 At the edge of the world's linking creativity and psychopathology, you will hear from Dr. Young shortly. We are also pleased to welcome our special lunch speaker today, Virginia Senator, State Senator, Cree Deeds, who will share his powerful story in an address titled, The Urgency of Now. We look forward to hearing from Senator Deeds. Throughout the day, you will also have 15 breakout sessions to choose from, presented by some of our community's leading children's mental health physicians, clinicians, and other professionals. Tomorrow, we welcome a speaker who will surely receive the recognition for Greatest Distance Traveled. David Epston, all the way from New Zealand, for his keynote address on narrative therapy entitled, Do the people we meet have moral character? Are they characterless? There will also be a choice of five more breakout sessions for you to attend Friday morning, following the keynote address. It's going to be a full day and a half of learning for you. This is our third year to present ClarityCon, and altogether that adds up to nearly 60 unique speakers we have hosted to provide insight on children's mental health. And as many of you know, we continue to offer community events on our campus in the South Texas Medical Center that provide CEUs and an opportunity to hear from leading authorities and children's mental health. We provide these kinds of events because we believe it's important as a nonprofit provider to actively share knowledge in order to serve the children of our community and their mental health care needs. Our community CEUs held on our campus are offered free of charge and today because of generous and caring sponsors lost my place, sorry, because of generous and caring sponsors that we'll thank in a moment, many of you are attending today at no cost. Now please join me in thanking over 20 speakers and presenters who will be joining today and tomorrow. There will be surveys following each session for you to complete and we would appreciate your feedback. Please note this year we will provide the CEU certificates after each session including our keynote presentations. If you're seeking CEU hours, please complete the white evaluations at your seats. For those of you who need continuing education for doctoral level licensures, please complete a colored evaluation form instead of the white one. Please take the completed form with you as you exit the ballroom to exchange for your certificate. If you have questions about any of these things, you will see a whole lot of clarity people around here look like they're with the Secret Service, they have these little earphone things, and any of them will be happy to answer your questions. In 2014, Clarity Child Guidance Center cared for nearly 8,000 children struggling with mental, emotional and behavioral issues. But there were more kids who needed care than we had beds at Clarity. We are so thankful to the people representing the system of care, many of whom are in the audience today, who we exchange referrals with that are there to provide services. But even that's not enough. The need is great and it's growing. We opened the first Clarity Child Guidance Clinic in the west over hills in the west part of San Antonio in January of 2014. In one year, the clinic served nearly 500 children providing thousands of therapy appointments and critical access to a psychiatrist. We've also provided 200 days of care through a unique program designed to prevent hospitalization called day treatment or some people know it as partial hospital. At our 52-bed hospital in the medical center, we provided nearly 1,700 children with 17,000 days of hospital care while helping another 6,000 children with over 40,000 outpatient therapy visits. But it's still not enough. So later this summer, we're unveiling an expansion of 20 additional hospital beds. At the grand opening we will announce we have operated or have opened and dedicated a crisis assessment center for children with six of the 20 new beds designated for 23-hour observation. It's for children who are in crisis and need to be assessed for an appropriate level of care. That's to help prevent the nearly 1,300 children who annually visit an emergency room only to discover that psychiatric care is not available. We continue to create awareness of the importance of children's mental health through our one in five minds advocacy campaign. Many of you have seen our recent pinwheels of hope at the Alamo. Some of you were even there to commemorate Mental Health Awareness Month in May. We planted, I laugh at the term, planted 3,000 pinwheels. You know, I don't think any of them have grown yet. But we planted 3,000 pinwheels at the Alamo in the background to call attention to our mental health partners and the need to care for kids. To date, over 2,600 caring individuals have signed up to actively advocate to end the stigma associated with mental illness. If you haven't had a chance to visit our one in five minds website or like our one in five minds Facebook page, I encourage you to do so. Thank you for all of the work that you do for the one in five kids who are contending with a mental, emotional, or behavioral disorder. I trust this next day and a half not only will educate but encourage you as well. Before I introduce one of our esteemed sponsors, there are a few important things to know about the conference. First, we're in Red Oak Ballroom B. This is where you will hear the keynote speakers and later today enjoy lunch and the discussion with Senator Cree Deeds. In a minute I'm going to tell you about a couple of room changes so get ready to make notes about that. Second, there are exhibitors throughout the lobby and the hallways. You will pass them on your way to breakout sessions. We encourage you to visit with them and thank them for being here to support ClarityCon 2015. This year exhibitors will be handing out raffle