The Real Happy Pill Page 15

  Ingenuity or hard work?

  In a preserved letter, Mozart explains how he composes his music. The process seems completely magical. The legendary composer describes how he creates musical masterpieces without even going near an instrument: he hears complete pieces in his head, and then he quite simply writes them down on paper, as if they had already been composed. Later, when it is performed by a symphony orchestra, the music sounds as wonderful as when he first heard it in his head.

  This image of an artistic genius’s enormous creative powers is undoubtedly very compelling, and it’s often used to illustrate how the brains of extremely creative people work in ways that we mere mortals can scarcely imagine. Problem is, that letter is a fake. Mozart didn’t compose his symphonies that way at all. Everything suggests that he worked with determination, and that he used music theory as well as other established methods to write. He spent endless hours fine-tuning his pieces, reworking, modifying, and reworking them again until he was satisfied. Mozart’s classical masterpieces are more the product of hard work than of some whimsical effort.

  A similar story involves Newton and how he arrived at his theory about gravity—just like that, when an apple fell on his head while he was sitting under a tree. What is not recounted, however, are the decades he toiled in mathematics and physics before the idea struck him. It then took him twenty years from the apple incident for Newton’s complete theory to be fully articulated.

  Of course, Mozart and Newton might have had their “Eureka!” moments, but everything indicates that their flashes of brilliance didn’t hit them haphazardly and were instead products of a long and painstaking slog. This doesn’t mean that everyone who makes the effort can compose timeless music like Mozart or make trailblazing contributions to science like Newton, but it certainly means that we can all practice and fine-tune our creative abilities if we try.

  Quantity leads to quality

  Do you belong to that category of people who come up with plenty of concepts; make free-associations right, left, and center; and suggest one thing after another when brainstorming? Or do you belong to those who only suggest a few things and hope they’ll be good enough? It’s a fact that the first process has proven to be the best way to come up with the most ideas.

  When we study how people perform on creativity tests for divergent thinking, those who have lots of ideas also tend to have a greater number of good ideas. This may sound obvious, but it’s worth looking closer at the implications. If you generate a lot of ideas, chances are likelier that you will hit upon a good one, even if the rest are bad. It’s not as common to come up with only one or two ideas that are brilliant, with no throwaways.

  For most of us to think up ideas, we must put in more effort. That importance of perseverance in creativity is underrated, as evidenced by the fictional tales of Mozart and Newton. Exercise isn’t just beneficial for divergent and convergent thinking; it also helps to give us the energy to keep plugging away with ideas. When you become physically and mentally stronger through physical activity, your stamina for additional work increases—as exemplified by Haruki Murakami during his intense bouts of writing—and so the good ideas tend to pop up sooner or later.

  HOW CREATIVITY WORKS

  Our knowledge about what happens in the brain when we’re being creative has advanced by leaps and bounds; we no longer consider the creative process some sort of black box that we don’t know how to operate.

  We have begun to understand why some people are more creative than others. Researchers on creativity have not only directed their interest toward the areas of the brain like the frontal lobe (the seat of our higher cognitive functions); the trail also seems to lead to an area deeper inside the brain: the thalamus.

  The thalamus sorts out information

  An enormous amount of information is constantly being triaged inside our brain: what we’re seeing and hearing at this very moment; how our arms and legs are positioned; if it’s warm or cold in the room; how often our lungs fill with air as we breathe; and how quickly our heart beats. Our brain receives this information continuously, day and night. We’re conscious of some of these data, and unaware of the rest. We typically don’t give much thought to our breathing or how our legs are placed, and it must be so for us to function normally. If all this information reached our consciousness, we wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything besides our initial impressions.

  The thalamus refers to the part of the brain that acts as a kind of filter for our consciousness to prevent us from becoming overwhelmed by information. The thalamus is situated in the brain like the hub of a bicycle wheel where all the spokes meet; it’s not by accident that the location of the thalamus is so central. Information is gathered in the thalamus from the brain’s different areas (like the centers for visual impressions, for example), at which point it chooses which signals are let through to our consciousness. The thalamus is like an executive assistant who picks which meetings her boss—in this case, the cerebral cortex and our consciousness—should attend, and which ones he can sit out. If the thalamus doesn’t function properly, the cerebral cortex runs the risk of becoming overloaded with information and not working as it should—like a secretary who is unable to make decisions and who arranges meetings all over the place, causing her boss, who is in meetings all the time, to work inefficiently.

  To think outside the box

  Today, we believe that this kind of information overload is what happens in the psychiatric disorder we call schizophrenia, where the sufferer loses touch with reality and experiences symptoms such as delusions and hallucinations. Many things point to the schizophrenic’s brain receiving too many strong impressions at once, making it hard for him or her to hang on to the real world. This leads the afflicted individual to subconsciously create an alternative picture of his or her surroundings. Schizophrenics often exhibit very bizarre thought patterns. Occasionally, I have met some who cling to such weird delusions that I could never have made up myself along those same lines, no matter how hard I tried.

