Rerun: Creativity - We Are Killing It Off; Hopefully There Will Be Enough Creative Thinkers Left To Rescue Us From the Disaster We Are Headed Into

 From August, last year ...

"I excelled at every subject just for the purpose of excelling, not learning. And quite frankly, now I'm scared."

High school valedictorian Erica Goldson (pictured here) had the guts to speak out. In an address to her graduating class, she spelled it out in a way that even the stupidest teacher in the audience could comprehend, if not accept:

Between these cinderblock walls, we are all expected to be the same. We are trained to ace every standardized test, and those who deviate and see light through a different lens are worthless to the scheme of public education, and therefore viewed with contempt.

She went on to say:

And now here I am in a world guided by fear, a world suppressing the uniqueness that lies inside each of us, a world where we can either acquiesce to the inhuman nonsense of corporatism and materialism or insist on change. We are not enlivened by an educational system that clandestinely sets us up for jobs that could be automated, for work that need not be done, for enslavement without fervency for meaningful achievement. We have no choices in life when money is our motivational force. Our motivational force ought to be passion, but this is lost from the moment we step into a system that trains us, rather than inspires us.

Coincidentally, last month Newsweek ran a cover feature, The Creativity Crisis, that reported that for the first time, measures of creativity in US school kids are way down. The implications are enormous. As Newsweek points out:

The potential consequences are sweeping. The necessity of human ingenuity is undisputed. A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future. Yet it’s not just about sustaining our nation’s economic growth. All around us are matters of national and international importance that are crying out for creative solutions, from saving the Gulf of Mexico to bringing peace to Afghanistan to delivering health care. Such solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others.

Ironically, as the rest of the world is moving beyond from the old "drill and kill" method of learning, the US is heading in precisely the opposite direction toward prepping students for acing standardized tests. Meanwhile, arts in the schools have been liquidated.

Creativity is not just about the arts. It's about generating original ideas, across all fields of endeavor. The creative process involves both "divergent" and "convergent" thinking. In the divergent phase, the brain is literally roaming the library stacks, gathering up books by the armload. A strong body of research suggests that creative individuals may have brains that are less than efficient at filtering out incoming information.

But we are easily overwhelmed by too much information, not to mention sensory input and emotion - which may explain much of mental illness. This is where the convergent phase comes in. The brain becomes ruthlessly efficient in weeding out irrelevancies and focusing only on the facts that matter. Finally, the brain needs to find associations between apparently unrelated facts and ideas to come up with an original solution.

In his outstanding 2009 book, "How We Decide," science writer Jonah Lehrer reports on what was going on in the minds of the flight crew of United Airlines Flight 232 from Denver to Chicago when one fine day over Iowa in 1989, the rear engine of their DC-10 exploded and took out all three hydraulic systems.

Without a functioning hydraulic system, Captain Al Haynes had no control of his plane. UA 232 was on the verge of flipping into a death spiral. Emergency procedures never anticipated a total loss of hydraulics. The manual had not provided for this contingency. The experts on the ground had no answers. Haynes and his crew were totally on their own.

As Lehrer reports, the first remarkable thing to happen was that Haynes and his crew fought back their panic. Haynes then did a mental scan of all the cockpit controls he could operate without hydraulic pressure. The list was a short one, and only one was useful - the thrust levers. But you couldn't steer a plane with thrust levers.

Or could you?

Haynes' DC-10 had two working engines. If he idled one while boosting the other - what they call differential thrust - in theory he could steer the plane. It was a crazy idea. No one had ever thought of it before, much less tried it. Lehrer notes that the pilots dealt with potential information overload only by focusing on the most necessary bits of data:

For instance, once Haynes realized that he could control only the throttle levers - everything else in the cockpit was virtually useless - he immediately zeroed in on the possibility of steering with his engines. He stopped worrying about his ailerons, elevators, and wing flaps.

