Why I Don’t Often Mention Neuroscience

Let’s read a bad neuro article to ironically regain our hope for neuroscience writing

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I don’t write about the brain often—at least, not as often as you might expect given I’m a neuroscientist who writes about science.

When I wrote about creativity, for example, I didn’t mention any neuroscience. That isn’t because there isn’t neuroscience on creativity, or because I didn’t read any of the studies. It’s just that those studies aren’t very helpful for understanding creativity.

It’s easy to stick someone in an fMRI scanner while they perform a “creativity” task. You’ll get different areas lighting up, and now you can say you found the brain regions “responsible” for creativity. But all you’ve done is put neuroscience-labels on some behavior. This doesn’t mean you understand that behavior.

Not that these types of studies are useless. Science is incremental, and when combined with evidence from other methods and further brain scan studies, these can be part of the triangulation that goes into forming a deeper theory of creativity.

The trouble comes when someone tries to write a popular press article for the public, and just has some questionable neuroimaging studies they claim tell you “the neuroscience of [x]”, as if this finally tells us what creativity is.

Wrap it up, folks, we found it, turns out the big red splotch was creativity all along.

“The” Neuroscience of Creativity

I recently came across this article on the neuroscience of creativity, in a newsletter for creative people.

I’m using this article not to pick on this particular author, but because it’s short and representative of the sorts of things you see out there. Plus, unlike other articles I came across, it doesn’t say anything just outright wrong. The science is relatively sound! So it gives an opportunity to look at what we learn from the neuroscience presented in a concise article meant for creative folks.

Let’s look at it section by section:

The Role of the Temporal Lobe

The temporal lobe, especially the anterior superior temporal gyrus (aSTG), has been linked to moments of insight or the “Aha!” moments. An EEG study showed a burst of high gamma activity (indicating neural binding) in the aSTG about 300 milliseconds before participants experienced an insight.

This is from a real study, and explains the finding pretty similarly to the way the researchers do. But what does it tell us about creativity or insight? I would say very little.

First, the standard objections: this is a single study and lacks details—this description gives the impression that this neural activity was measured in people going about their normal day and then having insights. The reality is they were in a lab doing an experimenter-designed task.

The experiment involved sticking people in an fMRI scanner, showing them three words that can be linked with a single word (e.g. “pine, crab, sauce”, which are all associated with the word “apple”). Then it had people hit a button when they figured it out. If the participants felt like the solution involved insight, they told the researchers. The researchers looked at the brain activity just prior to people hitting the button as the brain’s activity during problem solving, and then compared the times subjects reported having an “insight” experience to those where they got the solution but didn’t feel an “Aha” moment.

Figure 1 from the study, illustrating the task structure.

I explain all that not to knock the study—it’s a pretty standard looking study, using a standard paradigm of convergent thinking, to look at a neat idea (moments of insight). It’s fun! But, like any study, it has severe limitations.

Notice the language used—the anterior superior temporal gyrus “has been linked to moments of insight”. This is the kind of hedging language academics are trained to use—for good reason! You don’t want to claim a causal connection if you have no evidence of a causal connection. So it doesn’t say this brain region “causes moments of insight”, or “moments of insight come from“ the aSTG. The study doesn’t, and can’t, tell us anything about the causal relationship between the reported activity and insight.

Getting the answer in a stroke of insight involves excitement at having the answer, social anxiety about whether you’re right, and so on. Lots of brain processes going on at once, in addition to the “Aha” experience. This is also a very specific task, involving a specific type of language association, and it’s unclear that problem solving of this type generalizes to all “insight” having.

It should also be mentioned the 300ms thing is an average across participants, not some hard rule about when this happens, and is based on a timestamp of when the participant presses a button saying they had an insight. So I wouldn’t read much of anything into that 300ms timing—it includes the time it takes to form a motor plan to press the button and press it.

These are all just standard issues with hanging any conclusion on a single study of a complex topic. The bigger issue here, and why I wouldn’t put this kind of thing in an article about insight or creativity, is that even if you take the study at face value as generalizing about insight, it still tells you basically nothing about insight or creativity.

