On a vacation a few years ago, I described what I do for a living to family friend who is a neuropathologist.
When I asked him what happens in my brain while I listen and draw images to capture ideas on large surfaces, he replied: "Why, your whole brain is lit up like a Christmas tree!"
I have always wanted to have my brain scanned while listening and scribing. One limitation, however, is that I'd have to lay immobilized on my back in a giant beige magnet known as a fMRI.
Charles Limb is a doctor and a musician who researches the way musical creativity works in the brain. He wondered how the brain works during musical improvisation -- so he put jazz musicians and rappers in an fMRI to find out. What he and his team found has deep implications for our understanding of creativity of all kinds.
The working hypothesis is that, in order to be creative, a person has to have a "weird dissociation in the frontal lobe".
For creativity to work well, one area of the brain has to turn on, while another a large and important area needs to turn off. This is so that the artist is uninhibited and willing to make mistakes along the path of discovering something new.
The prefrontal cortex is this brain region where the juggling act occurs. This area is important in planning complex cognitive behaviors, personality expression, decision making and moderating correct social behavior.
Yet in order to accomplish tasks and make decisions--otherwise known as executive functions--the brain tends to filter out new generative impulses and stimuli that are deemed as incongruent or interfering with the focus of our attention.
Executive function is key to higher level analysis and critical thinking. It relates to abilities to differentiate among conflicting thoughts, determine good and bad, better and best, same and different, future consequences of current activities, working toward a defined goal, prediction of outcomes, expectation based on actions, and social "control" (the ability to suppress urges that, if not suppressed, could lead to socially-unacceptable outcomes).
This is most likely why graphic facilitation, scribing and mind mapping--as well as jazz and improv--are such effective tools in the process of innovation.
All of these modes of thinking and performing require (1) recognition of key patterns; (2) the generation and recombination of new information and seemingly unrelated content; (3) the synthesis of disparate elements into an experience that is beautiful, funny, unique and, ultimately, innovative.
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