  But there are always two sides to a coin. Having a thalamus that lets through a lot of information isn’t always a weakness or something that leads to mental illness. It also appears to be related to creativity; it can lead us to make unsuspected associations and think outside the box. If our cerebral cortex and consciousness receive many signals, it increases our chances of having unique ideas and seeing things from a different perspective.

  So how does our brain work? For the thalamus filter to function normally, we need dopamine (yes, it plays an important role here, too), but not too much of it and not too little—just enough. If dopamine levels deviate from the correct amount, the thalamus might not let the right number of signals through, leading to information overload, which can either be a benefit or a drawback.

  In other words, various dopamine levels in the thalamus could be linked to increased creativity and mental illness. This in fact appears to be the case. We know from experiments performed by Swedish professor and neuroscientist Fredrik Ullén at the Swedish Karolinska Institute

  that people who perform especially well on creativity tests for divergent thinking have fewer dopamine receivers in the thalamus, causing them to register unusual levels of dopamine. Consequently, their thalamus lets through more signals, and their thinking is more creative.

  What’s interesting is that the same thing has been observed in schizophrenics who perform well on creativity tests—they seem to have fewer dopamine receptors in the thalamus—but for them, this leads to psychosis instead of creative thinking. So what decides whether we’ll become mentally ill or creative geniuses? We don’t know for sure right now. Perhaps if our brain already works well in other ways, the increased flow of information can become an asset instead of a liability; it could be that the brain is resilient enough to handle the strain of added data without having to resort to creating alternative realities. You are original and creative and can free-associate in unusual ways without becoming psychotic
. However, if your brain can’t process things normally, it won’t be able to handle the deluge of information, and so you could suffer from psychosis and lose touch with reality.

  When it comes to the brain, things are seldom in black and white, where you either possess an ability or you don’t. It isn’t that people who let a large load of information go through the thalamus are either creative or psychotic. There are gray zones in which you can show signs of qualities, but to different extents. There is a vast spectrum between creativity and mental illness along which people are situated. Some may have to deal with a lot of data, and their brain is hanging on for dear life to cope with the load. At certain times in their lives, they may show symptoms bordering on psychosis, while at other times, when their brain is running smoothly, they can create things that others can only dream about.

  A hairline fissure separates madness from genius

  There are lots of people throughout history who have shown us how close creativity is to madness. Two famous cases are the artist Vincent van Gogh and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who were both enormously creative, yet who also suffered from mental illness at different times of their lives. A later example is John Nash, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, who combined exceptional creativity with serious mental problems. Nash, portrayed by Russell Crowe in the Oscar-winning movie A Beautiful Mind, was one of the world’s leading mathematicians who also happened to suffer from schizophrenia. He heard voices and was delusional, believing that he was being followed, threatened, and conspired against. He found his affliction to be both a blessing and a curse. “I would never have had such good scientific ideas had I been able to think normally,” he said about his exceptional creative abilities.

  Many highly creative people don’t suffer from mental illness, but they can trace it in their family. One of the greatest minds of our age, Albert Einstein, had a son who was schizophrenic. Polymath Bertrand Russell, who was a philosopher, an author, and a politician, had many relatives who suffered from schizophrenia. David Bowie, one of the past decades’ musical luminaries, had a schizophrenic brother.

  One possible explanation for this link is that both the creative people and their disabled relatives had a bigger rush of information through the thalamus—a more intense thought flow—but some of them had a brain that could handle the excess data and knew how to make use of it. This is what made them geniuses. Meanwhile, their relatives, who had brains that weren’t as resilient, became mentally ill.

  Are you stuck on a problem at work? Are you having trouble finding a good idea for a book you’d like to write, or a company you want to launch? If so, get out there and run!

  Boost the flow of ideas, and your ability to handle them

  The frontal lobe is seemingly vital for us to channel the flow of ideas through the thalamus and make something out of them. As we’ve already seen, training strengthens the frontal lobe. It does it in the short term by increasing blood flow, causing the frontal lobe to work better, and over the long term through other mechanisms we will read more about in the chapter Improved concentration. Exercise and training improves the conditions for using our flow of ideas and turning them into something productive.

  Additionally, exercise doesn’t merely affect our ability to handle the flow of ideas; it is also likely to influence the actual flow of ideas. We’re not sure exactly what kind of mechanisms are responsible for this, but one possibility is that physical activity affects dopamine, which is critical to the filter in the thalamus. However, with dopamine it’s not always the case that more—or less—is always better. The systems in the brain are incredibly complex, and theories of too much or too little of one thing or the other are often far too simplistic. Instead, one way to see this is that the different systems are more or less in tune, and exercise fine-tunes the dopamine system, influencing how you feel and how much information the thalamus lets through, thereby affecting how creative you are.

