Adhering to the often used criteria for creativity (original plus appliccable in reality) like Campbell and others have done seems to me a good starting point. On the other hand, low level psychophysical correlates of creativity may be difficult to find compared to the two big groups of variables -- (1) effects of arousal level on intellectual activities and (2) the dynamics and varieties of cognitive processes characteristic to individuals with known high level of creativity. As known already for long time and nicely summarised, reviewed and studied by the early and late Colin Martindale, the state of arousal allowing the so-called flat association hierarchies is beneficial for creativity (especially if related to the right-hemisphere processes compared to left-hemisphere processes). Overly focused type of attending and thinking, slowness of associations and small span of the associative chain, as well as too much emphasis on symbolic instead of imagery-based mentation are counter to being likely create a novel idea or theoretical vision. Thus, any recording means (EEG plus whatever else) allowing to objectively measure correlates of associative chaining and creating remote associations would do nicely. Additionally, comparative studies of brain dynamics of individuals with proven high creativity and those with known low creativity are advisable. (Caveat: IQ and creativity scores need not have high level of correlation as some would expect to be somewhere near r=0.8-0.95. Mental ability testing results of highly creative individuals may not be necessarily very high, although often they are. Better use Mednick's, Baron's et al. approahces and tests of alternate uses of objects and concepts, tolerance of ambiguity, ability to mentally take the position of anorther person depicted on a picture, tests of imaginary manipulation with mechanical or other devices and performing imaginary construction tasks etc could do.) All this means that we deal with relatively high level cognitive representations and processes.

In my tens of years long experience as an examiner of university students I have noticed that high levels of creativity correlate with musical training and musical aptitude and also good capabilities of visualization relatively exceeding the skills based on having learned the verbal concepts. (But this is nothing new and original, simply my observations are consistent with what has been known for some time.)

You might find that interesting, i did :)

http://www.creativitypost.com/psychology/scott_barry_kaufman_on_creative_brains

Oh nice. Thanks for sharing! :)

Hi,

You might be interested in that paper:

A Review of EEG, ERP, and Neuroimaging Studies of Creativity and Insight

Arne Dietrich and Riam Kanso

However, the neurophysiological correlates are IMO not specific to creativity, but rather associated with the specific function of the behavioral/psychological processes co-occuring with what we call creativity (e.g. arousal in Eureka or intense attention).

best.

Thanks for the reference. Based on what you mentioned, could we say that "creativity" is the abstraction caused due to concrete mechanisms (the behavioural/psychological processes) that aren't entirely exclusive to the creative act itself?

The physiological correlates of some forms of creativity with a strong auditory basis are musical hallucinations. For example, there was was an epidemic of musical creativity in the capital cities of Europe in the 19th century in the wake of Napoleon's armies which spread syphilis to louche or dissolute young men. Syphilis starts by irritating the ear and triggering MHs. Those with musical training were able to transcribe these subconscious melodies.

Hi, I am not active in the creativity research domain, but I would say that many of the high level faculties are actually based on lower processing levels. They emerge from their interaction. Anthonys example is a very nice, though gruesome one. If there are certain conditions that manipulate the activity of substrates involved in low-level processes, e.g. sensory perception, this might have impact on higher-level processes that are in part based on the low-level ones. IMO, it makes sense to try to figure out the involved low-level processes to see what is lacking in order to create a high-level process akin to the phenomenon of interest. Of course, there might be special circuits/processes which are directly and maybe even uniquely (though the brain re-uses many structures for different purposes) involved in creativity, but regarding the mentioned EEG correlates in the reference above, I doubt that they are isolating such processes. At least they did not make the impression when I read it.

"I would say that many of the high level faculties are actually based on lower processing levels."

This reminds me of Morgan's Canon:

"In no case is an animal activity to be interpreted in terms of higher psychological processes if it can be fairly interpreted in terms of processes which stand lower in the scale of psychological evolution and development."

