Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Creative thinking is slow thinking

Once again, our education and job experiences that emphasize timed tests and quick solutions during brainstorming sessions may hinder our creative abilities. Moreover, the education system may discriminate against creative students.
Here's some brain research evidence for that:

AS FAR as the internet or phone networks go, bad connections are bad news. Not so in the brain, where slower connections may make people more creative.
Rex Jung at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and his colleagues had found that creativity correlates with low levels of the chemical N-acetylaspartate, which is found in neurons and seems to promote neural health and metabolism.

The volunteers' capacity for divergent thinking - a factor in creativity that includes coming up with new ideas - had already been tested. Jung found that the most creative people had lower white-matter integrity in a region connecting the prefrontal cortex to a deeper structure called the thalamus, compared with their less creative peers (PLoS ONE, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009818).

tags: creativity, science, brain, mind, education, brainstorming, distribution, biology

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