tickets as you visit their booths. Please write your name on the back of each ticket and place them in the box at the check-in tables. We will draw from the raffle tickets for free entries to ClarityCon 2016. The Wi-Fi password is in your syllabus. It's a secret so I can't say it out loud. And all of today's presentations are handily on our website for easy viewing, downloading, and printing. Third, breakout rooms are outside the doors. There's also a map of the venue inside your syllabus. While you have time in your schedule to visit exhibitors, we also ask that you arrive at the breakout sessions promptly. And finally, this conference would not be possible without the caring support of our sponsors. A full listing is in our syllabus, but we'd like to highlight our presenting and luncheon sponsors. Today's special luncheon presentation from Senator Deeds is made possible by the generous support of Community Bible Church and New Star Energy and the Griehe Family Foundation. And thank you to our keynote sponsor, Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas. You guys follow instructions well, thank you. Because of these sponsors, we were able to provide nearly 50 deserving scholarships to attend this summit at no cost. We also would like to thank Nowcast SA for their support in live streaming and presenting the keynote and luncheon speakers. Thank you. Thank you all. I would now like to welcome Melissa Munoz, sorry, Jessica Munoz, Director of Communications for Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas to the podium to introduce your keynote speaker. Jessica. Melissa is fine. For years, the pastor at our church would call me Rebecca and it kind of got to be a joke in our family. The day I got married, he actually called me Rebecca too. He'd be called by another name. But thank you, Fred, and good morning again. Thank you so much for giving us the opportunity to welcome your attendees to the third annual ClarityCon. Methodist Healthcare Ministries has been extremely proud to partner with Clarity Child Guidance Center and support them in their mission to ensure children can access mental health care services. Especially children who are uninsured and those who live in areas where it could be especially difficult to access care. We share that commitment to ensuring low income families and the uninsured throughout South Texas can access health care services. It's why we operate primary health care clinics here in San Antonio, where people can get access to quality, holistic care, regardless of their ability to pay. It's why we offer free health care education programming through our Wesley Nurse Program. And it's why we offer community counseling services in rural communities where, if you all have ever been to a rural community, you know it can be especially difficult to find. And it's why we've provided a little over $25 million in community grants this year alone to 90 nonprofit partners so that we can ensure that these types of services are available to more people where they live. But we are very excited to support ClarityCon and just looking at the lineup of speakers, I'm excited to hear and to experience everything that you guys are going to experience today. But without further ado, the reason I'm here is to introduce our morning speaker. Dr. Young is an assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of Mexico, a research scientist at the Mind Research Network, and a practicing clinical neuropsychologist in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He studies both brain disease and what the brain does well, a field of research known as positive neuroscience. His research is designed to relate behavioral measures, including intelligence, personality, and creativity to brain function and structure in healthy, neurological, and psychiatric subjects. He has published research articles across a wide range of disciplines, including traumatic brain injury, lupus, schizophrenia, intelligence, and creativity. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Young to the podium. Thank you very much. It's a great honor to be here today to talk to you. Yep, that might be the problem. Talk to you about some of the things that I study in my lab and in my research clinic. But before I begin, I want to talk to you a bit about your evaluation, your continuing education evaluation. Who made this thing? I'm supposed to talk to you. It's always a good idea to look at these things beforehand to see what I'm supposed to be talking about. I think I put this together several months ago and gave it to ClarityCon. I vaguely remember doing this and I might be talking about some of these things. I hope you find this educational. But I should talk about abductive reasoning first because that is not going to be in this talk. I see that I have to directly that that is one of the key points in this talk. So that's a clear oversight. So there is different reasoning characteristics that are involved in being human and getting around in the world. And if you think about deductive reasoning, you think about cause-effect relationships that get you through the world. It's designed with how you get around in the world. The sun is going to rise in the east and set in the west. You can gauge your life by that to know when the sun is going to come in the window in the morning and when you're going to have to lower the shades in the evening. Abductive reasoning is about hypothesis generation. And if you think about mental illness for a moment, think about things that you haven't seen before and that there aren't clear rules to think about how the world might be working. The door just slammed in the back. What caused that? Was it a gust of wind? Was it a ghost? Did someone do that? Now think about for a moment if you're hearing voices in your head what is going to be the cause of that. Now we know in religious texts