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Lying and Creativity

By cortex on November 23, 2009.

Via Vaughan Bell, comes this wonderful essay by Tom Stafford on confabulation and creativity:

In those patients with frontal damage who do confabulate, however, the brain injury makes them rely on their internal memories--their thoughts and wishes--rather than true memories. This is of course dysfunctional, but it is also creative in some of the ways that make improvisation so funny: producing an odd mix of the mundane and impossible. When a patient who claims to be 20 years old is asked why she looks about 50, she replies that she was pushed into a ditch by her brothers and landed on her face. Asked about his good mood, another patient called Harry explains that the president visited him at his office yesterday. The president wanted to talk politics, but Harry preferred to talk golf. They had a good chat.

Improvisers tap into these same creative powers, but in a controlled way. They learn to cultivate a "dual mind," part of which doesn't plan or discriminate and thus unleashes its inventive powers, while the other part maintains a higher level monitoring of the situation, looking out for opportunities to develop the narrative.

I recently discovered a quite interesting case report of a 48 year old male patient named SB who, after suffering a subarachnoid hemorrhage in his frontal lobe, became a chronic confabulator. The following description is from a medical report on SB by his neurologist, Dr. Anthony Coughlan:

SB would claim, first thing in the morning, to have fictitious business appointments, when in fact he was attending a day centre, and would frequently dress for dinner in the evening in the mistaken belief that guests were coming. He would also attempt to take cups of tea outside, saying that these were for his foreman, who had discontinued employment with him several years earlier. During the interview, his memory was confabulatory even for events an hour earlier and he would sometimes claim to have been engaged in imaginary business appointments when in fact he had been undergoing psychological tests. When inconsistencies in his confabulations were pointed out to him, he would become perplexed and either profess ignorance of recent events or invent a new confabulation. His confabulations were not limited to his former business life, for when questioned about holidays or outings over the previous few days, he would again report events that bore no relationship to actual happenings.

This was SB's perpetual tragedy: he told lies without knowing that he was lying. Although his mind had mostly recovered - his memory problems and "inappropriate actions" had largely disappeared* - he would always be left with this terrible symptom, spinning fictions but thinking they were facts. It's not that he wanted to deceive - he just couldn't help it. And so, although SB never learned to tell the truth, his wife learned to stop listening.

And SB isn't alone: chronic confabulation is often seen in patients with frontal lobe damage. Like SB, these people invent fantastical fictions about their lives, telling stories that make little literal sense. They lie about anything and everything, if only because the truth is too confusing. Such confabulations tells us something important about the mind: spontaneous creativity - the ability to make up a story on demand - is a fundamental feature of human cognition. We're all natural storytellers, weaving narratives out of the confusion. In other words, SB's brain damage didn't lead to some special new mental capacity, which the rest of us are missing. Instead, it released a latent creative capacity that we all have, if only we learned how to stop holding it back.

We can observe a similar process at work in fMRI studies of jazz musicians, who learn how to temporarily silence those brain areas that keep us from confabulating. I wrote about this research earlier this year:

The first study, led by Charles Limb of the NIH and Johns Hopkins University, examined the brain activity of jazz musicians as they played on a piano. The musicians began with pieces that required no imagination such as the C-major scale and a simple blues tune they'd memorized in advance. But then came the creativity condition: The musicians were told to improvise a new melody as they played alongside a recorded jazz quartet.

While the musicians riffed on the piano, giant magnets whirred overhead monitoring minor shifts in their brain activity. The researchers found that jazz improv relied on a carefully choreographed set of mental events, which allowed the musicians to discover their new melodies. Before a single note was played, the pianists exhibited a "deactivation" of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), a brain area associated with planned actions and self-control. In other words, they were inhibiting their inhibitions, which allowed the musicians to create without worrying about what they were creating.

This research reminds me of that wonderful Picasso quote: "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up." From the perspective of the brain, Picasso is on to something, as the frontal lobes (and the DPLFC in particular) are the last brain areas to fully develop. And so the super-ego settles in, and we become too self-conscious to create. Obviously, we need the frontal lobes to function - just look at the tragic life of SB - but every talent comes with a tradeoff. When we repress our urge to confabulate we also repress the urge to create. To quote Picasso once again: "Art is a lie that makes us realize truth." But it's still a lie.

