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THE NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATIVITY 1: evolutionary ethology

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Title: THE NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATIVITY 1: evolutionary ethology


1
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATIVITY 1
evolutionary ethology
  • Neil Greenberg
  • University of Tennessee
  • ORICL
  • July 11 2000

2
My deep gratitude to
  • Colleagues
  • David Crews, Robert Switzer, Thomas Jenssen
  • Postdoc and graduate student
  • Cliff Summers, Enrique Font

3
And . . .
  • Mentors and role-models
  • Paul D. MacLean
  • Danny Lehrman
  • Colin Beer

4
My Own Work . . .
  • Clarifying the neurobehavioral causes and
    consequences of social behavior
  • Specific lesions in the striatal complex
    profoundly impair
    aggression
  • Stress endocrinology orchestrates and
    maintains the social dynamic
  • (at least in the reptile model)

5
Natural History
  • Natural history is the study of natural organisms
    and objects.
  • It involves the description of nature and
    attempts to determine the causes, consequences,
    and interrelationships of the phenomena observed
    therein.

6
ETHOLOGY
  • ETHOLOGY, the biological study of behavior has
    its roots in Natural History.
  • ETHOLOGY is among our most powerful disciplinary
    tools for understanding the causes and
    consequences of behavior
  • It is the approach to understanding behavior that
    invokes the methods and theoretical constructs
    of several disciplines within biology

7
Ethology
  • Ethologists . . .
  • describe behavioral traits,
  • the development of behavioral traits in
    individuals (ontogeny, experience),
  • the environment in which behavioral traits occur
    (context, stability),
  • the evolution of behavioral traits (how they
    enhance fitness), and
  • the physiology and proximal causation of
    behavioral traits (neurology, endocrinology).

8
EVOLUTIONARY ETHOLOGY
  • EVOLUTIONARY refers to the assumption that
    environmental circumstances selectively preserve
    traits that enhance fitness.
  • FITNESS refers to relative success in
    reproduction, particularly clear when
    circumstances limit the number of offspring that
    can survive. Traits that enhance fitness are
    adaptations.

9
Adaptations
  • ADAPTATIONS are . . . Both manifest traits and .
    . .
  • . . . processes by which organisms or groups of
    organisms maintain homeostasis in and among
    themselves
  • in the face of both short-term environmental
    fluctuations and long-term changes
  • in the composition and structure of their
    environments.
    (Rappaport, 1971)

10
IS CREATIVITY an ADAPTATION?. . .
  • YES!
  • Creativity is a potent biological adaptation in
    that it catalyzes or facilitates a regulatory or
    advantageous change in response to a real or
    perceived challenge or stress.
  • Creativity consequently results in higher fitness
    in terms of ones direct or indirect contribution
    to future generations.

11
CREATIVITY . . .
  • reflects a spontaneous or evoked increase in the
    intensity of cognitive processing . . .
  • that enables the relating and integrating of
    variables . . .
  • not ordinarily associated with each other.

12
The adaptive process . . .
  • is one of continuous assimilation of internally
    mediated consequences of the organisms action on
    the environment and the resulting accommodation
    of these action schemes into the previously
    formed structure
  • (Piaget 1980)

13
CREATIVITY, like all adaptations
  • Helps us cope with challenges that threaten our
    capacity to meet needs such as
  • Physiology (food, drink, exercise)
  • Safety (security, order, protection)
  • Belonging ( sociability, acceptance, love)
  • Esteem (status, prestige, acknowledgment)
  • Self-Actualization (personal fulfillment)
  • (Maslows need hierarchy)

14
CREATIVITY meets needs, is intrinsically
motivating
  • Real or perceived needs are served by creative
    perceptions, thoughts, or actions which associate
    familiar or novel stimuli in varying
    combinations.
  • Intrinsic reward systems operate to maintain this
    valuable activity.
  • Rewards are commensurate with the real (or
    perceived) urgency of the need, once the
    dissonance created by difficulty in accommodating
    it is resolved.

15
CREATIVITY meets needs . . . . . . it
can heal the mind and body
  • The therapeutic benefits of activities that
    involve the experience of creativity provide
    powerful evidence for a biologically adaptive
    function that may be independent of any specific
    kinesthetic, visual, or musical art form.

16
CREATIVITY defined . . .
  • CREATIVITY . . .
  • involves the expression of unprecedented or novel
    perceptions, thoughts, or actions . . .
  • by which an organism or group of organisms copes
    . . .
  • with present or potential changes in the
    composition and structure of the environment.

17
What is the experience of creativity ?
  • The defining experience of creativity involves a
    dramatic change in perception or understanding.
  • This can be more or less exciting,

18
EUREKA ! !
  • The sense of reward is commensurate with the
    intensity of the need satisfied, with the tension
    or dissonance resolved.
  • "...nothing holds me --
  • I will indulge my sacred fury!
  • (Kepler announcing the discovery of his Third Law)

19
ORIGINS OF CREATIVITY
  • Alternative theories such as INSPIRATION or
    PERSPIRATION are NOT mutually exclusive . . .
  • They each refer to one of the several dimensions
    of creativity that ordinarily work as an
    ensemble.

