Neuroscience of Creativity

By Beau Lotto

1. Every behavior that we do is to reduce uncertainty e.g. on a boat when eyes see we are still, inner ear see we are moving, brain gets confused and gets ill.
2. Creativity comes from unknown, asking questions and embracing uncertainty, it begins with a question, it begins with not knowing, it begins with Shy, with what if.
3. Assumptions keep us alive. The brain is adapted to adapt.
4. Deep question is — how is it possible to ever see differently if everything you see is a reflex grounded in your history of assumptions?
5. Brain is evolved to take meaningless and make it meaningful, the process is creating perception, then we hold on to those assumptions.
6. How we process creativity — by engaging the process of creating the perception.
7. First step is to recognize that everything you do right now is grounded in your assumption — not sometime but all the time. If you don’t accept that then you will never create the possibility of seeing differently
8. Second Step – identify your assumptions, most of the things we do, we don’t know why we do what we do
9. Final step — is to question those assumptions
10. Questioning you assumptions is incredibly hard, its working against evolution, your brain is evolved to avoid uncertainty.
11. Brain often start looking for evidence to confirm what we assume to be true already aka confirmation bias.
12. That’s we rather hold on to assumptions that we know dont work, because that is safer than questioning them and stepping into a place that we dont actually know, even though that other place might be a great deal better than where we are. e.g. politics, we want politicians to behave in a certain way even if the politician wants to change their opinion based on new evidence.
13. The brain only can make a change in small steps in its ideas.
14. The brain can only move a moment at a time by what is next likely possible, what next likely possible is determined by its assumptions, its called the space of possibility.
15. You can’t do just anything. Some things are just impossible for you in terms of your perception or in terms of your conception of the world.
16. Whats possible is based on your history.
17. What a person being creative means that they are making a small step to the next most likely possibility based on the assumptions.
18. For people observing from outside they think that how the guy did bring two things together, in their space of possibility they are two distinct points way apart from each other. So creativity in this sense is only creative from the outside not from the inside.
19. For the person being creative they are making a logical next step. The difference is that their space of possibility is different. They have different assumptions, different biases. In fact they might have more complex space of possibility because they have more complex biases and assumptions. Maybe they assimilated more complex assumptions, so they have more directions in which they can move within their space of possibility.
20. So we interpret that as them being creative by linking things that are far apart but in fact is a logical process of making small steps, changing your space of possibility by identifying and then questioning your assumptions.