I was very surprised to see on Wikipedia the claim that MC is the most highly quoted principle in psychology, as my impression is that cognitive psychologists have not even heard of it, let alone take it seriously. They are all top-down, nil bottom-up.

Creative thinking was the common dependent variable in six experimental series that examined the effects of a number of different indoor environmental factors, mainly temperature. It was possible to significantly increase creative thinking (originality of response) by raising the indoor temperature a few degrees above thermal neutrality, and as this effect was negated by noise it was concluded that a reduced state of arousal was responsible for the effect. The experiments were summarized in the following conference report:

Wyon DP (1996) Creative thinking as the dependent variable in six environmental experiments: a review. Indoor Air '96, 1, 419-422

Concerning the interaction of different areas of the brain on the creative process there is also a very recent study from people at the Darmouth College:

http://www.livescience.com/39671-roots-of-creativity-found-in-brain.html

They used MRI to track purportedly creative thinking in the brain. I don't know if this is already published or it is only a press release.

Hi Anthony, nice one. Didn't hear of that. Have to disagree though - I believe the cognitive sciences are well aware of the complex interplay between different levels of processing, e.g. cortical hierarchies, feedback from high to low levels. Nevertheless, deconstruction of complex cognitive phenomena is a sensible issue, since it sometimes might make it too obvious that we are "just" quite complex animals. Maybe there is some resistance to revealing the banal roots of something as extraordinary as creativity?

"Didn't hear of that"

To clarify my previous point, in adults cognitive scientists are looking at interactions and feedback between different levels of the brain. It is developmental scientists who do not know of or use Morgan's Canon, so I was surprised by Wikipedia which seemed to think it was a very well known principle. The adult neurological model of brain function does not apply to infants. As Luria pointed out, the most damaging lesions in adults are higher cortical ones, for infants it is peripheral sensory ones.

Adhering to the often used criteria for creativity (original plus appliccable in reality) like Campbell and others have done seems to me a good starting point. On the other hand, low level psychophysical correlates of creativity may be difficult to find compared to the two big groups of variables -- (1) effects of arousal level on intellectual activities and (2) the dynamics and varieties of cognitive processes characteristic to individuals with known high level of creativity. As known already for long time and nicely summarised, reviewed and studied by the early and late Colin Martindale, the state of arousal allowing the so-called flat association hierarchies is beneficial for creativity (especially if related to the right-hemisphere processes compared to left-hemisphere processes). Overly focused type of attending and thinking, slowness of associations and small span of the associative chain, as well as too much emphasis on symbolic instead of imagery-based mentation are counter to being likely create a novel idea or theoretical vision. Thus, any recording means (EEG plus whatever else) allowing to objectively measure correlates of associative chaining and creating remote associations would do nicely. Additionally, comparative studies of brain dynamics of individuals with proven high creativity and those with known low creativity are advisable. (Caveat: IQ and creativity scores need not have high level of correlation as some would expect to be somewhere near r=0.8-0.95. Mental ability testing results of highly creative individuals may not be necessarily very high, although often they are. Better use Mednick's, Baron's et al. approahces and tests of alternate uses of objects and concepts, tolerance of ambiguity, ability to mentally take the position of anorther person depicted on a picture, tests of imaginary manipulation with mechanical or other devices and performing imaginary construction tasks etc could do.) All this means that we deal with relatively high level cognitive representations and processes.

In my tens of years long experience as an examiner of university students I have noticed that high levels of creativity correlate with musical training and musical aptitude and also good capabilities of visualization relatively exceeding the skills based on having learned the verbal concepts. (But this is nothing new and original, simply my observations are consistent with what has been known for some time.)

"Caveat: IQ and creativity scores need not have high level of correlation"

This has been widely believed, mainly because of wishful thinking and poor data. Studies by Lubinski et al (eg below) show that IQ makes a massive difference to creativity even within very high IQ scorers.

********

"Psychol Sci. 2013 May;24(5):648-59.