Meanwhile, inside the brain, the prefrontal cortex took an abstract principle - the physics of engine thrust - and applied it "in an unfamiliar context to come up with an entirely original solution."

The brain at this convergent stage of creative thinking was uncompromisingly disciplined and rational. Without a strong "I" in the cockpit, mentally we are nothing more than flakes and fruitcakes. Likewise, without wide horizons in the divergent stage, we are mere industrious drudges unable to think our way outside of a paper bag.

Haynes and his crew managed to get UA 232 to an emergency landing strip. But they couldn't control the speed of the landing. The plane skidded into a cornfield and shattered into several sections, leaving 112 passengers dead but sparing 184 lives.

Meanwhile, in the US, our school system is gearing us to a crash landing. It is conditioning our young to become mere takers of tests and uncritical followers of received wisdom. Bound to the past, our next generation may lack the means to think our nation into the future, much less work its way out of our next round of current social, political, environmental, and economic jams.

Thank heaven, then, for boat-rockers such as Erica Goldson. "We are the new future and we are not going to let tradition stand," she told her graduating class. "Once educated properly, we will have the power to do anything ... We will not accept anything at face value. We will ask questions, and we will demand truth."

Ah, there is hope.

I Invest in a New Chick Magnet (But Did I Make the Right Decision?)

When shopping for cars, most of us engage in months of careful research, only to drive off the lot in the first thing that appeals to our fancy. Last week I decided that it would be far more efficient, instead, to simply dispense with the research phase of the process.

“What the f... ?” I could only wonder, an hour later, as I sized up my new purchase in the parking space to my apartment complex.

Let’s see: I had neglected to ask about things like gas mileage and how to pop open the hood, much less what kind of engine was actually beneath the hood. Minor stuff. Okay, forgetting to scrutinize the cup-holder for possible design flaws, that was major, but better to err on the side of simplicity. Keep simple things simple.

According to Jonah Lehrer in “How We Decide,” the average American spends 35 hours comparing automotive models before making a decision. See? I’m a lot smarter than that. Let me explain:

On Tuesday, my trusty old beater - a 1992 Tercel (“The Chick Magnet,” pictured below) - died on me. Four years earlier, I went way over my budget in paying $800 for the thing. Then I made a five-dollar investment in a blanket to conceal the gashes in the back seat.

I know, I know. Excessive spending is a sign of mania, but I did get three good years out of the thing. (My first year, I didn’t drive it - minor technicality about not having driven in 30 years, but that’s another story.) Anyway, here I was, Tuesday of last week, with a dead Chick Magnet, and me living 30 miles out of town with no wheels.

No sense in panicking, I decided, once I got through with my obligatory Peter Finch in “Network” scene, the one where he fulminates, “I’m mad as hell and not going to take it anymore!” (bless you director Sidney Lumet, RIP). Thursday morning, I got hold of a cab driver and we negotiated a flat rate to go shopping for used cars. “They say it’s best to buy a Japanese car,” I opened. (Who said I didn’t do my research?)

The cab driver (who was incidentally driving a Lexus) enthusiastically concurred.

We pulled into the first car lot on my list. Five VWs with silver paint were lined up in a row. “Get the car with the silver paint!” the two-year-old part of my brain screamed at me. But I’m way too sophisticated for that.

“Uh, German is kind of like Japanese,” I said tentatively to the cab driver. Yes, he agreed. Good enough for me. After all, they both lost World War II. I zeroed in on the one with a $4,999 price tag. One dollar under my budget. I could blow the rest on a 99-cent taco. No shortage of taco stands in this part of town.

The cab driver and I got in for a test drive. What do they call this thing? I asked him. It sounded like he said Pasada. A 1999 VW Pasada. Bigger than a VW Jedi. Clearly, the vehicle met all my major criteria, namely: It had an engine that started when I twisted the key in the ignition. Okay, the fact that the engine didn’t sound like a re-enactment of Pearl Harbor was slightly unnerving, but I could get used to that.

Plus, it’s got silver paint!

