The Neuroscience of Curiosity
Part of practicing medicine is the recognition of patterns. You need to get the symptoms, physical examination and lab results and review the data to recognize the big picture called diagnoses. The only difference between residents and specialists is the speed at which they arrive at the correct diagnoses. The specialist mostly get there quicker. It becomes interesting when symptoms or findings are out of the ordinary. When new data or different patterns appear not belonging to the well known patterns. The ability to discover these out of the ordinary symptoms and patterns together with the ability to understand new orderly relationships is the intellectual challenge of being a good physician.
This curiosity is not reserved for physicians, other professions also share this quality. I am inclined to think that detectives also benefit from this characteristic and that’s why psychiatrists like detectives on television.
Interested in this subject of curiosity and the neuroscience of this phenomenon I tried to find literature on the subject, which wasn’t easy. The term in the scientific literature mostly covering the aspects of curiosity is creative innovation. Published research on this topic is also scares.
creativity is defined as the ability to understand, develop and express in a systematic fashion, novel orderly relationships.
As with many subjects I’m interested in to know how it works in the brain, creative innovation is a complex process consisting of four stages: preparation, incubation, illumination and verification.
Preparation means having the skills and knowledge such as going through med school. You have to recognize the out of the ordinary from the usual. It’s the prepared mind that enables the mind to perceive anomalies.
Incubation is thinking about the phenomenon, cognitive processing it, comparing it to the known and previous experiences.
Illumination is the ability to change the cognitive process due to the observation of the anomaly, the so called “Aha erlebnis” or “Aha” experience.
Verification is the process of experimenting, searching and testing hypotheses, attempting to disprove or support the formed hypothesis.
The phases of incubation and illumination have received much criticism. These processes can differ in time needed for these phases, at least that’s what I think and what can explain the controversies in science about these two phases.
Now what is the neuroscience of curiosity?
Intelligence is necessary but not sufficient to explain creative innovation. Creative thinking requires the ability to take a different direction when thinking, to differ from the previous thought, to go a whole new different direction in the cognitive process. This is also called divergent thinking. Functional imaging studies and studies of patients with lesions suggest that the frontal lobes are important for divergent thinking or coming up alternative strategies and explanations. Another important aspect according to this review is the catecholamine-creative-innovation
hypothesis. This hypothesis suggests that for creative thinking the brain should be in suspend mode. With a low level of arousal relatively less activated neurons can be used to enhance constricted associative networks. Less activation, less arousal makes other neuronal networks more apprehensive for stimulation. So having trouble finding a solution for your problem, sit down and relax…………..
In conclusion, the speculative neuroscience of curiosity is summarized by:
creative people may be endowed with brains that are capable of storing extensive specialized knowledge in their temporoparietal cortex, be capable of frontal mediated divergent thinking and have a special ability to modulate the frontal lobe-locus coeruleus (norepinephrine) system, such that during creative innovation cerebral levels of norepinephrine diminish, leading to the discovery of novel orderly relationships.
What do you think, I especially like the low arousal part, going into suspend mode now, take care……….
Heilman, K., Nadeau, S., & Beversdorf, D. (2003). Creative Innovation: Possible Brain Mechanisms Neurocase, 9 (5), 369-379 DOI: 10.1076/neur.9.5.369.16553
January 12, 2010 @ 5:18 pm
Along with the catecholamine-creative innovation hypothesis, there are some nicely done papers that show that elevated levels of catecholamines, specifically norepinephrine, reduce creativity. They go about this by putting people under stress using the Trier Social Stress Test and using some very basic, but somewhat believable measures of creativity, like finding words that associate with three others, etc. Under stress, subjects perform worse, but with beta-blockade (by propranolol), they perform at baseline again. See: Beta-adrenergic Modulation of Cognitive Flexibility during Stress. Alexander et. al. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 19:3, pp. 468–478, 2007.
January 12, 2010 @ 7:45 pm
Thanks for this additional and appreciated information, kind regards Dr shock
January 13, 2010 @ 5:24 am
I regard your article also as highly interesting 🙂
I also dealt with the topic of creativity once in the first year of my studies. I had do deliver a speech about this topic. I also found the four phases of creativity and also found that “lowered brain activity” enhances divergent thinking. Further it’s beneficial (and possibly accompanies intelligence) to have highly interconnected hemispheres and other parts of the brain. The reason for this is that with more connections its better possible to connect information from different sources with each other which might lead to a creative idea. What I also found what increases creativity – but on cognitive level – is higher self esteem. So not only the skill but also the courage to think new ways are required to coming to creative solutions. Also the flexibility of thoughts can help with finding creative solutions. According to Stein (1974) there are two sorts of thought processes: Primary thoughts, being a sort of daydreaming and secondary thoughts, being concentratedly analyzing. The ability to switch between these two types of thoughts also elevates creativity: Primary type thoughts lead to new connections between old informations and the secondary type then analyses this connection for validity and adequacy.
References:
Stein, M. I. (1974). Stimulating Creativity I. New York: Academic Press.
January 13, 2010 @ 9:12 am
Psychologists believe famous creative luminaries, including Vincent Van Gogh, Albert Einstein, Emily Dickinson and Isaac Newton, had schizotypal personalities. How does this match with the low arousal hypothesis? Maybe they do very well on the illumination part, but skip the other 3 stages. Or is the whole ‘schizotypes-have-enhanced-creativity’ a myth? Like every person with autism is a ‘rainman’.
January 13, 2010 @ 12:31 pm
The picture:
The child is totally looking. She (?) is 100 % intellectual and emotional interested in the object. She feels safe. It’s wonderful.
The doctor is divided. Showing. His left hand doesn’t protect and support. He isn’t 100% caring and 100% detective.
He isn’t sure.
How can we see this?
I think we imitate inside our mind and body the faces, the movements and postures, than we know…
We may use the word “neuroscience”. Maybe this word expresses self-protection?
January 14, 2010 @ 5:24 pm
These artists had different diagnoses during the last decades. Moreover, a clear classification of schizotypical personality disorder is far less frequent than cluster A,B or C personality disorder. The schizotype enhanced creativity is also a myth. As far as I know there is no reason to believe that certain personality disorders are more creative than others, but maybe another subject for a post, will think about it. 😉 Take care Dr Shock
January 14, 2010 @ 5:26 pm
Thank you for this additional information, very informative, kind regards Dr Shock