that God talks to people. Is God talking to me? So this type of abductive reasoning, this hypothesis generation is a very adaptive reasoning process that people do. It leads to the generation of rules and adaptive things that happen in the future about how you can learn rules to solve the future. But they're not quite there yet. You have to figure out what might be the way that the world is working before you get there. So this abductive reasoning process is a complement to deductive reasoning in the way that the world works. Now we've solved item one. Now I don't have to worry about that anymore. So I'm going to take you on a bit of a journey. And I want to talk a bit about mental illness from a different perspective. I study creativity and in this research on creativity and I'm going to walk around a little bit because I have to see my slides and I can't see them from here. So I'm going to walk around a little bit. In my research on creativity I'm trying to figure out why creativity exists. What is this thing that creativity does in terms of adaptive reasoning? How did it emerge in evolutionary time? What purpose does it solve for us in the world? Is it just this fun thing that we do? Or is it something that solves an adaptive reasoning problem-solving process? So from that perspective I come to this as a neuroscientist and as a clinician working with patients from a different perspective when thinking about creativity as dance or art or architecture I'm thinking about creativity as a reasoning process-adductive reasoning process as we talked about-hypothesis generation about how the world might work. So this title, Here Be Dragons comes from the journey that I've been on over the last seven years when explorers got to the edge of the world and they thought they saw dragons-these strange creatures that emerged from the sea and I'll talk to you about this towards the end of my talk this Here Be Dragons when you're in uncharted territory and I'm taking you on a bit of a journey towards uncharted territory. So first I want to talk about creativity and madness. Is it real or is it neuromythology? There is a concept that creativity and psychopathology overlap somewhat. This is very pernicious throughout time. This concept. Plato said that creativity is a divine madness a gift from the gods. Aristotle said no great genius was with a sphere of insanity. Shakespeare via Theseus said lovers and madmen have such seething brains such shaping fantasies that apprehend cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover and the poet are of imagination all compact. Salvador Dali perhaps the best of this said the only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad. Albert Rothenberg, K. Jameson, Nancy Andreason are all proponents of this mood disturbance and creativity overlap that there is some interaction of mood disturbance particularly bipolar disorder and depression and creativity in these artists. There is any number of examples of an overlap between creativity and psychopathology. You have examples ranging from T. S. Eliot Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, Amelia Zola, Virginia Woolf, Henry James any number of examples from history of a large number of mostly artists writers, artists who have significant psychopathology and yet are able to produce beautiful works of art. Here is some examples Vincent Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, John Nash who just died recently a Nobel Prize winning economist who had significant psychopathology but we have to be careful about this linking of psychopathology with creativity because for every example of individuals who have bipolar disorder or depression or schizophrenia that you can have in the record there is an equal number of examples of individuals without a whiff of psychopathology and who are incredibly creative individuals from Benjamin Franklin to Da Vinci to Marie Curie you have a lot of individuals who are without any psychopathology at all so there might be something interesting there but we have to be careful not to equate the production of creative output with the interaction of psychopathology. Now there was a big to-do a few years ago when they looked at individuals in Iceland I believe the entire population of Iceland and found 300,000 people they were able to look at the entire population of a country and look at the interaction of psychopathology with creative output and found a significant interaction in this population I studied just last week which I didn't put into this talk where they found a genetic component in nature of psychopathology and creativity very small, less than 1% of the genetics could explain creative output but still this interaction this interesting interaction why is creativity persisting with psychopathology in human experience we have to understand this it's important to understand this people have looked at this interaction of creativity and psychopathology and started to parse it a little more carefully and you find that there's different types of creativity there's very eminent creativity which I'm not sure there's any of that in this room and there's more everyday creativity which there's a lot of that in this room we're all creative to greater or lesser degrees and then there's those big C creativity people like Da Vinci, like Van Gogh, like John Nash so this eminent creativity is more associated with the presence of psychopathology while everyday creativity has lower levels of psychopathology now in the scientific domain there's creativity, believe it or not and in the artistic domain there's definitely creativity also you find lower levels of psychopathology generally in the scientific domain as opposed to the artistic domain there's higher levels of psychopathology so as you move on the axis to the upper right level you get higher levels of psychopathology as you get more eminent and more