Neuroscientific approaches to musical creativity

COLIN MARTINDALE
University of Maine

Creativity is a rare trait. This is presumably because it requires the simultaneous presence of a number of traits (e.g., intelligence, perseverance, unconventionality, the ability to think in a particular manner, specific talents). None of these traits is especially rare. What is quite uncommon is to find them all present in the same person. One imagines that all of these traits have biological bases. I shall focus upon the type of thought involved in creative insight. First I describe the nature of this type of thought; then I present arguments as to why it must be based upon specific physiological states; finally, I review evidence that it is in fact so based. There not a lot of research on this topic, and very little of it concerns musical creativity. My hope is that at least some people will be interested in the topic and look further into the question of the neurological bases of musical creativity. A creative idea is one that is both original and appropriate for the situation in which it occurs. It would seem that creative productions always consist of novel combinations of preexisting mental elements. As Poincar noted, "To create consists of making new combinations of associative elements which are useful." Creative ideas, he further remarked, "reveal to us unsuspected kinships between other facts well known but wrongly believed to be strangers to one another." For neither scientists nor artists do novel ideas seem to arise from intellectual deduction. Ghiselin concluded after a study of such reports that "production by a process of purely conscious calculation seems never to occur." Besides being nonintellectual, creation is reported as being automatic and effortless. For example, composition was quite easy for Mozart, because he just copied down the melodies he "heard" in his mind. We may divide the creative process into several stages originally suggested by Helmholtz and Wallas. The stages are preparation, incubation, illumination or inspiration, and verification or elaboration. Preparation involves thinking about or learning the mental elements thought to be relevant to the problem at hand. Helmholtz noted that a solution was often not found at this time unless the problem was a trivial one. His practice was to set the problem aside. This is the period of incubation. After some time, the solution simply occurred to him. This is the stage of illumination or inspiration. Finally, during the stage of elaboration, the new idea is subjected to logical scrutiny and put into its final form.

Theories of creativity
Unless we know how more and less creative people differ on the psychological level, we would not know what sorts of biological differences to look for. Accordingly, I begin with a brief review of some major theories of creativity. As we shall see, the theories suggest certain physiological differences between more and less creative people.

Primary Process Cognition Kris proposed that creative individuals are better able to alternate between primary process and secondary process modes of thought than are uncreative people. The primary processsecondary process continuum is the main dimension along which cognition varies. Primary process thought is found in normal states such as dreaming and reverie as well as in abnormal states such as psychosis and hypnosis. It is autistic, free-associative, analogical, and characterized by concrete images as opposed to abstract concepts. Secondary process cognition is the abstract, logical, realityoriented thought of waking consciousness. According to Kris, creative inspiration involves a "regression" to a primary process state of consciousness. Because primary process cognition is associative and involves defocused attention allowing many ideas to be in awareness at the same time, it facilitates the discovery of new combinations of mental elements. On the other hand, creative elaboration involves a return to a secondary process state. Because uncreative people are more or less "stuck" at one point on the primary process- secondary process continuum, they are unable to think of creative ideas. Several lines of evidence are supportive of Kris's theory that creative people have easier access to primary process modes of thought. They report more fantasy activity, remember their dreams better, and are more easily hypnotized than uncreative people. The more creative a person is, the more primary process content his or her fantasy stories contains. Schizophrenia--a primary process state according to psychoanalytic theory--and creativity related in a number of ways. Because highly creative individuals are over-represented among the relatives of schizophrenics, there may be a direct genetic link. Creative people obtain quite high scores on tests of psychoticism. Furthermore, schizophrenics and highly creative subjects do not differ in the unusualness of their performance on object-sorting tasks. They are also similar in the remoteness of their responses on word-association tasks.

