Studio 360, a radio show on NPR (no affilation with Aaron Sorkin), did a show this week on the "Science of Creativity". The show featured a few nice segments - I especially enjoyed the riff on mental illness and artistic genius (Virginia Woolf wasn't the only one) - but I kept on waiting for the show to admit that science knows virtually nothing about human creativity. We don't know why it exists, or where it comes from, or how it works.
But instead of admitting that the imagination remains totally ineffable, the show discussed silly fMRI studies connecting artistic creativity to increased neural activity in the "association cortices". They talked to a psychiatrist whose "groundbreaking study" consisted of a single "creative individual". Let's be honest: this kind of research is just the modern version of phrenology. Instead of measuring bumps of bone, we're quantifying blood flow. We take some global mental phenomenon - like creativity - and try to reduce into a few discrete brain regions. (Franz Gall preferred vague traits like "amativeness" and "veneration".) fMRI is a very powerful tool, but this approach is misguided. It provides us with the illusion of an answer - "Creativity is just the association areas!" - that masks our very real ignorance.
Comments (1)
I doubt there was any mention of the fact that the vast majority of successful artists are male. Consideration of sex differences in artistic creativity might begin a scientific inquiry into the neural basis of creativity.
Posted by: doublehelix | December 4, 2006 11:34 PM