I test-drove one more car with silver paint, just to make sure. My cab driver suggested I try some other car lots in the neighborhood, but there was no sense in over-thinking this. Silver paint job, kinda Japanese, engine included. Good enough for me.

I called up my brother as the dealer was completing the paperwork. What kind of car is it? he asked. A Pasada, I replied. I checked the piece of paper in my hand. A Passat, I corrected. It’s even got a radio that works.

Jonah Lehrer’s book cites a series of studies by Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis. The first study was simple and hypothetical: Subjects were presented with four different used cars based on four features, representing 16 pieces of information. One car, for instance, handled poorly but had lots of leg room. Then he gave his subjects a few minutes to contemplate their choices. More than half wound up picking the “best” car. Easy.

Then Dr Dijksterhuis distracted his second group of subjects, forcing them to make an unconscious or emotional decision. These hypothetical buyers made bad choices. Obvious, right?

Not so fast. This time, the buyers were provided with 12 features (such as cup holders and trunk space), totaling 48 pieces of information. Their brains couldn’t handle the overload, even when given time to think things through. Less than one-quarter chose the best car, worse than chance. But the group he distracted actually made the best choice 60 percent of the time. What gives?

Dijksterhuis followed up with real-world studies on all kinds of consumer products, plus further hypothetical exercises. The gist of his findings is that our brains are designed for choosing simple products such as toilet paper and vegetable peelers, where buyers can zero in on important things, such as price. Emotions can mess up your thinking, here, and lead to bad choices.

That all changes, though, when we’re buying a couch at IKEA. Will the couch, for instance, match the drapes? Will the cat scratch the leather? On and on, way too many things to think about. Inevitably - without input from our emotions - we are going to make the wrong decision.

Yes, we need to do our homework. Yes, we need to rationally sift through our options. But Dijksterhuis found an important qualification to this. When it’s a complex decision, we need to distract ourselves, let our thoughts marinate in our unconscious for awhile, then have faith in our feelings. According to Lehrer: “Complex problems ... require the the processing powers of the emotional brain, the supercomputer of the mind.”

Anyway, here I am stuck with a car that has defective cup-holder that doesn’t slide out. It’s also way too huge for me. But it handles beautifully and it’s a pleasure to drive (a totally alien experience to me), and I didn't exceed my budget. Plus, it just FEELS right.

Not to mention the silver paint job. My new Chick Magnet. Honestly, could I have made a better choice?

Thinking With Our Emotions - It's Vital

We use our reason to keep our emotions in check. That way we don't do stupid things. We become masters of our domain. Plato believed that. So did the Enlightenment philosophers. So did our Founding Fathers, as did Freud. It stands to reason, right?

Not so fast, says science writer Jonah Lehrer. In his eye-opening (and highly recommended) book, "How We Decide" (published last year), Lehrer cites no end of brain science studies that show that emotion is very much involved in not only making decisions, but in making the right decisions. Not only that, the pre-frontal cortices - those parts of the brain associated with higher reasoning - are very easily tricked into making bad choices.

Lehrer begins his book with the closing seconds of the 2002 Super Bowl (click on YouTube video above). The New England Patriots have the ball on their own 17 yard line, and the Rams defense is expecting quarterback Tom Brady to pass. As Lehrer tells us, "each pass is really a guess, a hypothesis launched into the air." The best quarterbacks make the best guesses.

In the split-seconds he has at his disposal, there is no time for Brady to make a considered decision. Instead, it is his feelings that guide him. Brady starts moving the ball downfield. Then it's now-or-never time. Lehrer picks up on the action:

The primary target, a tight end running a short crossing pattern, is tightly covered. As a result, when Brady glances at the tight end, he automatically feels a slight twinge of fear, the sure sign of a risky pass.

His secondary target is also covered. Again, a negative feeling. Brady needs to get rid of the ball in a hurry. Otherwise, bad things will happen. He proceeds to his third target ...