Creativity and cortical activation

Lindsley draws a parallel between cortical activation as measured by the EEG and state of consciousness: As one moves from alert wakefulness through fantasy, and reverie to sleep, cortical activation measured directly by EEG frequency and inversely by EEG amplitude decreases. This suggests a parallel with the secondary process-primary process continuum. Hypothetically, medium levels of activation are optimal for secondary process states of consciousness whereas low levels of arousal should co-occur with primary process states. The proposed relationship allows us to translate Kris's hypothesis into a physiological hypothesis: If creative subjects are more variable on the primary-secondary process continuum, then they should also be more variable on the arousal continuum.

Induced Cortical Activation Though he did not state it explicitly, Hull was probably the first to imply that there is a relationship between creativity and arousal. His "Behavioral Law" is that increases in Drive (what we today call general level of arousal) make the dominant response to a stimulus even more dominant: that is, increases in arousal make behavior more stereotypical and decreases in arousal make behavior more variable. Of course, Hull himself produced experimental evidence for this law with studies of lower animals. Several studies showed that written language becomes more stereotyped under conditions of increased arousal. A number of studies of word-association tasks and creativity tests have demonstrated that stress reliably produces decreases in originality. Intense white noisewhich increases cortical arousal--has been shown to produce decrements on tests of creativity. It is safe to conclude that induced increases in arousal cause decreases in creativity, originality, and variability of behavior.

Resting Level of Arousal We have no special reason to expect creativity to be related to basal or resting level of arousal. In fact, there is not a very strong relationship. There is evidence that highly creative people exhibit somewhat higher levels of basal or resting-level arousal than do less creative people. However, we must look elsewhere to find a strong linkage between creativity and neural activity.

Variability in Level of Arousal Given our analogy with Kris's theory, we should expect creativity to be related to variability in level of arousal rather than with basal level of arousal. If creativity is related to psychoticism, as Eysenck hypothesizes, we should also expect to find more variability of physiological arousal in highly creative people. There is evidence supportive of this hypothesis. In laboratory studies, more creative subjects show more spontaneous galvanic skin response fluctuations, greater heart-rate variability, and more variability in EEG alpha amplitude. There is also evidence that they show the greatest amount of variability in arousal during creative inspiration as opposed to baseline or resting conditions,

Creative Cognition and Cortical Arousal If creativity is not strongly related to one's average level of cortical arousal, then perhaps it is related to arousal while one is engaged in the act of creation. This does, in fact, seem to be the case. I measured amount of EEG alpha-wave activity--an inverse measure of cortical arousal-while subjects took the Alternate Uses Test (a fairly pure measure of creativity), the Remote Associates Test (an index of both creativity and intelligence), and an intelligence test. Highly creative subjects showed differential amounts of cortical activation across the three tasks, whereas the medium- and low- creative subjects did not. The highly creative group showed lowest arousal while taking the Alternate Uses Test, somewhat higher arousal while taking the Remote Associates Test, and even higher arousal while taking the intelligence test. The medium-and low-creative groups exhibited high arousal while taking all three tests. The pattern is the one we would expect if creative activity requires the defocused attention produced by low levels of cortical activation. These findings lead to the hypothesis that, when asked to be original, as they are on the Alternate Uses Test, creative people exhibit defocused attention accompanied by low levels of cortical activation. On the other hand, uncreative people focus their attention too much, and this prevents them from thinking of original ideas. These differences should be most apparent during the inspirational phase of the creative process, because this is the stage where defocused attention is useful. Elaboration requires focused attention. Thus, there should be no differences in arousal during this stage. Martindale and Hasenfus tested this hypothesis. EEG activity was measured while people thought about a story they would write (the analogue of the inspirational phase) and while they wrote the story (the analogue of the elaboration phase). All of the subjects were asked to be as creative as possible in making up their stories. As predicted, highly creative people exhibited lower levels of cortical activation during the inspirational phase than did less creative people, and no differences in activation were present during the elaboration phase. In a second study, half of the subjects were urged to be as creative as possible, whereas nothing was mentioned about creativity or originality to the other half of the subjects. Creative subjects showed lower levels of cortical activation during the analogue of the inspirational stage if they were told to be creative. However, no differences were found when subjects were not asked to be creative. These studies lead to the conclusion that creative and uncreative people differ in cortical activation only under quite specific circumstances: during the inspirational phase of the creative process. Furthermore, this difference is found only when people are trying to be creative.