20
INSPIRATION THEORY
  • Joan . . . you must not talk to me about my
    voices.
  • Robert How do you mean? Voices?
  • Joan I hear voices telling me what to do. They
    come from God.
  • Robert They come from your imagination.
  • Joan Of course. That is how the messages of
    God come to us.

21
INSPIRATION THEORY
  • Joan . . . you must not talk to me about my
    voices.
  • Robert How do you mean? Voices?
  • Joan I hear voices telling me what to do. They
    come from God.
  • Robert They come from your imagination.
  • Joan Of course. That is how the messages of
    God come to us.

22
PERSPIRATION THEORY
  • Thomas Alva Edison
  • Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine
    per cent perspiration.

23
Integrating subsystems
  • Primary and Secondary Process Cognition
  • . . . primary process cognition of dreaming,
    reverie, psychosis and secondary process
    cognition involving the abstract, logical,
    reality-oriented thought of waking consciousness
    (Fromm 1978)
  • creative individuals can more easily shift gears
    from primary process, unfocused attention
    (associated with low levels of cortical arousal),
    to more focused secondary process (higher levels
    of cortical arousal) for the expression or
    implementation of creative insights (Kris 1952).

24
Creativity and Stress
  • The activation and use of the biological
    mechanisms we possess to deal with any deviations
    from the resting state constitutes the stress
    response.
  • STRESS . . .
  • is essential for coping with
  • . . . challenges to our biological stability
  • . . . challenges to our capacity to meet our
    needs
  • is among our most potent adaptations

25
creativity ?
  • Sometimes the creative insight strikes like
    lightening, but it is
  • orchestrated by cognition
  • guided by motivation
  • energized by emotion
  • These engage the same neural and endocrine
    subsystems as the stress response

26
How stress works . . .
  • First, an almost instantaneous
    sympathetic-adrenomedullary (SAM)
    flight-or-fight acute response (adrenaline)
  • Next, a few minutes later, a back-up
    hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis (HPA)
    chronic response (ACTH and glucocorticoids

27
What does stress have to do with creativity ?
  • The endocrinology of stress enhances the neural
    mechanisms of perception and cognition and action
    (inputintegrationoutput)
  • Stress enlarges our possibilities for solving
    problems

28
CREATIVITY meets needs . . .. . . it can enrich
the spirit
  • Beauty is truth, truth beauty,
  • that is all Ye know on earth,
  • and all ye need to know
  • (Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn, Stanza 2)
  • A thing of beauty is a joy forever
  • Its loveliness increases it will never
  • Pass into nothingness.

  • (Keats, Endymion. Book I, Line 1)
  • "It was as though I had looked for a truth
    outside myself, and finding it had become for a
    moment a part of the truth I sought... (CP Snow)

29
Premises of the neuroethological approach to
Creativity
  • Learning requires the orchestrated actions of
    motivation, affect, cognition, and access to a
    network of potential associations
  • Physiological stress selectively activates the
    essential neural systems and expands the range
    of potential associations
  • Creativity is at the end of a continuum that
    begins with the simplest connections of
    associative learning

30
A biological understanding of creativity
  • Creativity is at the end of a continuum due to
    adaptive co-opting of the machinery of
    associative learning and of physiological stress
  • Physiological stress is a response to intrinsic
    and extrinsic (environmental) change
  • Adaptive developmental changes induced by
    physiological stress enhances the interface with
    selective environmental pressures and expands an
    organisms adaptive options and potential for
    innovation.

31
EXTREMES CREATIVITY as an AFFECTIVE DISORDER
  • Creativity often involves unique or
    unconventional ways of perceiving, thinking,
    acting
  • It is unsurprising that these unique ways may
    sometimes be expressed as behavioral dysfunction
    -- disorders such as TLE, depression,
    schizophrenia

32
Creativity and Life
  • "When making a decision of minor importance, I
    have always found it advantageous to consider all
    the pros and cons. In vital matters, however,
    such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the
    decision should come from the unconscious, from
    somewhere within ourselves. In the important
    decisions of personal life, we should be
    governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our
    nature." --Sigmund Freud

33
Creativity and Art
  • Art is among the purest expressions of human
    creativity
  • Creativity is among our most potent coping
    mechanisms
  • The aesthetic experience affects our confidence
    in our beliefs

34
ART an extreme expression of creative
communication
  • "The best things cannot be told, the second best
    are misunderstood. After that comes civilized
    conversation after that, mass indoctrination
    after that, intercultural exchange. And so,
    proceeding, we come to the problem of
    communication the opening, that is to say, of
    one's own truth and depth to the depth and truth
    of another in such a way as to establish an
    authentic community of existence.
    (Jos Campbell, 1968)
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