Music and the mind

In September, I started taking piano lessons.

I've played the piano off and on for years (more off than on, I'm afraid), but was entirely self-taught.  To say my formal music background is thin is an understatement; I had a lousy experience with elementary school band, said "to hell with it," and that was the end of my music education in public schools.  However, I was (and am) deeply in love with music, so I picked up the flute at age sixteen, and taught myself how to play it.  I took four years of lessons with a wonderful flutist and teacher named Margaret Vitus when I was in my twenties, but until last fall those accounted for the sum total of my instruction in music of any sort.

My experience as a student -- both with Margaret forty-odd years ago, and with J. P. (my piano teacher) now -- has been interesting from a number of standpoints.  In both cases I profited greatly by having someone tell me what bad habits are holding me back, and (more importantly) what I can do to remediate them.  But my spotty background has resulted in some unique challenges.  On the upside, I have an extraordinary ear and memory for melodies and rhythms, to the point that my wife calls it my "superpower."  I once heard a piece of Serbian music in a Balkan dance class when I was in my twenties, and heard it again thirty years later, and immediately knew it was the same tune even though I hadn't heard it or played it during that time.  

The downside, though, is that my lack of formal training means there are great gaping holes in my knowledge.  I'm currently working on a charming and whimsical piece by Claude Debussy, "Dr. Gradus ad Parnassum," which like much of Debussy's music twists around our sense of keys and harmonies. 

"How do you get to Carnegie Hall?  Every day, practice, practice, practice."

So J. P. -- for whom music is about as natural as breathing -- will look at some passage, and say something that sounds like, "Oh, that's a B-flat Minor Seven Demented chord."  Once I analyze what he told me using paper, pencil, and a slide rule, after three or four hours of study I can usually say, "Oh, okay, I guess I get it," but it definitely isn't anything close to intuitively obvious.  Like, ever.  So I'm still at the point of having to read each note slowly and painstakingly, and although I think the piece is lovely (well, when someone else plays it), I don't have any real comprehension of its structure.

If you're curious, here's how it's supposed to sound:

Fortunately, J. P. is an extraordinary teacher and gets my struggles, and is working to help me fill in the gaps in my knowledge.  It's slow going, but I guess that's no different from anyone learning a musical instrument.

The reason this comes up today is a study by a team from the University of L'Aquila and the University of Teramo that discovered an interesting correlation; people who have studied music seriously have better working memory -- the ability to retrieve and load information into their "attentional stream."  Stronger and faster working memory is positively associated with a greater capacity for divergent thinking, and thus the facilitation of creativity.

The authors write:

Musical practices have recently attracted the attention of research focusing on their creative properties and the creative potential of musicians.  Indeed, a typical cliché of musicians is that they are considered predominantly artistic individuals, meaning that they are creative and original.  Practicing music is certainly an intense and multisensory experience that requires the acquisition and maintenance of a range of cognitive and motor skills throughout a musician’s life.  Indeed, music practice increases a wide range of cognitive abilities, such as visuospatial reasoning, processing speed, and [working memory], from the early stages of life.  For this reason, musicians are considered an excellent human model for the study of behavioral, cognitive, and brain effects in the acquisition, practice, maintenance, and integration of sensory, cognitive, and motor skills...

[E]xperience in the music field enhances [divergent thinking] in terms of fluency, flexibility, and originality.  Strengthening the associative modes of processing, which facilitate the retrieval of information from long-term memory, and improving the working memory competences, which facilitate the online recombination of information, might explain the relationship between musical practice and [divergent thinking].

All of which bolsters something I've been saying for years; we need to be actively supporting art and music in schools.  Sadly, school boards much more often have the opposite mentality -- the esteemed "STEM" subjects (science, technology, engineering, and math) are emphasized and thus funded, and the arts (sometimes derisively called "extras") are on the chopping block when money gets tight.

Which, of course, is all the time.  But wouldn't it be nice if the educational powers-that-be actually read the research, and acknowledged that music and art are every bit as important as STEM?