Do you know much about the anterior superior temporal gyrus? Would it have made a difference to you if the finding was instead of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or the ventral tegmental area?

Unless you’re a neuroscientist who knows the literature and has an idea of what brain areas are associated with what (allowing you to do a sort of reverse-inference), the brain area label tells you nothing. It’s just a technical term that looks fancy. If you’re speaking to a general audience, there’s really nothing to be gained by mentioning the brain area—it might as well just say “some part of the brain”.

Let’s go back to the original statement:

The temporal lobe, especially the anterior superior temporal gyrus (aSTG), has been linked to moments of insight or the “Aha!” moments. An EEG study showed a burst of high gamma activity (indicating neural binding) in the aSTG about 300 milliseconds before participants experienced an insight.

Even if we take at face value that the results of the study are reliable and generalize beyond the task given, this statement isn’t telling us much. Taking out technical terms, the irrelevant timing, and assuming the reader has no prior understanding of what the anterior superior temporal gyrus is, all the above statement should mean to a regular intelligent reader is:

A brain area does something around the time you have a moment of insight.

Like… Okay. I could have told you that without needing to put anyone in a brain scanner. The fact that people report feeling differently means there’s some difference in the brain, even if it’s just in the subjective experience and no difference in the problem solving process.

For a neuroscientist, this study might be of interest because of ongoing debates about the role of aSTG. It might form one small brick in an overall theory of aSTG functioning or in theories about insight or semantic associations. But on its own, studies like these just aren’t worth reporting to a general audience in such a condensed form. There just isn’t enough context for it to be meaningful, and it’s presented as far more certain than it is.

With all that said, let’s go on to the other parts of the same article:

Divergent and Convergent Thinking

Creative thinking often involves both divergent thinking (coming up with many possible solutions) and convergent thinking (finding the single best solution to a problem). A study using fMRI scans found that these thinking types involve distinct neural pathways.

This little summary is interesting because it doesn’t name brain areas—it just says there are distinct neural pathways—which is mostly just techno-babble that means “different brain areas light up when people do these things”. To state the obvious, if you’re doing something different, your brain is doing something different. If you’re doing something different, of course there’s at least some difference in the brain activity involved.

So by saying these types of thinking involve “distinct neural pathways”, all you’re saying is “these are two different types of thinking”, which we could already tell from the definitions we were given. Here, even for a neuroscientist, the neuroscience is superfluous. We haven’t learned anything other than the terms divergent and convergent thinking.

Default Mode Network (DMN) and Executive Network

These two networks are crucial for creative cognition. The DMN, active when our minds wander, is involved in daydreaming, envisioning the future, and reflecting on oneself. It aids in generating novel ideas. On the other hand, the Executive Network, engaged during tasks requiring attention, helps evaluate and refine those ideas.

An interesting dance between these networks occurs during creativity. Initial brainstorming might activate the DMN, but as we refine and assess the feasibility of an idea, the Executive Network jumps in.

This is much better than the previous examples.

What differentiates this explanation from the other examples above is that it gives a bit of context—it says the Default Mode Network is involved in daydreaming, envisioning the future, and reflecting on oneself. And it’s not totally untrue, though it’s a very simplified and romanticized version of the Default Mode Network. The DMN is not all sunshine and rainbows—for example, activity in the Default Mode Network can also be associated with depression.

But the general idea here is pretty mainstream—lots of researchers have argued that “creative cognition” involves “cooperation” between the Default Mode Network and Executive Network. The framing here, that the Default Mode Network generates ideas while the Executive Network either filters or constrains the process to make it more goal-directed, is in the ballpark of how neuroimagers might describe this.

So what does this tell us about creativity?

It’s important to note how we came to this conclusion that the Default Mode Network and Executive Network are involved in creativity. It doesn’t come from a single study—there have been many studies using divergent and convergent thinking tasks. Others have looked at the brain activity of musicians or poets while they do art. Putting all these studies together, we get a general picture of the “cooperation of networks” mentioned above. This is cool because it gives us confidence we’ve found something that generalizes.