artistic you'll see higher levels of psychopathology whereas if you get more everyday creativity and more in the science domain you'll see generally lower levels of psychopathology so this is very interesting science that induces lower levels of psychopathology now if you remember way back to the early part of my talk when I was talking about abductive reasoning versus deductive reasoning science very much works in the deductive reasoning process where you are looking at cause-effect relationships artists are looking at abductive reasoning processes where you are hypothesis generating you are creating very new things it's not about cause-effect relationships generally you are producing new things and hypothesis generating think of Picasso who created a whole new area of cubism and out of impressionism this is a very new way of thinking to hypothesis generate about how the human form could be represented by artists that other people followed this doesn't have to lead to psychopathology and Picasso was not accused or did not exhibit any sense of psychopathology but it is out there on the edge of the world as opposed to scientific creativity now even within the sciences there is normal science and revolutionary science there is academic art and there is avant-garde art and this gets to the point too you will see more psychopathology and avant-garde art as opposed to more academic art you will see more psychopathology and revolutionary science as opposed to normal science it's that pushing the boundaries at the edge that appears to be associated with increased levels of psychopathology as opposed to doing normal science this is very interesting, very important it's that hypothesis generation that putting new things together in novel and useful ways that appears to be associated with psychopathology now we don't know if those brains are brought to the table that have psychopathology residing in them or if being out on the edge and being a poet and being poor and not having a regular income is associated with higher levels of psychopathology is it a chicken or an egg type of phenomenon we don't know that yet and then there is this you have the sound turned up we have this image in the culture right of the tortured genius, the mad genius right is that a romantic, no is there anything to that is it simply a cliche you have thought a lot about it it's just like the nature and nature tradition we have people who stay extremes and you can always find data showing one thing or another let me give you an example this is not my data, this is a colleague of mine collected data on eminent people these are primarily late 19th and early 20th century people all of whom have biographies written about them so you can collect information about their mental disorders and you notice that the poets 87% of them 77% for fiction social sciences which includes me but not you you are a natural scientist very high, 51% I am in the 49% and the natural sciences is 28% and if you look at overall there is sort of a pattern to it that if you are in a field where creativity requires going against the grain, going against convention using a lot of intuition taking chances, using a lot of imagination then you are more at risk at having a mental illness and in support of that it is kind of interesting even though the natural sciences are very low the revolutionaries are very high revolutionary scientists so let me just ask with that data up on the screen and I should say Phillip and Julie this is a very safe audience but I am just wondering feel free are you kind of depressed or through mental illness are you seem pretty happy to me I am a licensed psychologist does your work come from a place of darkness it is wonderful that you and this is Phillip Glass talking I don't buy it it is not that something basically wrong with it it is just that someone else may be able to come up with a different way of viewing it so we might have to maybe you could use that actually it is interesting when I presented this at a meeting in positive psychology and then the founder of positive psychology Mark Shelton looked at it and he says the problem with this you have it upside down what you should look at is all the people who are mentally healthy well I would suggest what we call creativity well that is so to speak or that ability so it does affect us it is totally subjective I mean that is the problem what is healthy and what is well balanced well these are people who we had to either get medication or therapy is that pretty extreme wait you said medication or seek therapy and or that is fine so you get the idea there is a lot of resistance to this idea especially among artists that there might be some association between psychopathology and their creative juices between Julie Tamar and Philip Glass there is a lot of pushback even in spite of the there is a lot of overwhelming evidence that there is this association so it is very fraught with danger this research and a lot of pushback from the artist so we have to tread very carefully so now I would like to walk you through this notion of what is creativity there is a lot of notions of what this creative process is but we do have a science of creativity and we are starting to understand from a neural perspective where in the brain creativity might reside and I want to walk you through that and educate you about what I know about the creative process so the creativity is the production of something novel and useful so this is an important distinction that it is not just novelty production it is some utility artists hate this concept too now I am just producing something that is for me it is novel there is no utility to it well why do we go to museums and pay these little green slips of paper to go see the beautiful art there is some utility to it we feel emotional attachment to pieces of art and we will go pay harder and harder and