Self-Control of Cortical Arousal How can we explain the above results? A possible (but incorrect) explanation would be that creative people are more capable of controlling their own level of arousal. When asked to be creative, they use this ability to induce the low level of arousal that is necessary for creative inspiration. People can control their level of cortical arousal. In a biofeedback paradigm, subjects are asked to keep a light on or off. The light is controlled by the person's own brain waves. For example, the only way to turn the light on may be to produce alpha waves. People can keep the light on or off at above-chance levels and they get better with practice. If creative people were adept at self-control of cortical arousal, they should perform well on biofeedback tasks. I did two experiments designed to test this hypothesis yielded consistent results: Creative people are not very good at biofeedback tasks. Initially, their performance is better than that of less creative people. However, this advantage is lost after only several minutes. After that, uncreative people become better and better at controlling the amount of alpha that they produce. On the other hand, performance of highly creative people actually deteriorates. Specifically, amount of alpha drifts upwards across trials regardless of whether they are trying to produce alpha waves or to suppress them. The low levels of arousal that creative people show during creative inspiration are evidently not due to self cortrol.

Creativity, Disinhibition, and Reactivity At least in retrospect, the poor performance of creative people on biofeedback tasks should not be surprising. When creative people are asked to describe themselves, they use words that stress disinhibition and lack of control. Martindale and Eysenck have argued that creativity is a disinhibition syndrome. That is, creative people are characterized by a lack of both cognitive and behavioral inhibition. Self-reports of highly creative people almost all stress the effortlessness of creative inspiration. Creativity seems not to be based upon self-control or will power. Just the opposite seems to be the case. Creative people have used a variety of often bizarre methods which they believed helped them to be more creative. These methods do not include self-control; rather, they involve automatic reaction to a stimulus. Perhaps the most common method used by creators is withdrawal so extreme that it verges on sensory deprivation, a condition that lowers cortical arousal. The image of the withdrawn artist is ubiquitous: Vigny advocating withdrawal into a "tower of ivory," Hlderlin imprisoned in his tower at Tbingen, Proust isolating himself in his cork-lined rooms.

Creativity, Oversensitivity, and Habituation Why do creators withdraw in the first place? Generally, it Iis because of oversensitivity. Proust's withdrawal was forced upon him because normal levels of light and noise were painfully intense for him. There is evidence that creative people are in fact physiologically over-reactive. I found more alpha blocking in response to onset of a tone in more creative subjects than in less creative ones. In another study I delivered a series of electric shocks to people. The more creative a person was, the more intense he rated any given shock. I also found a correlation between creativity and augmentation on a kinaesthetic after-effect task. Augmentation on this task is conventionally interpreted as meaning that an individual "amplifies" the intensity of stimuli. With several colleagues, I measured skin potential responses to a series of moderately intense tones. (Skin potential is believed to covary directly with cortical activation.) Two findings were of interest. More creative subjects showed much larger skin potential response to the tones than did less creative people. Further, they took twice as long to habituate to the tones as did uncreative subjects. The slow habituation of creative people may be related to their tendency to stick with a problem until they have solved it rather than tiring of it and moving on to something else.

Creativity and Need for Novelty and Stimulation Creative people show a trait that seems to be at odds with their oversensitivity and slow rate of habituation: They love novelty, which is known to increase cortical arousal. Koestler that scientific geniuses tend to have "on the one hand skepticism, often carried to the point of iconoclasm, in their attitude toward traditional ideas and dogmas" as contrasted with "an openmindedness that verges on naive credulity towards new concepts." There is also experimental evidence that creativity is correlated with preference for novelty as well as with need for stimulation in general. How can creative people crave stimulation if they are oversensitive? The probable cause is that withdrawal--because of oversensitivity--leads to a lowering of level of arousal. This, in turn, leads to a craving for novelty. Note that creative people usually seek mental stimulation rather than the strong stimuli of, say, real-world adventure.