Troy Brown is sneaking across the center of the field, threading the seam between the linebackers and the cornerbacks. When Brady looks at the target, his usual fear is replaced by a subtle burst of positive emotion, the allure of a receiver without a nearby defender. He has found an open man. He lets the ball fly. ...

As Lehrer explains later in the book, a lot of our decision-making has to do with the dopamine system, most commonly associated with the emotions of pleasure and fear. But dopamine is also involved in the process of anticipation - a lot of it driven by past experience. Thus in a gambling game, if a player drew from a bad deck, the dopamine neurons immediately stopped firing. "The player experienced a negative emotion and learned not to draw from that deck again."

This is a crucial cognitive talent, Lehrer tells us. "Dopamine neurons automatically detect the subtle patterns that we would otherwise fail to notice; they assimilate all the data that we can't consciously comprehend. And then, once they come up with a set of refined predictions about how the world works, they translate these predictions into emotions."

Oddly enough, Lehrer says later on, psychopathic behavior appears to result from lack of emotion rather than a breakdown in reason. Psychopaths tend to have above average intelligence. The problem is they are not guided by their emotions. They never feel bad when others feel bad. As a result, they show no remorse. "This emotional void means psychopaths never learn from their adverse experiences. ... The absence of emotion makes the most basic moral concepts incomprehensible."

Yes, our emotions can lead us astray, but the skilled decision-maker knows when to pay attention:

Brady yells out a snap count, sends a man in motion, then the ball is in his hands. He drops back and notices three defensive linemen are rushing him. The fourth is trying to cut off the short pass. Brady looks to his right. The receiver is covered. He looks to his left. Nobody's open. He looks to the center of the field. Troy Brown, a Patriots wide receiver, is trying to find a plane of unoccupied space ...

Something feels right to Brady. He fires a bullet 14 yards downfield. Brown runs with the ball another nine yards, then steps out of bounds. One more quick pass, then the kicking unit comes onto the field. Adam Vinatieri sends the ball 48 yards through the uprights. Zero seconds on the clock. Game over.

Much more to come ...

Jonah Lehrer authors the outstanding brain science blog, The Frontal Cortex.

Creativity - We Are Killing It Off; Hopefully There Will Be Enough Creative Thinkers Left To Rescue Us From the Disaster We Are Headed Into

I excelled at every subject just for the purpose of excelling, not learning. And quite frankly, now I'm scared.

High school valedictorian Erica Goldson (pictured here) had the guts to speak out. In an address to her graduating class, she spelled it out in a way that even the stupidest teacher in the audience could comprehend, if not accept:

Between these cinderblock walls, we are all expected to be the same. We are trained to ace every standardized test, and those who deviate and see light through a different lens are worthless to the scheme of public education, and therefore viewed with contempt.

She went on to say:

And now here I am in a world guided by fear, a world suppressing the uniqueness that lies inside each of us, a world where we can either acquiesce to the inhuman nonsense of corporatism and materialism or insist on change. We are not enlivened by an educational system that clandestinely sets us up for jobs that could be automated, for work that need not be done, for enslavement without fervency for meaningful achievement. We have no choices in life when money is our motivational force. Our motivational force ought to be passion, but this is lost from the moment we step into a system that trains us, rather than inspires us.

Coincidentally, last month Newsweek ran a cover feature, The Creativity Crisis, that reported that for the first time, measures of creativity in US school kids are way down. The implications are enormous. As Newsweek points out:

The potential consequences are sweeping. The necessity of human ingenuity is undisputed. A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future. Yet it’s not just about sustaining our nation’s economic growth. All around us are matters of national and international importance that are crying out for creative solutions, from saving the Gulf of Mexico to bringing peace to Afghanistan to delivering health care. Such solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others.

Ironically, as the rest of the world is moving beyond from the old "drill and kill" method of learning, the US is heading in precisely the opposite direction toward prepping students for acing standardized tests. Meanwhile, arts in the schools have been liquidated.