money to go see plays and to go listen to concerts there is utility, social utility to this artistic production to this creative production but again there is lots of pushback and this dynamic interplay of novelty and usefulness I think is interesting from a brain perspective there are novelty generators in the brain and then there is selection processes in the brain that allow for us to see if it will work out in the world and I will get to that in a moment so Henri Poincaré who looks very dour there is a famous mathematician who looked at his own creative process and came up with five stages that were later trimmed to four in creativity and I think these are very useful to think about creativity is not just one thing but it is stages or processes that you go through it is not something that just happens that springs forth from your mind it is a process that you go through in order to produce something creative and he talked about these four stages that I am going to go through preparation, incubation illumination and verification are four major stages that we think about in the neuroscience of creativity the first is preparation and it is the things that you have to have in your brain to put them together in novel ways you have to have stuff in your head and expertise in order to create novelty you have to, if you are an artist you have to understand something about color and hue and tone and the human form in order to be able to produce something novel if you are a scientist you have to understand something about the scientific method and the brain in my case if you are a teacher you have to understand something about didactics and the subject that you are teaching if it is mathematics or history you have to have that raw material in place in order to produce something novel that ten year rule that Malcolm Gladwell talks about is likely true it usually takes up to in about ten years to get that level of preparation necessary in order to be able to start producing something something truly novel something truly creative this is one of the reasons why children produce novelty but they don't produce stuff that is truly creative other than to their parents and children here I know a lot of refrigerators are going to be offended by this but children produce lots of great novelty they can produce lots of wonderful interesting things it is not particularly useful other than to their parents and it takes till about ten years before they start producing things that are really novel and useful truly creative or at that eminency emerge that are able to do amazing things whether they are concert pianists or scientists where they are able to really produce something novel and useful now I wanted to give you an example of Picasso's Guernica this is his master piece and he went through 80, 90 hundreds of different iterations of all the different pieces of Guernica to get to this master piece he was producing iterations of these different pieces and variations of these different pieces trials, trial balloons if you will and that's another interesting part of creativity which I'll get to in a moment that it's not just one trial learning or a single hit we find that creative people produce a lot of stuff and Picasso is the prototypical example of this creative people produce a lot of stuff now he also produced some duds this is a plate that I took a picture of in Germany at a museum and a child could have done this this is not particularly creative it doesn't look like a Picasso you know by any stretch of the imagination I'm sure we would all love to own it but knowing that it's a Picasso but it's not Guernica for goodness' sake so there's some duds in there too and people that produce a lot of stuff are going to get some duds every once in a while incubation is a very important part of creativity it's that downtime where your brain needs to rest if you will and allow ideas to percolate to combine to formulate to produce ideas to reject ideas to iterate those ideas to simulate those ideas that incubation time is very important in the creative process we think that we are getting at some of the incubation process in creativity and most creative people have their tricks of what they do in their incubation time Beethoven had his long walk Hemingway like to tipple a bit he has I don't know if this is an apocryphal quote or if it's true he said you should write drunk and edit sober and so I don't see him writing there but he's working so everyone has their place where they do that incubation you know the warm bath the long walk people meditate, people like to run I like to mow the lawn this is my place where I'm doing a repetitive motor activity but my mind can wander freely and work on different ideas and I keep putting in more lawn so that I have more time that I can work illumination is that eureka moment where ideas come out of that space that incubation space from unconscious space awareness very important that eureka moment it's not critical that you have that flash of insight but many people describe this illumination where they have that eureka moment where it's I've got it I understand where we're supposed to go now and then the final stage verification you have to check to see if your idea is going to fit in the world is it a good fit is it useful is it going to work is it the best idea that I can put forward this is very important this is a good friend of mine Scott walking through some of the latest neuroscience of creativity is really exciting to me because we're finding that it's not just a simple left brain right brain distinction people who are more open to combining lots of different associations that are coming from various different brain networks do tend to be more creative there's lots of stages that create a process you have to take into account and different stages that process activate different neural networks neural