Who rises to the top? Early indicators.

Kell HJ, Lubinski D, Benbow CP.

Abstract

Youth identified before age 13 (N = 320) as having profound mathematical or verbal reasoning abilities (top 1 in 10,000) were tracked for nearly three decades. Their awards and creative accomplishments by age 38, in combination with specific details about their occupational responsibilities, illuminate the magnitude of their contribution and professional stature. Many have been entrusted with obligations and resources for making critical decisions about individual and organizational well-being. Their leadership positions in business, health care, law, the professoriate, and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) suggest that many are outstanding creators of modern culture, constituting a precious human-capital resource. Identifying truly profound human potential, and forecasting differential development within such populations, requires assessing multiple cognitive abilities and using atypical measurement procedures. This study illustrates how ultimate criteria may be aggregated and longitudinally sequenced to validate such measures."

"outstanding creators of modern culture" begs validity. I though we speak here about individual creative perceptual or thought acts, not success in one's career. Career success relies too much on factors other than "pure creativity". I better will not list the ways success in business and politics is achieved (where creativity of mind may play a secondary role). Last not least: should we consider talent or readiness to cleverly use what some others have actually discovered or innovatively suggested as a variety of creativity?

One more thing: youth at 13 may solve intellectual tests more based on their natural creativity compared to adults who rely more on what they have learned.

@Talis: Thank you for your observations in an earlier comment. The construct of creativity is as fascinating as intelligence, since both are riddled with semantic and connotative difficulties, that research has yet been unable to untangle. The psychophysiological correlates were questioned by me for the very purpose of understanding whether a complex construct such as creativity can be reduced to simplistic recordings on an EEG or an ERP. A recent review by Dietrich (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20804237) was fascinating to go through, since he questions whether "creativity" can really be equated with divergent thinking measures that are so often employed to measure the construct.

@Anthony: Thank you for raising this discussion to a higher level, and stimulating a healthy to-and-fro :)

A popular paper by Ulrich Kraft in Scientific American Mind Vol. 16 N. 1 2005 is also devoted to Creavity. He identifies four steps in any creative event: Wonderment, motivation, intelectual courage and relaxation.

The divergent vs convergent thinking duality is also discussed.

Turning more philosophical: Could a computer be creative ? In my opinion, this would pose a more stringent condition for an improved Turing test because of the large number of higher level thinking involved in the creative act in comparison with other brain functions: pattern recognition, communication, etc.

In creative imagination or thinking often it is that something "goes wrong". (Read: produces atypical, hardly likely, accidental or serendipious associations or combinations; makes highly original, unprecedented sets of element configurations.) If a machine -- eg a computer for that matter -- is preprogrammed to "go wrong" occasionally and within certain necessary constraints set to guarantee its existence, its output could be evaluated as more or less creative...

Perhaps a divergent-output producing system with high capacity combined with a convergent conclusive step would be something with creative potential. But the problem is who (what) will evaluate what to converge at when trying to point at certain product assessed as a creative one. Collective mind? A comparison device working with culturally accumulated data, ie with cultural memory? God?

@Luis: That would make an excellent debate, about whether computers could be creative in the research sense of the term. However, you speak of AI creativity in the form of divergent thinking, or something else? I'm asking since coming up with something original and statistically infrequent could be programmed into an algorithm too. So creativity would be measured how exactly?

Hansika: I speak on the context of the AI debate. Turing test implies that if a computer/artifical intelligence device communicates with you as a human then it could be considered conscious. There are important advances in this kind of Turing test machines: the chess-playing dedicated computer Deep Blue and, more recently, the Watson cluster: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer) who beated humans in the Jeopardy contest (which requires a considerable amount of verbal competence and language interpretation). Of course, all this is algorithmical and it use the information we have fed in withour really creating anything new. My point is that we can, in principle, design a computer that can beat Turing test by beguiling you into thinking you are speaking with a human without really being creative. And, consequently, that creativy is a higher mental function or a group of functions much difficult to program (if ever they could be programmed) than language comprehension, vision, object recognition, etc. In other words, that we can function socially most of the time without creativity.

