Creativity uses both right and left hemispheres.

I scrolled through my RSS feeds this morning and up popped the kind of neuroscience article that I absolutely cannot resist: Imaging finds creativity uses both right, left brain, in Psych Central. I cannot resist this kind of article because even the headline is so preposterous. Assuming we could even define what creativity is, why wouldn’t it require both hemispheres? Is the left side of your brain just going to sit there doing nothing (or perhaps doing your taxes) while the right side is being artistic and avant-garde? It’s so silly.

I’m going to use this article as an example, since they dangled the carrot and I, like many others, bit.

 

1) Who did the research?

Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, and colleagues from the University of Southern California, and it was published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. No citation, volume, or link to the abstract is listed. (I found it anyhow, here, via Google scholar.)

Citation score: 1/2. I know one of the authors and the journal, but I have to search] to find the article itself.

 

2) What did they do?

They “used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of architecture students, who tend to be visually creative.” I’m not sure why they specifically needed to find people in a “creative” field, since everyone can be creative. But architecture? (Ok, judgements aside about architecture students…) Students looked at a circle, a C and an 8, and were “asked to visualize images that could be made by rearranging those shapes.” They also did a control task where they were “asked to simply try to piece three geometric shapes together with their minds and see if they formed a square or a rectangle.” The article states that this task requires spatial processing of the shapes, just like the first task, but doesn’t require the same amount of creativity.

Methods score: 1. I know who participated and what they did. I even know what the control task was.

 

3) What did they find?

This is the point in these articles where I start yelling to anyone who’s around me, “but that’s not what they did!”, at which point I often launch into a nerdy rant about experimental design and neuroimaging, at the end of which I usually end up annoyed that others do not share my outrage.

Exhibit A: “Researchers discovered that although the creative task was mainly handled by the right brain, the left brain hemisphere was actually activated more than the right.”

That’s not what they did.

They didn’t look at the brain activity during the creative task and see the left side of the brain lighting up. Without even reading the study I can tell you that that’s not what they did. What they DID do, is look at the brain activity during the creative task and see the whole brain lighting up, look at the brain activity during the “non-creative” control task and (again) see the whole brain lighting up, and then compare how much each little part of the brain lit up in the creative versus the non-creative task. You do this by subtracting the control task from the “creative” experimental task, and then seeing if any areas were more active in one condition compared to another. That’s how every image you see of a brain with a little spot lit up was generated – you have to have two conditions, and subtract one from the other. So, the information you get from a neuroimaging study is: which parts of the brain are MORE active when you’re doing one thing, compared to another. NOT which part of your brain was the one part doing this particular task. Your whole brain is always working, it’s just that sometimes one part has to work just a little bit harder.

So if we go back and re-read that sentence: “Researchers discovered that although the creative task was mainly handled by the right brain, the left brain hemisphere was actually activated more than the right.” …the statement stops making sense. How do you know that the creative task was “handled by the right brain”? I’m assuming the right hemisphere was more active during the creative task than the control task. So if the left hemisphere was more active than the right, then the left hemisphere was also more active during the creative task than the control task.

I’m not saying that the results reported in the article are incorrect – this does suggest that the left hemisphere is involved in the creative task – I’m just saying that this is a really bad way of describing what the results were because it perpetuates the misconception that it’s possible for only one part of your brain to be responsible for “doing something” while the rest is just sitting there.

See? Now if you were actually here I’d be annoyed that you were sharing my outrage. It’s ok.

Results score: 1/2. I get the gist, but as always, the misrepresentation of the results itself resulted in a rant, so… yeah.

 

4) What does it mean?

The article states that the results challenge “the common belief that the right hemisphere of the brain is the source of creativity while the left brain is responsible for logic and math.” But I’m confused by the statement that “while the right half of the brain performs the bulk of the creative process, the left half makes important contributions.” Didn’t the results show that the left hemisphere was more active than the right? Why does this mean that the right hemisphere is still controlling the bulk of the “creative process”? Nevertheless, I think it is important to highlight any study that challenges the right-brained/left-brained idea, because you obviously need and use both all the time.

There isn’t much discussion of the limitation of the research though, most notably the task that researchers chose (is it really a creative task? or just harder than making a rectangle?), or the participants they used (architecture students), but the author does mention that the researcher is planning to “explore more of how different types of creativity (painting, acting, singing) are created by the brain – what they have in common, and what makes them different.”

Saying you’re going to figure out how the brain creates creativity is a pretty lofty ambition, but perhaps (just like in this study) you could see what makes them different when you compare them with one another.

Implications score: 1/2. There is little connection to a bigger picture about how the two hemisphere work together, and instead it’s boiled down to a kind of “what-do-you-know” sound bite. But there is at least an acknowledgement that this is just one possible type of creativity, and that more work is needed.

Total score: 2.5. I really tried not to be mean! But I think this study could have been described better, especially if the goal was to break down a misconception that it’s possible to be right- or left-brained.

 

Other versions: 

Seat of creativity may not be in the right brain alone, R&D

Creative thinking not just for the right side of your brain, Red Orbit

 

So do me a favor and whenever you read the results of a neuroimaging study, where it says something like “scientists saw activity in such-and-such part of the brain when participants were doing such-and-such” just ask “Compared to what? That part of the brain was active compared to what?” And if the article doesn’t tell you “compared to what,” then you are missing the information you need to understand what they really found. There are other limitations of neuroimaging that I will share with you at a later date but that’s the take-home for today. Class dismissed!