*Gotta love the droll way the doctors describe SB's behavior immediately following the injury: "SB manifests gross behavior disturbance...He feeds guests with biscuits like monkeys at a zoo, endeavors to eat his children's toys, draws erotic pictures and masturbates in front of others."

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It's not lying if the person has no intention of deceiving another, or of fooling themselves as the case may sometimes be. These confabulators by definition had false memories, and evidently didn't falsify them in any sense of their own choosing.
Now it's possible that, if inclined to lie otherwise, they were adding some embellishment to the false memory, but that's anther kettle of fishiness.

Good Picasso quote. Buckminster Fuller wrote: âInasmuch as the new life always manifests comprehensive propensities I would like to know why it is that we have disregarded all childrenâs significantly spontaneous and comprehensive curiosity and in our formal education have deliberately instituted processes leading only to narrow specializationâ¦What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities.â

A propos the first Picasso quote: '[i]n the beginner's mind there are many possiblities; in the expert's mind there are few.' --S. Suzuki

What's even more interesting is the implication that our own memories might not be exactly true.

I can certainly see why this is creative in a sort of sad, humorous way. I wonder if an undamaged prefrontal cortex which makes most of us conscious to be truthful, at least to ourselves, may actually inhibit some creative impulses. Are there any case studies of these patients doing scientific work? I wonder if scientific creativity is not also enhanced.

I can certainly see why this is creative in a sort of sad, humorous way. I wonder if an undamaged prefrontal cortex which makes most of us conscious to be truthful, at least to ourselves, may actually inhibit some creative impulses. Are there any case studies of these patients doing scientific work? I wonder if scientific creativity is not also enhanced.

Fantastic post.

I think that sometimes there's a danger of overshooting the point here, and emphasising the value of play/unfettered confabulation at the expense of expertise/learning. Not anyone can sit at a piano, unlock their unconscious and turn out beautiful music. It's because those musicians had both years of learning AND the retained ability to think freely that they made great music. Similarly, the "growing up" part of Picasso's quote is just as important as the "remaining an artist/child" part. Picasso himself is the perfect example: he was both expert and child. Those are the necessary preoconditions for great creativity, it seems to me.

This photo of Picasso with his son Claude shows what he means by staying a child:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_1S8g9P9UX3Y/SFOETjZg3hI/AAAAAAAAAIY/x5xRuo73g…

I like your point about PFC's late development contributing to the creativity of children. This flexibility also accounts for why children are better at learning foreign languages. Sharon Thompson-Schill at UPenn has an interesting theory about 'hypo-frontality'-that processes of 'statistical learning', such as language learning, which are unconscious, need less rather than more top-down supervision from prefrontal cortex. One of the hallmarks of autism is an EARLY-developing PFC; Thompson-Schill suggests that this causes a limitation on cognitive flexibility in childhood that results in autistics developing abnormal social sensitivity and deficient communication skills. Social cues, like language, are intuitively learned by our senses, and are actually inhibited by

In reference to the earlier post on the reading brain, don't you think that creativity and dis-inhibition applies to reading too? It seems to me that reading is a predictive process, involving creativity and mental simulation, and that a phonics-focused interpretation of reading like Dehean's treats all readers as if they were autistic. or robots.

By Taylor Beck (not verified) on 27 Nov 2009 #permalink

Re: Readers as robots. I think that phonics' way of thinking of reading is unrealistically reductive in the same sense that the 'cat-brain' computer simulation you mention in your Reverse Engineering post misses neurological reality. Reading, like vision, is as much psychological as physiological, dependent as much on prior experience and expectation as it is on bottom-up sensory decoding. William James knew this more than a hundred years ago, when he wrote, in 'Principles of Psychology': 'Enough has been said to prove the general law of perception, which is that, that whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the greater part) always comes from within our own head.' (James, 1890; in Raichle, 2006)

By Taylor Beck (not verified) on 27 Nov 2009 #permalink

Sorry, one more blip to add and then I'll quit, I promise.

