My first Magazine Creative Minds | Page 7

SCIENCE The massive 86 billion neurons in our brain is organised in a pretty special way. Roughly speaking, one group of neurons sense the environment and another group react to it. In most animal brains, there is a hard-wired path from the sensing neurons to the acting ones. However in your human brain, there are lots of paths connecting the two, and even way more that generate random, spontaneous thoughts. Creativity depends on the cooperation of two competing brain networks; one that generates spontaneous thoughts (default mode network) and the executive control center of the brain that governs everything else. To produce new ideas, we start with a pool of random, free- flowing thoughts - those worthy of further exploration are then approved by the executive control network. According to George Land’s Creativity Test, young children are creative geniuses, and become less creative as they age. His study took a group of 1,600 five-year- olds and tested to see how creative they were. Ninety-eight percent were deemed creative geniuses, thinking in novel ways similar to the likes of Picasso, Mozart, Einstein and other creative personalities. He tested them again at 10 years old. That number dropped to 30 percent. By 15 years of age, it had declined to 12 percent. He gave the same test to 280,000 adults and found that only 2 percent were creative geniuses.