and popcorn. The process starts when your more rational, top-down conscious thinking system struggles with a question it can't seem to solve. With possibilities exhausted, you start to lose focus, and as a result, your attention shifts. At this point, your executive control system bows out and the problem gets dumped into the more reflexive, impulsive, emotional brain. Your brain is designed in such a way that when you stop actively working the problem, your unconscious systems help out by taking over, continuing the associative matching exercise. It's like an architect who, out of ideas, kicks a problem down to the site foreman, saying, "See what your ...

Irrational behavior is commonplace in sports. Michael Jordan wore his "lucky" University of North Carolina practice shorts under his Chicago Bulls shorts every season, believing that extra layer of shorts made the difference between winning and losing. Tennis ace Serena Williams is rumored to have worn the same unwashed pair of "lucky" socks 162 matches in a row . And the list goes on and on. Are professional sports stars somehow more superstitious than the rest of us? The answer is no. And it's not just humans: famed psychologist B.F. Skinner once reported that pigeons seem to behave superstitiously , too. Although we can, of course, never know for sure what birds are thinking, Skinner observed patterns of strange behavior, like a bird twirling in a circle prior to feeding. He posited that the bird had somehow associated the act of twirling with the act of getting fed. We are all twirlers to some extent. We can trace our irrational behaviors, both col...

Even if you from time to time think about your neurons, those little chemical-electrical switches that dictate your mental and physical activity, you probably don't give much thought to your transposons. And yet transposons don't just play a crucial role in neural application; in a very real sense, they define who you are. A transposon is a fragment of DNA that inserts itself into another cell. Research suggests that about half our DNA sequence is made up of these fragments, these interlopers. In the cells of, say, your lungs, heart, or kidneys, transposons have no real effect. They don't behave like viruses, which sneak into cells and multiply like crazy. They're more like very mellow hitchhikers: once they've found their way in, they're usually content to fall asleep and enjoy the ride. The exception is the brain. Once transposons get inside neurons, they can alter the very nature of the cell. It's like a troupe of improv actors that show up unexp...

Last year, Americans used and discarded about 50 billion plastic water bottles. The recycling rate on those bottles is about 23%, meaning that roughly 38 billion plastic water bottles were dumped into landfills or ended up as general litter. In the face of this growing problem, Elkay Corporation, a U.S company best-known for drinking fountains, developed the EZH2O fountain, which doubled as a water bottle filling station. This allows people to reuse their own refillable bottles, thus cutting down on waste. As a savvy company, Elkay saw an opportunity to make money and be a little greener at the same time. The big question their engineers had was, will people actually change their habits and take advantage of the eco-friendly option? When the engineers finished their filling station design, they decided to add a counter to show consumers how many bottles were being saved with each use. Once the full expense of research and development are factored in, it's not uncomm...

What is fear made of? In his book Self Comes to Mind , Antonio Demasio describes emotions as complex, largely automated neural programs of action. He writes that emotions can be triggered by real-time events, events of the past, or images related to events. They tap into various brain regions, including the areas concerning language, movement, and reasoning. This in turn sets off a chain of chemical reactions. Certain kinds of emotions tend to activate specific brain regions, producing a kind of lock and key effect. For instance, situations involving fear unlock the amygdala and triggers additional chemicals associated with fear. Our perceptions of those internal changes are what we call feelings. (When two regions are affected at the same time, it can create a composite or mixed emotion, such as bittersweetness or nostalgia.) Feelings are the body’s readout of what’s happening internally, combined with your moment-by-moment state of mind. As Damasio says, “Feelings are the co...

There was a moment during the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804 when, after months of deprivation, hardship, and arduous climbing, they finally scaled the eastern face of the Continental Divide. Standing exhausted on that peak, they hoped to gaze down on gentle meadows and the gateway to the sea, but instead they saw…more mountains. It was mountains as far as the eye could see. In some ways, modern biology has followed the same trajectory: in the 70's we believed we were within striking distance of the cure for cancer, steps away from enlightenment about our own internal processes. Now we know it's a much bigger expedition than we ever anticipated. When it comes to understanding the body, the complexity we face is mind-boggling, a thick and tangled web of feedback loops and inner dependencies. Take, for example, the human gut. For years, it's been relegated to the back bench of physiological study. Recently, we've begun to see that the digestive tract is, in f...

We Americans are proudly and hugely into our conveniences. We buy pre-washed lettuce and pre-cut chicken pieces because it's more convenient than washing our own vegetables or slicing up our own birds. We use our remotes because it's more convenient than getting up to change the channel. We navigate the drive-thru at Starbucks because it's more convenient than actually walking into a coffee shop. And we email the person in the cubicle next to us because who has the time for a conversation these days? Entire technologies are built around the idea of convenience. Since our GIs returned from the rather massive inconvenience of fighting World War Two, we've been obsessed in sparing ourselves extra toil wherever possible. Remember TV dinners? In minutes, you could enjoy nicely diced chicken parts with presorted peas and carrots and a little peach cobbler on the side. Usually at least one of those things was still crunchy with ice on the inside, but who could complain? I...

Suicide: the word itself is sobering. In the U.S., there are 38,000 suicides a year. This makes it one of the top ten causes of death in the country; twice as common as homicide, which in recent years has declined. Roughly 38,000 people also die annually on U.S. highways, but that number is also on its way down; we've experienced a 50% drop in highway fatalities since the seventies. Unfortunately, the suicide rate has not followed suit. In fact, overall it is ticking upwards. So why do people kill themselves? Experts on suicide are among the first to admit that their own understanding is limited. It's not something people feel particularly comfortable talking about, which makes research tough. Big Pharma has offered no solution; there are no anti-suicide drugs for sale. In fact, it's almost the opposite: a number of drugs list suicide as a possible side effect. From looking at the statistics, we do know some factors increase chances of suicidal behavior. Th...

The concept of studying is at the core of our learning institutions. It's what you're supposed to be doing in college. Still, just how you're meant to do it remains one of the many mysteries of college; the drop out rate is about 33%. To be fair, there's a number of reasons a person might drop out of college, but for those who are looking to up their study game, here are some quick neuroscience facts to work smarter and not harder. 1. Eliminate distractions. Splitting focus with your smartphone, tablet, TV, or roommate blathering away will force your brain to "task switch", flipping back and forth and draining your brain's energy reserves. This will drastically reduce your ability to move information into your memory for later retrieval. It might feel like multitasking, but research shows that attempting multiple demanding tasks at once sets you up for the 50/50 rule. That is, you'll make 50% more mistakes and you'll take 50% longer than i...

When you think of inventors, the iconic example might be Thomas Edison, who brought us the electric lightbulb. In the process, he discovered what we call the "Edison effect." The idea is that in a vacuum, electrons will move from a heated surface to a cooler one. Simple as it sounds, it's a fundamental principle underlying modern electronics, from toasters to computers. By the time the Wizard of Menlo Park died in 1936 at the age of 86, he had managed to attach his name to 2332 patents worldwide. Some of those creations he produced personally, some he helped develop as part of a team, and sometimes the connection is dubious. It seems if you worked in Edison's lab, he had no problem sticking his name on your work. (Edison didn't invent taking credit for the efforts of his underlings, but he certainly brought it to new levels.) Still, there's no denying Edison had a deep domain knowledge. The lightbulb, the phonograph, the movie camera—these are the kin...