Notice: in my second to last post, I forgot to finish one paragraph, but you can tell what I was going to say. I'm sure you all understood my full meaning, despite a sentence with no end (a computer couldn't infer the meaning of this sentence; Neither could a person, if reading was just decoding sounds from symbols).

This is one obvious proof of my, and Ken Goodman's, and Daniel Ferguson's, and Marcel Just's, and Jeff Hawkins', point about reading.

Jeff Hawkins' makes a similar point in his TED talk, when he says. 'Prediction is why you already know the last word of this...' '...sentence.'
http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_hawkins_on_how_brain_science_will_change_…

By Taylor Beck (not verified) on 27 Nov 2009 #permalink

I have an MFA from one the best art schools in the country, and my good friend, Kenny, has more creativity in his pinkie than I will ever have. Kenny was shot in the head and have much of his frontal cortex removed as a result. He lives alone in Dallas and is a millionaire thanks to a family inheritance. He has had to have a couple of additional brain surgeries in the past couple of years, but he is okay. He just spends his day having fun and making art doing all kinds of crazy projects. I love him and the fun he and his condition have brought into my life.

There is an interesting literature (most from Bruce Miller and his group at UCSF) on the emergence of artistic talent in frontotemporal dementia. Often the paintings and drawings become more abstract and less representational and generally more interesting. I don't think they have tried connecting it to confabulation but I would not be at all suprised if there were a link.

By Lorin Freedman (not verified) on 29 Nov 2009 #permalink

Fascinating, Jonah. Makes me think that a lot of my writing "rituals" may be ways to try to trick my brain into that inhibition-inhibited state. Wish I could do it more reliably. If you have any good ones, let me know... :)

Jonah, I follow your blog with interest and have used your books in my classes. The students love Proust Was a Neuroscientist and it has helped them to trust their instincts greatly. This post on Confabulation really hit home for me.

As an acting teacher, the need for actors to inhibit inhibition is primary. Acting is in many ways confabulation. The actor must believe fully in her "lie" and be able to repress her own personal "reality" in order to reveal a deeper "truth." We train bodies and voices relentlessly in order to allow the expression of these confabulations to emerge. As Ian said, the artist must be both expert and child.

While in the past, acting was considered to be interpretative rather than creative, we now have a different understanding and different training methods. This new idea probably emerged with the advent of film and television. The public simply wouldn't accept the presentational approaches used over the centuries. The close-up dictated a new more penetrating way of watching actors.

There is a stronger need therefore, for the actor not to be seen "lying." The need for "personalization" becomes more important than "characterization" as a goal.

For this to happen, the actor must be able to marry script with improvisation, the formal with the impulsive, in the same way the jazz musician acknowledges the main score and creates around and in response to it.

Oddly enough, as this more personal approach grows deeper, the meanings of the work become more universal.

very useful read. I would love to follow you on twitter. By the way, did any one learn that some Iranian hacker had hacked twitter yesterday.

There is an interesting literature (most from Bruce Miller and his group at UCSF) on the emergence of artistic talent in frontotemporal dementia. Often the paintings and drawings become more abstract and less representational and generally more interesting. I don't think they have tried connecting it to confabulation but I would not be at all suprised if there were a link.

Omg please, im you are friend on here could you email me to chat and give me the courage to perhaps tell her because i truly wanna talk to you seein as you was in the exact same situation as i am, Please i really require some assist with points. :(

By Love o Meter (not verified) on 14 Aug 2010 #permalink

I've struggled with this ever because, but recently had begun to properly get over her (once again!) I've just returned from a camping holiday with her, and I think I am falling again. I've a feeling she is as well. We went with our 4 other friends, and I observed many things she insisted on, such as sleeping near to and next to me at night, and how she created a unique effort to invest time with me.

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His confabulations were not limited to his former business life, for when questioned about holidays or outings over the previous few days, he would again report events that bore no relationship to actual happenings.

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