Creativity and hemispheric asymmetry

Theoretical Rationale There are reasons to believe that creativity should be related to differential activation of the right and left hemispheres of the brain as well as to general level of cortical arousal. Galin, Hoppe, and others have argued that the right hemisphere operates in a primary process manner, whereas the left hemisphere operates in a secondary process fashion. Their arguments are based upon findings that verbal, sequential, and analytical processes tend to be carried out in the left hemisphere, whereas global, parallel, and holistic processes are carried out in the right hemisphere. If this is the case, then we can again "neurologize" Kris's theory of creativity: Because creative people have more access to primary process cognition, they should show more right hemisphere--as compared with left hemisphere--activation than less creative people, at least during periods of creative activity. There is no reason to expect differences during baseline recording or performance of noncreative tasks. There are other reasons for suspecting that the right hemisphere should be connected with creativity. A good deal of evidence shows that most brain centers involved in the perception and production of music are located in the right hemisphere. Similarly, a number of centers necessary for creation of visual art are segregated in the right hemisphere.

Induced Right-Hemisphere Activation There is some evidence that procedures known to increase right-hemisphere activation can facilitate creativity. At least in highly hypnotizable subjects, hypnosis increases right-hemisphere activation. Gur and Raynor found that such subjects performed better on tests of creativity when hypnotized than when not hypnotized. Music also has been shown to facilitate performance on creativity tests.

Hemispheric Asymmetry during Creative Activity My colleagues and I reported on three experiments concerning the relationship between creativity and hemispheric asymmetry as measured by EEG activity. In none of the experiments were there significant differences in resting or basal asymmetry between more and less creative subjects. In two of the experiments, creativity was assessed with paper-and-pencil tests. In these experiments, the creative task was to either write down or speak aloud a fantasy story. Hemispheric activity during creative activity showed the same pattern in both experiments: Highly creative

subjects exhibited more right- than left-hemisphere activation; those of medium creativity showed strong asymmetry in the opposite direction; and very uncreative subjects showed about equal activation in both hemispheres. Analogous results were found inthe third experiment, in which student artists were compared with artistically untrained subjects. Thus, it would seem that creative people rely more on the right hemisphere than on the left not in general but only during the creative process.

Address for correspondence: COLIN MARTINDALE Department of Psychology University of Maine Orono, ME 04469 Email: RPY383@maine.maine.edu

Summary
We have seen that the creative act involves the discovery of an analogy between two or more ideas or images previously thought to be unrelated. This discovery does not arise from logical reasoning but, rather, emerges as a sudden insight. All of the theories of creativity reviewed say essentially the same thing--that creative inspiration occurs in a mental state where- attention is defocused, thought is associative, and a large number of mental representations are simultaneously activated. Such a state can arise in two ways: low levels of cortical Activation and comparatively more right- than left-hemisphere Activation. Creative people do exhibit these traits not in general but only while engaged in creative activity.

References

Eysenck, H. (1995). Genius: The natural history of creativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kris, E. (1952). Psychoanalytic explorations in art. New York: International Universities Martindale, C. (1995). Creativity and connectionism. In S. Smith, T. Ward, and R. Finke (Eds.), The creative cognition approach (pp. 249-268). Cambridge: MIT Press. Martindale, C., Anderson, K., Moore, K., & West, A. N. (1996). Creativity, oversensitivity, and rate of habituation. Personality and Individual Differences, 20, 423-427. Martindale, C. (1999). Biological bases of creativity. In R.J. Sternberg (Ed.), Handbook of creativity (pp. 137-152). New York: Cambridge University Press.