In any case, it's good to know that my struggling to learn piano might provide some other benefits besides making Debussy turn over in his grave.  Hell, at age 63, I'm thrilled to have any boosts to my cognition I can get.  And even if I'll never be able to play "Dr. Gradus ad Parnassum" like Lang Lang does, maybe the skills I learn from my piano lessons will spill over into other creative realms.  

After all, as Maya Angelou said, "You can't use up creativity.  The more you use, the more you have."

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Squelching the obvious

The origin of creativity is an ongoing source of fascination and puzzlement to me.

I say this in part because I'm frequently asked, "Where do you get the ideas for your books?" and the answer, "Beats the hell outta me" seems kind of inadequate.  Sometimes I can identify at least some sort of point of origin -- for example, my work-in-progress, The Harmonic Labyrinth, was inspired by a combination of dream my wife had and a piece of music by Johann Sebastian Bach -- but the details of the characters and plot come from who-knows-where.  They just seem to appear, unbidden, in my mind, and I have to write them down to keep my skull from exploding.

But a new piece of research, published last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has suggested that creativity may have as much to do with suppressing ordinary ideas as it does with generating unusual ones.  Scientists at the University of London have shown that the production of alpha waves in the right temporal lobe of the brain is associated with inhibiting obvious/habitual connections -- and that this may allow more creative ones to form.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons LaurMG, Glass creativity finalrevis, CC BY-SA 3.0]

As an example, think about the classic divergent thinking question, "How many uses can you think of for a paper clip?"  Ordinary adults can usually come up with ten or fifteen, maybe twenty if you really push it.  People classified as divergent thinkers can come up with far more -- up to two hundred -- and the most interesting thing is that amongst kindergartners, 98% of them fall into this range.  Most of them do this by disregarding the basic assumptions of the question.  For example, could the paper clip be thirty meters tall and made of Silly Putty?  Most adults never get this far because they're locked into the ordinary interpretations.  In other words: if you accept the walls of the box as a given, you can't think outside it.

Interestingly, divergent thinking decreases steadily from childhood into adulthood.  Some of it is undoubtedly brain wiring, but a good share of it is how we teach kids, that of the many answers to a question, one of them is the one the teacher wants ("correct") and the others are going to be frowned upon ("incorrect").  Now, clearly, there are some cases where this is a valid approach; there's not much to back up a kid who wants equal respect for his claim that 2 + 2 = 13.  But what about things like interpretation of the motives of a character in a book?  Analyzing the causes of a historical event?  Or better still, finding solutions to problems such as how to build a better mousetrap?  Here, the narrow thinkers run out of steam very quickly.

Apparently, the key is not only to generate new solutions, but to convince your brain somehow to look past the obvious ones, to question your own assumptions about the perimeter of the problem.  "If we need to generate alternative uses of a glass," said lead researcher Catherine DiBernardi Luft, "first we must inhibit our past experience which leads us to think of a glass as a container.  Our study’s novelty is to demonstrate that right temporal alpha oscillations is a key neural mechanism for overriding these obvious associations.  In order to understand the processes underlying the production of novel and adequate ideas, we need to break down its constituent processes, dissecting creativity as much as possible at first, and then analyzing them in context, before putting them back together to understand the process as a whole."

I know from my own experience as a writer, it does take some level of assumption-suppression to work my way out of a corner.  When I have "writers' block" -- and I put it in quotes because I don't honestly believe such a thing exists, although writers (like everyone) do get temporarily stymied at times -- the thing to do is to work on a different story, or better yet, do something else entirely.  Go for a run, practice the piano, play ball with my dog.  The alternate activity acts to suppress my focus on the "obvious solutions" (which aren't working), and more often than not, the way out pops into my brain, sometimes with such alarming suddenness that it seems to come from somewhere outside of me.

