Electrical brain stimulation enhances creativity

Date:

April 14, 2016

Source:

Georgetown University Medical Center

Summary:

Safe levels of electrical stimulation can enhance your capacity to think more creatively, according to a new study.

Safe levels of electrical stimulation can enhance your capacity to think more creatively, according to a new study by Georgetown researchers.

Georgetown psychology professor Adam Green and Dr. Peter Turkeltaub of Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) and MedStar National Rehabilitation Network, and a team of colleagues published the study yesterday online in Cerebral Cortex.

The team used Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) to stimulate an area of the brain known to be associated with creativity in combination with giving test subjects verbal cues to think more creatively.

"We found that the individuals who were most able to ramp up activity in a region at the far front of the brain, called the frontopolar cortex, were the ones most able to ramp up the creativity of the connections they formed," Green explains. "Since ramping up activity in frontopolar cortex appeared to support a natural boost in creative thinking, we predicted that stimulating activity in this brain region would facilitate this boost, allowing people to reach higher creative heights."

Use of tDCS targeting frontopolar cortex in two creativity tasks allowed the test subjects to form more creative analogical connections between sets of words, and to generate more creative associations between words.

"This work is a departure from traditional research that treats creativity as a static trait," Green says. "Instead, we focused on creativity as a dynamic state that can change quickly within an individual when they 'put their thinking cap on.' "

"The findings of this study offer the new suggestion that giving individuals a "zap" of electrical stimulation can enhance the brain's natural thinking cap boost in creativity," he adds.

The researchers wrote that their results provide "novel evidence" that tDCS enhances the "conscious augmentation of creativity elicited by cognitive intervention, and extends the known boundaries of tDCS enhancement to analogical reasoning, a form of creative intelligence that is a powerful engine for innovation."

Turkletaub, a GUMC cognitive neurologist, hopes that one day doctors may be able to improve creative analogical reasoning using both cueing and tDCS to help people with brain disorders.

"People with speech and language difficulties often can't find or produce the words they need," he explains. "Enhancing creative analogical reasoning might allow them to find alternate ways of expressing their ideas using different words, gestures, or other approaches to convey a similar meaning."

Green and Turkeltaub say that although their results are promising, "it is important to be cautious about applications of tDCS."

They say that much remains unknown about exactly how tDCS affects brain function, and early reports of tDCS effects need further replication before researchers can further gauge how substantive these effects are.

"Any effort to use electric current for stimulating the brain outside the laboratory or clinic could be dangerous and should be strongly discouraged," Green cautioned.

This work was supported by awards from the National Science Foundation, The John Templeton Foundation, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences via Georgetown Howard Universities Center for Clinical and Translational Science (KL2 TR000102) and Pymetrics

latest news about creativity

Relationships among creative identity, entitlement and dishonesty hinge on perception of creativity as rare

Date:

September 23, 2015

Source:

Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University

Summary:

Think that you are special because you are creative? Well, you are not alone, and there may be some serious consequences especially if you believe that creativity is rare. A new study demonstrates that believing that you are a creative person can create feelings of entitlement when you think that creativity is rare and valuable. That feeling of entitlement can be costly for you and your organization as it can cause you to be dishonest.

Think that you are special because you are creative? Well, you are not alone, and there may be some serious consequences especially if you believe that creativity is rare.

A new study by Lynne Vincent, an assistant professor of management at Syracuse University's Martin J. Whitman School of Management, and Maryam Kouchaki, an assistant professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, demonstrates that believing that you are a creative person can create feelings of entitlement when you think that creativity is rare and valuable. That feeling of entitlement can be costly for you and your organization as it can cause you to be dishonest.

Many organizations now are recognizing the importance of creativity and are attempting to encourage their employees to be creative. However, there is a cost to that creativity when creativity is seen as a rare and unique attribute. The findings in this study are based on several laboratory experiments, in addition to a study of employees and supervisor pairs.

While creativity is generally valued, such as other positive attributes, including practicality or intelligence, it may be over-valued compared to those other positive attributes because creativity is by definition rare. That sense of rarity then creates a sense of entitlement. People see their creative efforts as special and valuable and feel that they deserve extra rewards for their creative efforts. That entitlement can cause them to steal in order to get the rewards that they think they deserve.

However, it is naïve to assume that employees in companies that have developed a strong identity as creative, such as Apple, Google, and IDEO, would be necessarily more dishonest due to their creativity.

"The key to the relationship between creativity and dishonesty is the sense of rarity," said Vincent. "When individuals identified themselves as creative and believed that creativity was rare, entitlement emerged. However, if individuals believed that creativity was common, that sense of entitlement and the dishonest acts were reduced."

When people in the laboratory experiments believed that their creativity was rare compared to common, they were more likely to lie for money. However, when people believed that being practical was rare compared to common, the increased sense of psychological entitlement and dishonesty did not occur.

The effect was seen in organizations too. In organizations in which creativity was viewed as rare in workgroups, employees who identified themselves as creative were rated as engaging in more unethical behaviors by their supervisors. In brief, even though creativity is commonly considered as rare, the perceived prevalence of creativity and thus the accompanying entitlement depends on individuals' context.

Despite the importance of creativity in the business world, the dark side of creativity has not been fully studied. However, as creativity is becoming more important for organizations, it is crucial for organizations to understand how to encourage creativity. Encouraging creativity in organizations is not as simple as telling employees to be creative. Defining what it means to be creative and what creativity means in that context is important. When people define creativity in terms of being rare and valuable, seeing yourself as a creative person can trigger entitlement and dishonesty. However, if organizations define creativity as a common and everyday behavior or an attribute that many people can have, organizations may be able to encourage employee creativity without encouraging employee dishonesty.

The study is forthcoming in the Academy of Management Journal.

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