Creativity is not just about the arts. It's about generating original ideas, across all fields of endeavor. The creative process involves both "divergent" and "convergent" thinking. In the divergent phase, the brain is literally roaming the library stacks, gathering up books by the armload. A strong body of research suggests that creative individuals may have brains that are less than efficient at filtering out incoming information.

But we are easily overwhelmed by too much information, not to mention sensory input and emotion - which may explain much of mental illness. This is where the convergent phase comes in. The brain becomes ruthlessly efficient in weeding out irrelevancies and focusing only on the facts that matter. Finally, the brain needs to find associations between apparently unrelated facts and ideas to come up with an original solution.

In his outstanding 2009 book, "How We Decide," science writer Jonah Lehrer reports on what was going on in the minds of the flight crew of United Airlines Flight 232 from Denver to Chicago when one fine day over Iowa in 1989, the rear engine of their DC-10 exploded and took out all three hydraulic systems.

Without a functioning hydraulic system, Captain Al Haynes had no control of his plane. UA 232 was on the verge of flipping into a death spiral. Emergency procedures never anticipated a total loss of hydraulics. The manual had not provided for this contingency. The experts on the ground had no answers. Haynes and his crew were totally on their own.

As Lehrer reports, the first remarkable thing to happen was that Haynes and his crew fought back their panic. Haynes then did a mental scan of all the cockpit controls he could operate without hydraulic pressure. The list was a short one, and only one was useful - the thrust levers. But you couldn't steer a plane with thrust levers.

Or could you?

Haynes' DC-10 had two working engines. If he idled one while boosting the other - what they call differential thrust - in theory he could steer the plane. It was a crazy idea. No one had ever thought of it before, much less tried it. Lehrer notes that the pilots dealt with potential information overload only by focusing on the most necessary bits of data:

For instance, once Haynes realized that he could control only the throttle levers - everything else in the cockpit was virtually useless - he immediately zeroed in on the possibility of steering with his engines. He stopped worrying about his ailerons, elevators, and wing flaps.

Meanwhile, inside the brain, the prefrontal cortex took an abstract principle - the physics of engine thrust - and applied it "in an unfamiliar context to come up with an entirely original solution."

The brain at this convergent stage of creative thinking was uncompromisingly disciplined and rational. Without a strong "I" in the cockpit, mentally we are nothing more than flakes and fruitcakes. Likewise, without wide horizons in the divergent stage, we are mere industrious drudges unable to think our way outside of a paper bag.

Haynes and his crew managed to get UA 232 to an emergency landing strip. But they couldn't control the speed of the landing. The plane skidded into a cornfield and shattered into several sections, leaving 112 passengers dead but sparing 184 lives.

Meanwhile, in the US, our school system is gearing us to a crash landing. It is conditioning our young to become mere takers of tests and uncritical followers of received wisdom. Bound to the past, our next generation may lack the means to think our nation into the future, much less work its way out of our next round of current social, political, environmental, and economic jams.

Thank heaven, then, for boat-rockers such as Erica Goldson. "We are the new future and we are not going to let tradition stand," she told her graduating class. "Once educated properly, we will have the power to do anything ... We will not accept anything at face value. We will ask questions, and we will demand truth."

Ah, there is hope.

Ruminating Depressions - Is There a Purpose to Our Suffering?

I’m taking time out from my DSM-5 Report Cards to comment on a thought-provoking article in the NY Times Magazine by author Jonah Lehrer, Depression’s Upside.  Don’t be fooled by the title - depression sucks. The true issue is whether our suffering has a purpose.

Here’s the deal: Depression is endemic in the population. Every year, seven percent of us get taken down by what William Styron described as a “gray drizzle of horror ... a storm of murk.” But:

If depression was a disorder, then evolution had made a tragic mistake, allowing an illness that impedes reproduction ... to spread throughout the population.

