Creativity - The playground of the brain - Introduction by samuel meyler

so we just got to see 3-year-old jonathan playing Mozart I think it is a nice example and a nice way to start the evening because this is an example of creativity that we can all appreciate. We can see that it has certain requirements like curiosity, exploration imagination, that ability for Jonathan to step onto that cushion and wave his wand. and of course it required playfulness. Welcome to Creativity: the playground of the brain My name is Sam Meyler, I am a PhD student here at Champalimaud Neuroscience program and tonight as as dr. Leonor was saying, we are going to have artist Vik Moniz and neuroscientist Rui Costa speak about creativity so when i was in university i was studying to become a biologist and i came across a man who really inspired me called Micheal Moschen. He wasn't in fact a biologist, he was juggler. He spent hours and hours juggling everyday One day the thought came to him: can I juggle without throwing the ball? and he created a new type of juggling one where the ball never left his hand Thank you! so he took an old idea which was juggling and by giving a new for me turned it into something entirely different something that he thought was new and valuable from his perspective and also from mine when i was in university new and valuable which is exactly the definition that henry miller used to describe creativity and he knows that the creativity is the occurrence of the composition which is both new and valuable. of course a scientist might take a slightly different approach. H.H. Fox describes creativity as any thinking process in which original patterns are formed and so depending on whether you're a psychologist, mathematician, musician or a singer you might have a different criteria for defining what creativity is what we do know though Is that creativity is a function of processes in our brain. And not only that - it's not just limited to artists, like Picasso, or Van Gogh, or writers like Shakespeare or Camoes, but it's used everyday in a variety of contexts by scientists, engineers entrepreneurs, politicians. And so one of we questions we, neuroscientists, can ask, is is creativity unique to the human brain? so for example these two photos were sold for 25.000 US dollars in an art exhibition in the U.S. They were painted by an artists named Kongo. now that the only thing that was unusual about this was that condo was in fact a chimpanzee. Novel? Valuable? Required and original pattern of thinking? At first glanced these two photos or these two paintings seem like they fit with this definition of creativity but to know that for sure we have to ask the question what was happening in Congo's brain when he drew these pictures? whas he playing with colors? was he trying to captures some chimpanzees landscape that only he saw? Or has he learned a motor task? So was he just picking up a brush and dragging along a piece of paper and every time you did this someone would give him a banana, so he just kept doing this? great! Hum.. we see especially in nature and in the laboratory we begin to see examples of creativity in animals, especially in the realm of problem solving, where animimals have to generate new solutions to old problems. and for example in the studio we see a crow who has learnt that she can press a lever down quickly and access food in the second example though there's a cylinder tube, that's been placed above and does not allow her to access lever, as before. So she has to find a new solution and you can see her trying. pretty cool, right? like one of those films you keep seeing the end even though you know it's gonna happen So one of the things here that is important to know is that she was not taught this she discovered it and so it's a one of the questions we can ask is did this solution require creativity? And so, as neuroscientists, we are interested in the questions of what are the mechanisms which allow us to be creative we can even ask is there a specific place for creativity in the brain for example in this experiments normal human volunteers were presented with the problem that required a creative solution and by using increases in blood flow is proxy for neural activity, investigators are trying to capture specific places So in this image we can see the specific places in the brain, that were trying to be used when they had that creative flash of insight, that moment of inspiration, that thing that is often called The AHA moment of course immortalized by Archimedes running naked down the street screaming eureka eureka so i'm not gonna take my clothes off for you tonight thankfully for you guys But we are interested in looking at creativity is a process something that isn't just an AHA moment, but something that requires hard work requires making mistakes requires intuition and on some level requires returning to the playground i think the material kind of captures this idea that for adults creativity can be fun and engaging just the way it is just like for a 3-year-old Jonathan. Can we get more people to choose the stairs by making it fun to do? So I would like to finish this short introduction by a poem by Fernando Pessoa, which I think captured something really nice about creativity. He said the following: Há um tempo em que é preciso abandonar as roupas usadas, que já tem a forma do nosso corpo. e esquecer os nossos caminhos, que nos levam sempre aos mesmos lugares. É o tempo da travessia: e, se não ousarmos fazê-la, teremos ficado, para sempre, à margem de nós mesmos. And so for me it feels like creativity is knowing when to abandon these old clothes that no longer fit us. Thank you very much! Subtitles by the Amara.org community