 Hi, my name is Tracy Tejama Espinosa and this is a video on Mind, Brain, and Ao. Today we're specifically going to be looking at the AOLA learner outcomes from the perspective of learners' productive courses of action and focusing on innovation and creativity. In this video, we're going to begin by considering creativity and its relationship to intelligence, creativity and design thinking, as well as creativity versus innovation. What's the difference between those two steps in this process? And creativity from a psychological perspective and then moving on into neuroscience and how we can actually measure creativity in the brain? Question mark there, okay? So if we begin with looking at creativity versus intelligence, what's so fascinating is that you find people who will claim that they are one in the same. I would beg to differ. There is a bit of a difference between creativity, the ability to perceive things in a novel manner, to create things, ideas, concepts, and make an innovative change to what already exists, which is intelligence is the ability to acquire knowledge and utilize it in a different way. So yes, they are definitely related, but they are not the same thing. And you'll find a lot of people who will argue that creativity is actually the apex of intelligence in and of itself. That it's the ability to actually build off of that prior knowledge, which could be intelligence, right, to do something actually different. So Sir Ken Robinson is one of those who strongly believes in this. But this really boils down to what we consider fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence. So the crystallized intelligence would be that native innate intelligence that we're talking about, whereas fluid intelligence is the ability to perhaps resolve problems. And so this is where we bridge into this idea of design thinking, which is asking you to be not only smart, not only intelligent, not only book savvy, but also being able to leverage ways of approaching problems to come up with novel perspectives on that. So design thinking has a lot of different steps. Many models look at this idea of understanding the problem, exploring and materializing a solution. Others look at inspiration and ideation and implementation of the steps and that they're all iterative processes that always circle back to each other. I particularly like this model just because of the focus that it gives. So, you know, we go from understanding ourselves to being able to have empathy in a greater way for other people. And then we take that greater perspective of needs that might exist out there and refine and define the problem so that it's a much clearer focus of what we're looking at. And then we can begin the design process, which in this new term of ideation is to come up with all the different options that we might have to resolve that. And then we refine that. You know, as we build prototypes to actually respond to that, we see how we actually have to narrow that down a bit because not all solutions can respond to the most idealistic solutions that we might have had in mind. And so then after it's tested and then, you know, put it out there for the real world, then you can actually have a much more refined product that responds to that particular problem that you are attempting to resolve. So, this leads us to looking at this other aspect of creativity. I mean, how is that different from innovation? Maybe you saw in this design thinking process some of the hints at that, right? So, creativity is looking at, you know, use of imagination and just pulling together different kinds of thoughts in this ideation process that we were talking about. Whereas innovation is a true process that builds off of prior knowledge. And so, I kind of like this particular graphic from the Edison Awards. They look at this idea as a cyclical process. You might have an idea and then you throw this out there and then let's say that we have developed a car or a telephone or we develop an egg slicer or something like that, right? So, the idea here, innovation means how to build a better mousetrap, how to build something better, how to create something or build something even more superior to the thing that already exists. So, that initial idea phase is something that gives birth to the general concept and then maybe a first prototype of what you're trying to do. But then when you innovate, you're actually improving upon what existed. So, we look at this in this particular definition, we define creativity as idea generation. Whereas innovation has to do with the implementation and the improvement of that product or that idea or that concept. And because this is such a fascinating process and so highly valued in society, we begin to try to now figure it out, describe, you know, why? How is this actually happening in the brain? And so, you get a lot of people who make very big promises. This book is a very good introduction. I'm trying to explain where creativity really comes from and how it is that we've sought to understand it over time. And basically jumping off from the psychological understanding of what might be happening in your mind to trying to say, okay, nowadays we can actually look at creativity in your brain, which is not exactly true. And somebody who's really kept a reality check here is Hailey and go ahead and try and pronounce his last name. He used to be a professor at Harvard, is now retired. He's a Hungarian thinker who is just amazing in looking at this idea of where does, how do creative processes occur in the mind? So, he's looking at the psychology of invention. So, what he has actually broken down has been a really good jumping off point for looking at the brain. So, the mind seems to be intangible things. And so, he describes all these mental processes. But once you've described all those processes, then you can actually see can I measure those things, right? So, measuring or seeing creativity in the brain, people have tried to do all kinds of sub elements of the creative process that we've seen, right? Some people are trying to say, okay, what happens when we're trying to create something new? Here's an object, create something new. Are you using the default mode mechanism? Are you using saliency and attention? You know, what part of your brain is kicking into gear? Others say, okay, here's an alternative use of tasks. So, I'm giving you something that you've always had. You've had a paperclip, okay, try and mess around with this paperclip and use it in a different way. Can you innovate the typical use of a paperclip and seeing what parts of the brain are involved there? There's others with just general creative processes. People believe now there's a huge group of studies that look at the default mode mechanism when your brain is kind of mind wandering, when you're not really focused on anything in particular. How does that compare with a saliency network where you have super hyper focused attention? And then executive function works. Is there this toggling back and forth between these kinds of networks that leads