So does depression have some kind of secret purpose, like a fever that helps the immune system fight off infection? Enter Andy Thompson and Paul Andrews, a psychiatrist and evolutionary psychologist respectively from the University of Virginia, who came up with the “analytic-rumination hypothesis.”

Start with the proposition that depression is characterized by over-ruminating. Our brain gets locked into “a recursive loop of woe.” We can’t think about anything else. What is good about that?

Nothing, according to prevailing opinion, which strongly suggests that our malfunctioning brains are genetic accidents.

But the evolutionary perspective forces us to consider depression as an adaptation (however painful) to our environment. We typically ruminate in response to a bad setback, such as death in the family or loss of a job. A rumination about a bitter divorce may take the form of regret, second-guessing, and concern about the future.

These are the type of thoughts that fuel depression, which meds and talking therapy aim to stop dead. But suppose this type of rumination forces us to focus on the things we need to be dealing with right now? To learn from our experience and reject the type of rationalizations that may have gotten us into this very type of mess in the first place? So, quoting Andrews:

I started thinking about how, even if you are depressed for a few months, the depression might be worth it if it helps you better understand social relationships. Maybe you realize you need to be less rigid or more loving. Those are insights that can come out of depression, and they can be very valuable.

Bullshit, says Peter Kramer, author of "Undoing Depression." Depression sucks, and that’s all there is to that. How does the hypothesis account for chronic depression, for instance? Or late life depression?

Ed Hagen, an anthropologist at the University of Washington who is sympathetic to the hypothesis, also has some quibbles. For instance, individuals with major depression often don’t groom, bathe, or sometimes even use the toilet. This is one helluva price to pay for quiet reflection.

But evolutionary psychiatry and its critics are essentially coming from the same starting point. Depression is a hugely complex illness. Multifactorial and heterogeneous are the terms used to describe its many causes and seemingly infinite variations. No one theory is going to account for every single depression.

Randolph Nesse, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan, offers a list of possibilities (see Darwin and the Psychiatric Advantage and Randolph Nesse Interview), including a plea for help, signal of defeat (to prevent future attacks), and removing the rose-colored glasses. Nesse compares depression to pain, which can arise from a variety of sources, as well as being an affliction in its own right.

In the meantime, though, something observable is going on in the brain. Researchers investigating depressed individuals have picked up heightened activity in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), which is especially important for maintaining attention. (Deficits in the VLPFC have been linked to ADHD.) One possibility is the VLPFC underlies rumination, allowing individuals to stay focussed.

The downside to this type of focus is individuals are too wrapped up in their own shit to concentrate on other things, such as work and relationships or even the most basic cognitive tasks. But, “human attention is a scarce resource — the neural effects of depression make sure the resource is efficiently allocated.”

Moreover, “if depression didn’t exist — if we didn’t react to stress and trauma with endless ruminations — then we would be less likely to solve our predicaments. Wisdom isn’t cheap, and we pay for it with pain.”

This same unrelenting focus may help account for the unbelievable creativity found in the depressed population. As neuropsychiatrist Nancy Andreasen of the University of Iowa describes it, “if you’re at the cutting edge, then you’re going to bleed.”

In the meantime, there is a growing body of opinion that meds may interfere with the rumination process. Yes, there is a use for meds, but the high relapse rate (76 percent according to one study) when antidepressants are discontinued indicates a host of underlying personal problems that haven’t been resolved. 

Even strong supporters of antidepressant therapy acknowledge that these meds are treating the symptoms rather than the cause. But do we do nothing while over-rumination works its destructive course? Of course not. Certain kinds of talk therapy are extremely helpful, and further refinements may speed up the rumination process.

Often, when the ruminator solves his or her problem and comes to a decision (such as to find a new career), the depression lifts. But can we afford to wait that long? As the article concludes:

To say that depression has a purpose or that sadness makes us smarter says nothing about its awfulness. A fever, after all, might have benefits, but we still take pills to make it go away. This is the paradox of evolution: even if our pain is useful, the urge to escape from the pain remains the most powerful instinct of all.