So what Luft et al. have done is shown the neural mechanism that underlies this process of blocking habitual, ordinary responses, allowing you to get out of your own way.  What this still doesn't answer, however, is why some people are so much better at it than others.  In my Critical Thinking classes, we do periodic divergent-thinking puzzles, which I think of as being mental calisthenics.  Some students take to them right away, and others find the exercise incredibly frustrating -- and it seems to have little to do with how well they do on other school tasks.  I'll end with one of the puzzles that half of my students figured out in seconds, and the other half never did.  I'll post the answer tomorrow!

A man left home, took three left turns, and as he was arriving back home, he saw two masked men waiting for him.  Who are the masked men?

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One of the best books I've read recently is Alan Weisman's The World Without Us.  I wouldn't say it's cheerful, however.  But what Weisman does is to look at what would happen if the human race was to disappear -- how long it would take for our creations to break down, for nature to reassert itself, for the damage we've done to be healed.

The book is full of eye-openers.  First, his prediction is that within 24 hours of the power going out, the New York Subways would fill with water -- once the pumps go out, they'd become underwater caves.  Not long thereafter, the water would eat away at the underpinnings of the roads, and roads would start caving in, before long returning Manhattan to what it was before the Europeans arrived, a swampy island crisscrossed by rivers.  Farms, including the huge industrial farms of the Midwest, would be equally quick; cultivated varieties of wheat and corn would, Weisman says, last only three or four years before being replaced by hardier species, and the land would gradually return to nature (albeit changed by the introduction of highly competitive exotic species that were introduced by us, accidentally or deliberately).

Other places, however, would not rebound quickly.  Or ever.  Nuclear reactor sites would become uninhabitable for enough time that they might as well be considered a permanent loss.  Sites contaminated by heavy metals and non-biodegradable poisons (like dioxins) also would be, although with these there's the possibility of organisms evolving to tolerate, or even break down, the toxins.  (No such hope with radioactivity, unfortunately.)

But despite the dark parts it's a good read, and puts into perspective the effect we've had on the Earth -- and makes even more urgent the case that we need to put the brakes on environmental damage before something really does take our species out for good.

Networks and creativity

It's no wonder I'm interested in the neurological origins of creativity.

Besides the fact that I'm a fiction writer -- so coming up with creative and engaging lies is basically my stock-in-trade -- I'm also a lifelong musician.  And I'm not the only one in my family.  They're all creative in various ways.  My father was an amateur jewelry-maker and designed and built stained-glass windows in his spare time.  My mom was a ceramic artist and exceptionally talented oil painter.  My wife's art consists of using handwritten text, much of it almost microscopic, in combination with watercolors and glass etching to create pieces of an intricacy that nearly beggars belief.  (Take ten minutes and check it out; I can almost guarantee you've never seen anything quite like it.)  Our older son is a talented sketch artist and cartoonist, and our younger makes his living as a professional glassblower.

So I can say with all due modesty that we're a pretty creative bunch.

As far as where it all comes from, that's a little trickier.  The nature/nurture issue rears its ugly head here; it's certainly a possibility that creativity is to some extent genetic, but (in the case of my kids, for example) they were raised by parents who were constantly looking for new ideas and modes of expression, so it's natural enough that they gravitated that way themselves.  But last month, a paper  was published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences called "Robust Prediction of Individual Creative Ability from Brain Functional Connectivity," by Roger Beaty et al., which gives some credence to the fact that whatever its ultimate cause, creativity has a definite biological underpinning.

What the researchers did was to use fMRI data from 183 individuals who were engaged in a classical divergent thinking task (such as, "Think of as many possible uses for a paperclip as you can").  People vary greatly in their competence at these sorts of things; an average person might be able to come up with twenty or so, but a highly creative person can generate many more -- usually by questioning the baseline assumption of the task (for example, does it have to be a standard paperclip made of metal?  Could it be made of styrofoam?  Could it be a hundred feet tall?).