There are cases where a computer helped scientists to prove a new result (and a difficult one, indeed) as in the famous Four Color Theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem but here the computer only processed all the possible cases as the researchers instructed it to do. It does not discovered the result.

The question is if creativity can be, even in principle, be programmed. Or, at least, some kind of creativity. Divergent thinking can, of course, be considered algorithmical in the obvious sense of taking into account combinations of concepts, ideas we already have in our culture but I find difficult to accept that this alone as capable of generating something genuinely new as a solution to a difficult problem in mathematics, for example.

On the other hand, on certain forms of creativity, even consciousness may be not necessary. For example, we can think of the evolution of species with the discovery of new forms adapted to their environments and solutions to problems (flying, swimming and human intelligence itselft) as an example of a creative process but an unconscious one indeed !

Perhaps, evolutionary algorithms (already used frequently in mathematics) is what Talis is proposing as a possible creative machine.

@Tallis: Precisely. That which is deemed "creative" may not really be so, and therefore, setting a benchmark for creativity is difficult to do so, in real life as well as in the laboratory. The collective mind is often used, where expert raters rate products for creativity (see Amabile's work), but that simply leads to answers that most people think are right (or in this case, creative). The question of "who decides" is going to plague researchers in the field too, since we really have no clue who decides. When a computer is preprogrammed to go wrong, as you say, serendipitous discoveries (like the juxtaposition of two unrelated words) may often occur. Linking this to the concepts of AI consciousness, does that really mean that the machine is being creative and understanding that it is being creative?

@Luis: I concur with your comment completely. I think humour in this context would play an important role, to assess whether machines can be creative. Once you reduce humour to just a punchline, it can be explained as being a manifestation of a creative thinking process, since you need to be able to say something unexpected, yet relevant. If machines could be programmed to create humorous statements, or even simply jokes, maybe we could assess creative output there. I'd love to know your opinion on this :)

In order not to count a mistake as a creative act we again need a meta-level of evaluation. (... and keep to the principle that in addition to novelty and originality there should be some test of usability or a kind of realizability check.) So perhaps "from within" a machine can not evaluate its creativity. Is it the same with a human being? As far as cultural knowledge and self-consciousness informed also by that knowledge are parts of the human mind, perhaps a subject can estimate the relative level of his/her creativity. If this kind of representation can be implemented in machines, maybe there will be something that can be used as a model of self-evaluation in terms of level of creativity. But in one way or another, the machine should have knowledge of outputs of other machines as well (reflecting the social culture of the "society" of machines).

Hansika: I agree with your idea. But it is not only humour but also art and many other manifestations of human culture whose algorithmical character is difficult to find. In the sense that the question if they could be programmed in a standard computer available nowadays is far from obvious if not impossible. Watson is a very efficient machine to answer relational questions of the kind: Which European city has two greek churches and five protestant ones ? (Answer: Paris) or things like that, but, it is certainly not able to create jokes or humorous statements. Otherwise, it has not been programmed for that, also because nobody knows how to program humour.

In my opinion, the problem is that creating a new joke or a new tale requires a profound semantic understanding of the cultural environment and the situation. You have to internalize the punchline to get it or the plot of the tale. This implies consciousness and self-consciousness. No computer can do that. At least, the solid-state semiconductor computers available now. This is the problem of semantic vs grammatical content that the philosopher of the mind J. Searle discussed in his famous Chinese room thought experiment:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

Perhaps that is the problem why artificial music generators are not very succesful. Computers can generate many patterns, some of them interesting other not, but we require the metalevel Talis is talking about to assess the validity of those "creations". That metalevel is provided only by the individual human mind and the society.

You can use a computer to mix different sections of other tales and jokes but the result wouldn't be useful because there is no understanding. The reduction to a "punchline" you are proposing is just that: a matter of semantics, meaning.

