Suppressing reasoning leads to greater creativity

Suppressing the part of our brain responsible for thinking and reasoning makes us more creative but it makes it harder to remember things.

Scientists have found a way to improve creativity through brain stimulation, according to researchers at Queen Mary University of London and Goldsmiths University of London. They succeeded in making people thing outside the box by temporarily suppressing a key part of the frontal brain called the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex which is involved in most of our thinking and reasoning.

“We solve problems by applying rules we learn from experience, and the DLPFC plays a key role in automating this process,” said Dr. Caroline Di Bernardi Luft, who conducted the research. “It works fine most of the time, but fails spectacularly when we encounter new problems which require a new style of thinking – our past experience can indeed block our creativity. To break this mental fixation, we need to loosen up our learned rules,” she added.

The researchers used a technique called transcranial direct current stimulation or tDCS, in short. It involves passing a weak constant electrical current through saline-soaked electrodes positioned over the scalp to modulate the excitability of the DLPFC. Depending on the direction of the current flow, DLPFC was temporarily suppressed or activated. The very low currents applied ensured that it would not cause any harm or unpleasant sensation.

Sixty participants were tested on their creative problem solving ability before and after the DLPFC was suppressed and also when the DLPFC was unstimulated. The tests of choice for scientists were the “matchstick problems”, considered hard because to solve them, participants need to relax the learnt rules of arithmetic and algebra.

The participants whose DLPFC was temporarily suppressed by the electrical stimulation were more likely to solve hard problems than other participants whose DLPFC was activated or not stimulated.

This demonstrated to scientists that suppressing DLPFC briefly can help break mental assumptions learned from experience and think outside the box.

But the researchers also observed that these participants got worse at solving problems with a higher working memory demand, like those where many items are needed to be held in mind at once. These problems require the participants to try a number of different moves until finding the solution, which means they have to keep track of their mental operations.

“These results are important because they show the potential of improving mental functions relevant for creativity by non-invasive brain stimulation methods,” commented Dr Luft, participant to the study.

The specialists say that their study shows that simply using a tDCS machine, which is sold by companies promising to improve cognition, will not make you smarter and we are far from developing an electrical helmet with an “On” button that can raise our intelligence.

“However, our results also suggest that potential applications of this technique will have to consider the target cognitive effects in more detail rather than just assuming tDCS can improve cognition as claimed by some companies which are starting to sell tDCS machines for home users,” Luft argues. “I would say that we are not yet in a position to wear an electrical hat and start stimulating our brain hoping for a blanket cognitive gain.”