What they found was that the people who scored as the most creative (the highest on the divergent thinking scale) had a different fundamental connectivity in their brains.  The authors write:

At the behavioral level, we found a strong correlation between creative thinking ability and self-reported creative behavior and accomplishment in the arts and sciences (r = 0.54).  At the neural level, we found a pattern of functional brain connectivity related to high-creative thinking ability consisting of frontal and parietal regions within default, salience, and executive brain systems.  In a leave-one-out cross-validation analysis, we show that this neural model can reliably predict the creative quality of ideas generated by novel participants within the sample.  Furthermore, in a series of external validation analyses using data from two independent task fMRI samples and a large task-free resting-state fMRI sample, we demonstrate robust prediction of individual creative thinking ability from the same pattern of brain connectivity.  The findings thus reveal a whole-brain network associated with high-creative ability comprised of cortical hubs within default, salience, and executive systems—intrinsic functional networks that tend to work in opposition—suggesting that highly creative people are characterized by the ability to simultaneously engage these large-scale brain networks.

So the presence of this connectivity between different parts of the brain acts as a good predictor of the capacity for creative thought, and (apparently) also correlates with creative behavior (e.g. taking up art, music, writing, dance, and so on).

Which probably explains why it's so difficult to teach creativity.  In my experience both in writing and in music, it's not hard to teach someone to improve their skills (although in practice, it does take a lot of work on the part of the student), but it's nearly impossible to teach creativity itself.  In writing, training someone to generate novel ideas is a bit of an uphill battle.  In music, learning how to play expressively can be equally challenging.  I distinctly remember one of my flute students who had hired me specifically to teach her how to play with feeling -- her playing, she told me, had been characterized as "cold" and "mechanical."  Over a period of a few weeks, I found something very interesting about her.  Technically, she was a better flutist than I am.  Her sight-reading ability was certainly leaps and bounds beyond mine.  But if she wasn't told how to play something -- if there were no dynamic markings of "fortissimo" and "pianissimo" on the page, for example -- she had no idea what to do with it.

At first, I was convinced she just had never been shown how to recognize the emotional content of music, but could be taught to do it.  I tried to start with the simple stuff first.  We took a piece of Shetland folk music that, to me, is heartwrenchingly emotional -- the lament "Da Slockit Light."  I played it for her completely flat, no dynamics, and asked her to try to identify for me how she would add dynamics to increase its emotional impact -- where, for example, to play louder or softer, where the emotional climax of the tune was, and so on.

She couldn't do it.  She was trying -- that much was clear -- but it became quickly obvious that she was guessing.  So I played it for her with the dynamic structure as I heard it, and she said, "That was really pretty, but I don't know how you figured that out."

I find a similar thing in my biology classes.  The final project is that the students do a design-your-own-experiment -- they come up with an idea they want to test, and figure out how they could create an experiment to find the answer.  Some students jump right in; their problem often is that they come up with too many ideas, and have a hard time winnowing it down to a single one.  But some students find this task nearly impossible.  I have some methods for helping them at least generate an idea they can work with, but the process of coming up with a creative question to ask about the world is difficult and frustrating.

I wonder if it's all the same thing, really, and might have to do with the multiply-connective brain networks identified by Beaty et al.  All of these things require you to link disparate realms -- sounds with emotions, media with visual impact, scientific questions with novel methods.

Whether this connectivity is genetic or comes from early exposure and training is still an open question, of course.  But it does show one thing -- being able to think outside the box requires your brain to have boxes with distinctly blurry edges.

An aura of divergent thinking

First, let me just say that I love my students.

Far from conforming to the slacker, disaffected teenage stereotype, I find that nearly all of my students are natural questioners, are interested in the world around them, and are willing to be engaged with learning.  We as teachers have only to hook on to that energy, avoid putting a bell jar over the flame of their inborn curiosity, and half the battle over "higher standards and academic achievement" will be won.

Take, for example, my Critical Thinking classes.  An ongoing exercise we do once weekly through the entire semester is media analysis; students submit an analysis of an example from popular media, as an illustration of some concept we've studied during the previous weeks.  We look in turn at print media, audio/visual media, and online media, but other than that, there are few strictures on what they can turn in to receive credit for this project.

It's amazing what they find.  Once tuned in to a few basic principles of media analysis, high schoolers rapidly become adept at sorting fact from fiction from outright bullshit.