This also poses the question whether intelligence and creativity are measured independently. A computer can be intelligent (scoring high in some test) but no creative of at all. This is stressed in a recent paper which challenges the threshold hypothesis:

http://joa.sagepub.com/content/16/2-3/57

Another paper regarding a model for the interaction of areas in the brain could be also useful to you:

A. W. Flaherty: "Frontotemporal and dopaminergic control of idea generation and creative drive", Journal of Comparative Neurology, Volume 493, Issue 1, 2005.

The idea is that the frontal lobe gives the drive to creativity while the temporal lobe generates the divergent patterns.

@Tallis: The self-consciousness aspect of recognising creativity is definitely difficult to achieve in the case of machine thinking. But the type of meta level you propose is interesting. I would think a human's assessment of a machine's creativity may be a feasible option right now, but as you mentioned, it is important to assess the machine's creativity in comparison to that of other machines, and not other humans. Very interesting argument, thanks

@Luis: Firstly, thanks for the references. If i combine your and Tallis' comments, we actually should not attempt to make machines imitate human creativity, but assess machine-level creativity. So it would theoretically be "unfair" to program a machine to generate humour, or art, or other forms of (conventional) human creativity. Also, I agree that reducing a joke to just semantics is not a practical method of assessing creativity - but having the machine understand the nuances of interaction to generate that punchline, may be.

Thank you both for raising this discussion to a higher level :)

Thank you for very insightful discussion related to my own interest area "humour" ! How about looking back (or forth) to animals' world too? As far as we know today animals are both using creativity and "humour" . I was wondering whether the reason would be "survival" ?! If everything in life happens simpy for life to be continuing, creativity and humor (I agree with the connection but them not exactly coming fro same source) both can be related to the very survival instinct in creatures. Any ideas?

That may make for an interesting discussion. Creativity has been associated with heightened survival (since making a fool of your predators in a novel way would enhance your ability to survive, to give a very basic instance), and how that would relate to humour is intriguing too. Could you cite some references for the use of creativity by animals please? Also, evolution by itself is a highly creative process :)

"Creativity has been associated with heightened survival"

This does not sound plausible with respect to human evolution. Any one in a hunter-gatherer society who devised a creative way of hunting lions and thus disregarded the well-established rules of the hunt would be more likely to contribute to lion than human evolution. Even today in authoritarian societies being creative is a sure way to end up in prison.

Agreed, and in the evolutionary context, one species' survival can mean another's demise. But if you take into account the Red Queen Hypothesis, it would imply that creatively killing your prey, makes your prey find creative ways to protect themselves, which spurs further creativity in yourself to try and kill your prey. Creativity in (authoritarian) human society as we view it today, has been unfortunately undermined and disregarded, as you rightly pointed out. However, the role that creativity "may" have had to play in human evolution shouldn't be dismissed that easily.

No doubt that creativity as well as intelligence gave humans an evolutionary edge. Specially in the hard times of the glacial eras. Otherwise, it hadn't be selected. Another different topic is the undermining, or even censoring, of creativity in modern societies. People tend to do things the same way, if that way was proven good in the past. This is another evolutionary strategy. But this requires a first creative individual who developed that way.

Another reason may be tribal, most people are not specially creative and they see the minority of individuals who challenge common perspectives as a menace. But, globally, creative is surely good.

In relation to our relation to other species, we know some creative undertakings may be dangerous sometimes. One example: the use of DDT to eliminate mosquitoes carrying malaria. Nobody predicted that they will become resistant because of its large reproductive and mutation rate. The same happens with antibiotics which are encouraging the appearance of resistant strains.

Concerning animal innovation (the famous case of the macaque Imo):

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/imagine/200807/creativity-the-wild-side-animal-innovation

A whole book about the subject is available from Oxford Scholarship Online:

http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198526223.001.0001/acprof-9780198526223