More importantly, the neuroscience literature as a whole lends some support to the common cognitive frameworks of creativity as a process that involves generation and selection. It can at least join the conversation with other ways of looking at creativity, using behavioral measures or computational models, and is suggestive of what might be going on. Ideally, neuroimaging studies can be used to differentiate between two models of creative thinking that are hard to disentangle using behavioral measures alone.

But still—with this explanation, we’re just echoing the theories from cognitive science, giving a superficial summary of a brain network involved, and I’m not sure it informs more than it misleads. It gives the impression we can pinpoint “creativity” in the brain, instead of getting fuzzy blotches of activity and looking at how they correlate with each other and behavior. We just have a vague hand-wave at how a theory says it works, and map that onto a blurry picture of what the brain is doing. I worry mentioning “brain networks” makes it all seem deeper and better understood than it is.

If I want to write about creativity, I’m not going to mention the neuroscience because it’s mostly just weak evidence supporting the dominant theories. If I wanted to bolster the case for a specific theory of creativity, the neuroscience literature might be worth mentioning, but it isn’t something to spend lots of time on otherwise—it’s pretty weak evidence, and just shows the theory isn’t so far off base it can be ruled out by a blurry picture of brain activity.

Seductive Neuroscience

Articles like the above abound—you can find superficial articles about the neuroscience of self-control that follow the same pattern: a psychological model of the high-level phenomenon is recapitulated in the brain, as if putting brain labels on parts of a theory gives us a deeper understanding.

It’s not that good neuroscience writing can’t be done. An in-depth article about the neuroscience of creativity, that talks about the associated brain areas/networks and gives enough context to help you understand the neuroscience could be good. But frankly, the neuroscience of these sorts of high-level functions is pretty speculative, and needs to be even further contextualized with the limitations of the methods used.

For someone just looking for a general understanding of what creativity or self-control are, or someone looking to improve those things, the neuroscience is just irrelevant. Naming a brain region that lights up when you do an activity doesn’t help you understand that thing or do it better.

I suspect what drives most articles about this stuff is what researchers call the seductive allure of neuroscience. When irrelevant neuroscience is thrown into an explanation, people find it more credible. Neuroscience is fancy and has a lot of technical terms—and I think people severely overestimate what neuroimaging can tell us. When an article mentions a brain area, it makes it feel like we have such a good understanding of the phenomenon, we can watch it unfolding in the brain. The reality is, neuroscience is hard. For any complex, high-level concept like “creativity”, neuroscience studies are going to involve high levels of uncertainty of the brain activity measured, the generalizability of the tasks used, and whether the general framework used to interpret the data is actually right or not.

I’ve talked before about how superficial neuroscience is common in the self-help and productivity worlds. Neuroscience can tell us a lot, and there’s plenty of good neuroscience writing out there. Look at the books by Dean Burnett or David Eagleman. Michael Halassa has a recent great post about the thalamus, and Chenchen Li has written some great posts about modeling in neuroscience.

There’s also a lot of great stuff on the research on high-level phenomena like creativity—I recently came across Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, who writes great articles about the science of creativity.

But the superficial stuff that tries to explain these complex high-level phenomenon based on superficial readings of speculative neuroimaging studies abounds.

When I write about neuroscience, I try to avoid making it “science garnish“, adding unearned credibility for some psychological model. But most neuroscience writing I see, that’s all it is. The neuroscience adds little to nothing, but is interpreted as being definitive because of neuroscience’s seductive allure.

Writing all this out, and trying to pinpoint why some neuroscience writing is so superficial and irrelevant, has actually made me feel a bit more optimistic about neuroscience writing. By looking at why some writing seems so superficial, it’s highlighted for me what can make it less superficial. It is possible to write about the neuroscience of high-level phenomena, it’s just hard. It requires a lot of context, and it’s hard to get across that context without being boring and becoming a dry textbook. But getting around that is a skill issue, requiring the right hooks to interest people and keep it relevant while giving the necessary context. It’s hard, but it can be done.

Failing that, I guess I can always keep readers engaged with my trusty old stand-bys: dumb jokes and swears.

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