As an example of the last-mentioned, take a look at the site one of my students submitted last week, a little gem called Reading Auras.  In particular, she drew my attention to the page, "Aura Dating for Seniors -- A New Way of Looking at Love."

If you're sitting there thinking, "No... that can't mean what it sounds like...", unfortunately, you're wrong.  This is precisely what it sounds like.

This site is suggesting that senior citizens find new love by comparing the color of their aura with that of a potential significant other.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

It starts out in a remarkably condescending fashion:

One of the more interesting applications of this knowledge is in dating, with special emphasis on senior dating.  Seniors are less familiar with the Internet and because of this they might not be able to give an accurate or complete description of their personality details and likes and dislikes.  Neither they would [sic] be able to describe too well what they are looking for in a partner.

Now that we've established that once you pass the age of 65, you are no longer articulate, let's take a look at the solution:

The aura personality map, in this case, would work like an automatic scanner that reads and translates all that the seniors could not put in words.  Besides, matching the auras is much more accurate in finding the right partner than any other method.  This is because each color of the aura would provide information about the person that would be a better guide to find the right person. 

The relationships that come out from aura colors matching are more meaningful for it is based on the vital energy sources.  This means there would be a better chemistry between the matched senior dates right from the beginning, which in turn would have better chances of developing into a long term significant relationship.

Well, this is correct in one sense; if I was re-entering the Dating Game, I'd want to know right away if a potential partner thought I had a nice-looking aura, because no way would I want to become romantically involved with someone who sees nonexistent halos around people.

On this site, we also find out that it's not a good thing if you have a brown aura, unless it's "caramel brown," which means that you're "fun;" that you can compliment your aura readings with reading a person's tongue, because the tongue's "size, shape, color, and topography" tells you a lot (for example, if your tongue is blue, you have circulatory problems); that your pets have auras, and that if you tune in to your pet's aura (s)he will "show more pleasure than usual;" and that children are naturally adept at seeing auras, and we should encourage them in this rather than dissuading them by silly old narrow-minded rationalist nonsense like teaching them to sort fact from fantasy.

This last-mentioned is at least within hailing distance of the truth.  There is one skill at which children outstrip most adults by a mile, and that's divergent, creative thinking.  A study by Robert McGarvey, which gained traction largely because of its use as an example of how schools fail by the phenomenal speaker Sir Ken Robinson, shows that by one measure of divergent thinking, preschoolers score 84% -- and second graders an average of 10%.  This is, Robinson says, because by second grade, kids have already learned "that there is one answer, and it's in the back of the book -- but don't look."

In my experience, though, you can resurrect this long-suppressed ability for creative critical thinking, but it requires teachers to do something that many of us find pretty scary -- to let go of the reins some. Turned loose on academics, most students can re-engage their curiosity and capacity for divergent thinking quickly.  Take, for example, a recent study that showed that when students are given the opportunity to make choices about what they read for their classes, they read more often and more enthusiastically.  Who wouldn't?  It doesn't take a Rhodes Scholar to see that autonomy is a motivator.  As literacy advocate Pam Allyn put it, "You become a lifelong reader when you're able to make choices about the books you read, and when you love the books you read.  You tend to get better at something you love to do."

But our response, as educators, has been to tighten down more, to place more restrictions on how students learn and on how they demonstrate that they have learned, all behind the rallying cry of "raising standards."

As my student's analysis of the aura website showed, when given the opportunity to dig into a topic, students are capable of doing so with gusto.  My student's presentation of her media submission to the class began with the statement, "This may be the most extreme example of confirmation bias that I've ever seen -- these people are literally seeing what they want to see."

But are we, as educators, doing the inverse of that -- not seeing what we would prefer not to see?  More student autonomy, more divergent thinking, more ways of getting to answers, more ways of expressing them?

And how much of that reluctance comes from our conviction that there should be only a single way to learning?

It seems fitting to end with a quote from Sir Ken Robinson:

We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people.  We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture.  We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it's an organic process.  And you cannot predict the outcome of human development.  All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.