  We’re born with an individual range of basic creative talent, and we can’t change that. What we do with that talent later is, however, up to us. There are many different factors that are important for creativity, but the fact is that physical activity is one of the most important. Are you stuck on a problem at work? Are you having trouble finding a good idea for a book you’d like to write or a company you want to launch? If so, get out there and run! If it can work wonders for Haruki Murakami and for Beethoven, it should also be able to help you and me.

  THE RIGHT PRESCRIPTION TO INCREASE CREATIVITY

  The best way to boost creativity is to go for a run or to be active in a similarly vigorous way. A walk is good, too, but it won’t be as effective.

  Run for at least twenty to thirty minutes. You’ll feel the effect on your creativity afterward, and it will last for about two hours.

  Don’t run to the point of exhaustion, because creativity diminishes for several hours after a hard workout (not over the long term, though).

  Make sure that you’re fit, because that is when the effect of exercise on creativity is the strongest.

  Training improves the ability to brainstorm, primarily, but that might differ from person to person.

  7. THE GROWING BRAIN

  For children to reach their full potential, they need to be active.

  CATHERINE DAVIS

  The Program for International Student Assessment test (PISA) measures the scholastic performance of fifteen-year-olds and is used to compare the academic prowess of students across different countries. In December of 2013, the latest results of the PISA test were presented, and they were a bombshell to my native Sweden. Swedish students weren’t merely light-years behind countries such as South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong, which topped the list. They also performed worse than average compared to other OECD (The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries and came in last among our Nordic neighbors. Math, reading, and scientific levels were in an especially sorry state. Worst of all, we were heading in the wrong direction—Sweden was the country whose rankings had fallen the farthest.

  Lively debates have since ensued, and many appear to have ideas on how to turn this situation around. But maybe the discussion should center less on teaching methods and class size and focus more on what research has shown to have a formidable influence on children’s memory and learning abilities—that they be physically active. Today, children simply do not get enough physical education.

  It’s certainly not only what happens in class that affects a child’s instruction; research has clearly shown that movement has a reinforcing effect on children’s and teenagers’ ability to learn. School athletics are about so much more than what takes place on the soccer field or in the gymnasium—it’s definitively not about winning teams or making children good at certain sports. School athletics is about improving the groundwork for learning math and English.

  MORE GYM CLASSES—HIGHER MATH GRADES

  The most convincing proof that exercise improves children’s academic results in the “three Rs” (reading, writing, and arithmetic) doesn’t come from some American Ivy League university, but from Bunkeflo, a suburb in the Swedish southern region of Skåne. There, two elementary school classes were followed as they participated in athletics every day. Another elementary class at the same school was used as a control group, and they engaged in the customary two gym classes per week.

  The groups of kids were comparable in every respect, other than the amount of sports they took part in. They all lived in the same area, attended the same school, and studied the same subjects. What happened next? For starters, those who went to gym every day got better grades in gym class than the others—no surprise there. What was unexpected, however, was that they also did better in math, Swedish, and English without receiving any extra tutoring in these subjects. And the effects continued over many years; more of the kids who had extra gym classes graduated from the ninth grade with satisfactory grades than those in the control group. The effect was especially noticeable among the boy
s. Typically, girls get better grades than boys, but the grades leveled out completely between the genders of the children who participated in a daily gym class. No other approach has provided this kind of outcome.

  It’s not only in Skåne that we’ve seen this link. American scientists also noticed it when they studied some 250 elementary school children in third and fifth grades. A measuring technique was used that took cardiovascular fitness, muscle strength, and agility into consideration to paint a complete picture of the participants’ physical fitness. They also looked at how well the children did academically. Here too, the results were unambiguous: physically fit children did better at math and reading comprehension. The higher their fitness levels, the higher their grades. The opposite was true for overweight children: the more overweight the kid was, the worse his or her test scores were. The widely-held preconceived notion that overweight children are academically minded and physically active children are empty-headed has proven to be completely baseless.

  Is it risky to draw conclusions from a study of only 250 children or of a few elementary school classes in Skåne? In Nebraska, nearly twelve thousand children were tested, and results indicated that the fitter children tested better in math and English than those who were unfit. However, excess weight—a major concern in the US—didn’t play a role in the findings. Overweight children scored neither better not worse than the children of normal weight.

  So how can exercise make children better at math and languages? As you’ve read in the chapter Jog your memory, physical activity makes the hippocampus—our center for memory and emotional control—grow in adults who are physically active. This appears to happen in children, too.

  When the brains of ten-year-olds were examined by MRI, it showed that fit children had bigger hippocampi, one of the most important areas of the brain. These variations even went hand in hand with the finding that fit children did better on memory tests. So, good physical fitness leads to a larger hippocampus and better results on memory tests.