to creativity? We don't know that yet, right? Other studies have looked at people who are classified as being problem solvers versus problem explorers in the parts of the brain that are involved in that. And so others that look at the flexibility of approaching problems versus persistence and just making sure you can finally get to a final answer, lots of sub elements of creative processes have been studied. And there's a lot of people who have thrown out some really great, you know, theories about how things work, about looking at the neural substrates of general creativity. Trying to figure out from an artistic perspective, is there something else that's going on in the brain which is fascinating because creativity can be creative problem solving like some difficulty of it work versus being creative like producing a piece of art. So how do those kinds of creativity in the brain differ? And they're very, very different, right? Other studies have looked at artistic talent in savants. So what's the relationship between autism and artisansry? And is there something there that we can talk about creativity in general for the average human brain? Looking at people who are visual artists who have brain damage and then where did they lose certain skill abilities in the brain? So trying to track out neural correlates by absence, you know, what seems to be missing now. Others have looked at how dementia actually reduces inhibition and maybe lack of inhibition makes you more creative, which is another really interesting idea. And yet others have looked at very chemical based things about the brain. So, you know, how people on drugs, you know, actually have these creative insights. So trying to put all those pieces together, are we really seeing creativity in the brain? And so there's some people who would like to say so. And but what their books actually boiled down to, which is fascinating, is single messages. For example, creativity really has to do with saliency. How does you, how can you train your brain to identify what is novel and patterns in the world so that you can build on those things and have creative insight? So there's different approaches to this. But the bottom line is that in all of our searches for finding possible mechanisms for creativity in the brain, every single one of these studies has managed to basically look at a single element or elements. For example, the toggling back and forth between mind wandering and mindfulness, does this lead to creative insight? But they're not looking at this global vision of where creativity might bring the brain. So in all spaces. So can you measure or see creativity in the brain? Sorry, basically, you can't really do that. Just if you go back to Michele's work and creativity and flow and understanding psychology behind this, in all of these very important sub elements, there are some things that relate to saliency, what we consider important, some things that relate to patterns in the brain or how you identify novelty. Other things have to do with how you manage time between focused attention and then also mind wandering. How does that help? Other things have to do with levels of inhibition that we might have. So all of these sub areas of creativity don't allow you to actually measure or see creativity in the brain. But pretty much all of these studies show you a part of this. So maybe someday when we pull all of those pieces together, you could say, well, look, this is what creativity appears to look like in the brain, but not right now. So in summary, this video is looking at innovation and creativity and how they're different stages of a similar process, right? Because it's this iterative process of having an idea, putting it out there, developing it, then being able to innovate and build on top of that idea, you have a new idea. And so this is always a continual process, right? And that some people definitely equate creativity with intelligence, some even saying it's the highest form of intelligence. But there's a caveat here, understanding that when we talk about intelligence, there's fluid intelligence, which has to do with being able to problem solve in new situations, to transfer understanding about things versus a crystallized intelligence, sort of this booksmart that you can get from studying a lot. And we talked a bit about how creative intelligence and design thinking have similar steps in them and some things that might help us break down this huge idea of creativity into its smaller pieces. And finally, this last idea that basically creativity, everything that you do, creativity included occurs in the brain, but where exactly in the brain and how has not been yet determined? Are there chemical processes? Absolutely. Are there certain networks that can be stimulated? Yes. There are people who say, there's no such thing as true creativity. I can teach anybody to be creative. They just have to rehearse it a lot. They have to practice these stages of inhibition. I don't care what other people think. I'm going to keep trying new ideas to identifying patterns and looking at novelty and searching their memory so that they can build off of prior knowledge. There's a lot of ways to approach this, but we're not there yet. So just to sum up, I just have to say personally, I am fascinated with creativity in the brain. I think it's one of the most interesting ways to study the brain because it's one of the most complicated combinations of multiple neural networks that are involved. But one of the things that's most important perhaps, so going back to McKaylee's understanding of the conditions under which creativity occurs. Some people, we know the whole story of the depressed artist who's very creative. That's very interesting. But we also know that some people, given the right conditions, given lots of options or tools or choices or materials, actually gain creative insight by imagining their use in new contexts. So we know that there's no single condition. However, one of the things that we can do as parents and teachers is to offer that encouragement. Oftentimes people stop. They nip themselves in the bud. They stop being so creative because they have been criticized or critiqued for what they did. That's not a perfect painting because you didn't color between the lines or that's not the best poem because you didn't use the literary device we told you to use or whatever it is. These small types of critiques actually change the self-perception of an individual as being creative or not. And we know that that can really destroy the desire to actually try again. So we know that we as teachers and parents have a lot to do with the creative processes in the students around us by encouraging their efforts rather than being overly critical about what they're producing. Remember, we always talk about the product, the process, and the progress of what kids are doing and we should value all of those things, not just the final product. So these are the ideas that I hope to talk about when we get together this week. I'm looking forward to your questions. Thanks.