When creating enters the body: a look to the embodiment of creativity

When thinking about creating a bunch of neuroscientific evidence pointing to the brain describes it as a mainly cognitive process. However, a broader view coming from interdisciplinary approaches shows it may be a human capability that we experience with our whole body.

I’ve been agitated several times by a question concerning the human condition: What is creativity? And when it comes to my mind, it’s almost impossible to avoid asking myself where -the heck- is located creativity? just like a delicate poet does. Creativity is often seen as an ephemeral human enlightening process. It is maybe what people do when they conceive a work, but in our collective imaginary, dreams, life experiences, emotions, muses, and even triggering substances are linked to what is known as divergent thinking. Neuroscience has been curious to underpin the neural basis of creativity in the last decades. 

Following the general thought, it can lead to thinking this is an emergent feature of our souls. So, I decided to search for evidence of the relationship between creativity and human being biology. To start, I present a finding in the last decade that I find outstanding and straightforward within research on the neural basis of creativity. Nowadays, the mainstream scientific cognitive view, linked to the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses, tries to disentangle which situations overlap with intelligence and which differ. If you wish to accompany me on this quick journey, I will also try to challenge the cognitive theory with a broader view, in which creativity might locate in the whole body. 

A brain lesion experiment crunched it

When embarking on this short dissertation, I first looked for evidence of something cross-relating the brain and creativity. While exploring resources, I saw that, in the early last decades, scientists examined creativity through people doing certain tasks involving cognition and divergent thinking and analyzing their brains through electroencephalographic -EEG- devices. These devices measured waves from the outer areas of the brain. A first insight in the 70s was that creativity was related to changes in alpha waves, the main oscillatory pattern observed in a waking brain. On the other side, in some studies, the brains of people were analyzed while doing similar tasks with big functional magnetic resonance imaging -fMRI- machines. With this, scientists had a deeper understanding of how the different brain networks underlie creativity and how it overlaps with intelligence. Unfortunately, these sorts of measures use mathematical models that make the results rather hard to interpret due to their complexity to even initiates, as well as being indirect. I needed something easier and clearer, just to the bone.

I felt an immediate attraction to a paper published in 2011, which demonstrated there was a relationship between a specific area in the brain and creativity, leading me to think it may be far from an epiphany coming from the desire of the gods, at least. Here’s why I found this study a big shot: Shamai-Tsoori and colleagues [1], in Israel, explored the involvement of an area in the forebrain on creativity, which we call the medial prefrontal cortex - mPFC -. This area is related to what we know as higher-order functions, such as the ones that allow us to make decisions, plan our lives, or inhibit conduct that we find inappropriate. And they did it using a model which I find especially clear and straightforward: they analyzed patients with lesions in this area, either in the left or the right hemisphere. It may seem like Dr. Frankenstein's science, but the thing is that the understanding of the brain advanced notably by studying patients with lesions in specific areas due to accidents or inborn malformations. This kind of study is a direct measurement of what is in there. 

In this experiment, the scientists found that lesions in the right hemisphere impaired the originality and creativity of patients, as measured with tests. And concretely, lesions in the right mPFC damaged them even further. Perhaps these results originated -or at least contributed- to the world-spread belief that the right hemisphere is the ‘creative one’ while the left hemisphere is the one we use for thoughtful reasoning. Despite this, we nowadays know that the brain works in connected networks. For example, fMRI studies reported evidence that we need both hemispheres working together to create or reason. But the finding by Shamai-Tsoori and colleagues is still valid due to the strength of being a particularly direct observation. Indeed, as the study reported, there is a predominance of one hemisphere to the other when creating, which I find amazing.

I sensed this vision of creativity being packed only in the brain may be too reductionist. Intuition led me to explore further, outside the brain. And here’s where other views depict a broader biological container, helping me understand the creative process as a whole-body experience. 

Creativity might be a byproduct of our whole body

Several resources are challenging the idea of emotions being only cognitive. In my point of view, creativity is fully emotional. I found common expressions like I feel it in my guts or I don’t have the guts to do it. This makes me think that some emotions seem to be stored somewhere outside the brain. The gut could be a good candidate if we consider it contains the recently named second brain. With more than 100 million neurons, all of them making complex calculations, its role in creativity still scapes from our knowledge about the gut-brain axis. I curiously found no papers studying this topic, which I leave open if anyone wants to catch it in the air. 

I like drawing and painting. In my intermediate-mastered artistic experience, feels that when I do something, the thing that comes is not only restricted to the head. That means creating is something you experience with your senses and somehow it breaks away from the inner, implying internal and external transformation, always in contact with the external reality. Creativity seems to start in the interface between inside and outside, in a back-and-forth manner, of what is being created, whether it is a painting, a piece of text, or a rough idea that seems to be produced in our heads. People often need to discuss their ideas to tailor them. It needs and precedes expression, taking it out of the body, speaking, playing, painting, or recording it somewhere, and getting it back in a sort of cyclic vortex. But all of these account for rough intuitions. 

I also discovered that the embodiment idea of creativity has been introduced previously. Jeffrey Davis wrote a delightful piece where he tracks resources and evidence supporting creativity as a body-mind experience [2]. “If we're going to track the most seminal emotional experience we humans are capable of, we need to track its potential place in the body.”, says Davis in his article in Psychology Today. To track some evidence on embodied creativity, I invite you to read the full article by Jeffrey Davis, who gathers, and converts the sources into five ideas and exposes their implications. Here I leave two ideas that especially attracted my attention:

1. Emotions are perceptions of changes in the body. This idea challenges some neuroscientists’ stakes that emotions are 100 percent cognitive [3].

2. Hand gestures facilitate knowledge and new learning. Take three groups of third and fourth graders. Give them math problems. Show one group a set of physical gestures to facilitate idea processing. Let the second group use their hands however they wish. Restrict the third group from using their hands. The results? Group 1 outperformed group 2, who outperformed group 3 [4]. 

It may be like solving a few pieces of the whole puzzle relying only on how neuroscience can provide insights into where creativity is. But becoming conscious about where it happens and being able to modify what might be mislearnt and recorded in the body looks like something deserving close attention. While writing these last sentences I feel a knot in my gut. It may be related to inner anxiety, telling me oh man you have to finish it ASAP. Curious caves and crannies from the mind, wherever it comes from.

A quick one

What do you think of using your body position, arms, and hands to better craft and communicate an idea? 

To know more

1 Shamay-Tsoory, Simone G., et al. I The origins of originality: the neural bases of creative thinking and originality I 2011 I Neuropsychologia 

2 Davis, Jeffrey I Science of Creativity Moves Into the Body I Nov 2012 I Psychology Today

3 Prinz, Jesse I Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion aims to mediate between the extremes of where emotions originate I 2006 I Oxford University Press

4 Broaders, Sara C., et al. I Making children gesture brings out implicit knowledge and leads to learning I 2006 I Journal of Experimental Psychology: General