network is just simply different areas of the brain communicating with each other so during the stage which I'm trying to learn lots of things called the preparation stage you see a lot of brain activation in areas associated with attention and deliberate focus called executive functioning then there is this important stage where you let it go it's called the incubation stage it's really important there is research showing that mind wandering away from the current task and then returning to the task those people have more creative ideas when they come back and then there's another stage of illumination or insight where these connections automatically subconsciously collide and then reach the threshold of consciousness and you're like oh my gosh that's the idea and then once that happens you're not done you're not creative yet so that's why it's really important for this last stage of the creative process verification where you use these executive processes or this critical thinking skills to think about your audience and you really craft the message so it's best received by people because some of the greatest creative ideas of all time can easily be lost because they're not packaged in the right way or not consumable I think what cognitive scientists are on the forefront of trying to discover right now is isolating all these separate processes and what interests me is how we bring all this together to come up with a more nuanced model of creativity so a complete understanding of creativity is going to inspire bringing all this perspective together yes and so Scott is a collaborator of mine, a good friend of mine and I think that's what we're getting at is this integration of all these different stages of creativity we can't just focus on preparation we can't just focus on the aha moment illumination we have to have a fuller better understanding so this is the tough part of the talk evolution of creativity now I want to walk you through this you might not agree with all of this but I think it's important to think how creativity emerged in evolutionary processes is it just a human thing or is it something that is across most species certainly mammals and across evolutionary time I am becoming more and more convinced of the latter that it's not just a human capability and in my next breakout session I'll talk more in detail about that we see examples from other species whether it's the weaver bird or the puffer fish or dolphins blowing bubbles and playing with them this creative urge in other animals and what does it play what role does it play these other animals besides us doing this creative thing in evolutionary process does it create some survival characteristic now Cosmodes and to be talked about two different thought processes or reasoning processes in the human brain I think this is very important I'm not going to read all of this to you but they talk about these two different problem solving processes and the tradeoffs between the two between the problem solving power and specialization they talk about a general purpose problem solving architecture which is very weak but broad in application they talk about a second one a special purpose problem solving design that is very efficient and inferentially powerful but limited in their domain of application the sounds to me like the interplay between intelligence that deductive problem solving process and creativity or that abductive problem solving process when you 95% of our day is consumed with things that are very familiar to us we know how to do breakfast we know how to take care of ourselves and wash ourselves and go to the bathroom we know how to get to work we know how to do everything at work we know pretty much how to have relationships but what if your boss comes up to you and says you know I have to lay you off you're going to have to find a new job you're going to have to start hypothesis testing and doing that abductive reasoning thing and figuring out what to do next relationships can be very fraught with this abductive reasoning process where you have to hypothesis test what is that person thinking why did she say that I don't understand what they're trying to get at you do hypothesis testing you do mental simulations what should I say in this situation this difficult relationship that I'm having what should I say to this person that's upsetting me what if I said this, what if I said that you can do mental simulations before you try it out out in the world so thinking about the combinatorial explosion think about all the different possibilities so you could deal with these various problems out in the world not the ones that are well known that you just go from A to B to C but the possibilities of what if this person jumped up and tried to tackle me what would I do is this person have a mental illness is this person think that I've said something that is very upsetting does this person think that there's a danger out in the hallway that I need to be protected from these possibilities I have to hypothesis test about all the different scenarios whether I'm going to punch them in the face and defend myself or let myself be protected if that's the scenario so the combinatorial explosion is very pernicious and you see problem solving across different species just one example of a dolphin in Australia mostly females interestingly almost exclusively females they like to forge for fish in the sandy beds of this bay the sand that they irritate at the bottom of this bay to make the fish flutter up is very irritating on their beaks these females have figured out if they put this sponge on their beak and use that as a tool to flutter up the sand their beak is protected like a glove so they are able to use this sponge as a tool they show it to each other mostly females so the older females will show the younger females and they will pick these sponges up they will flutter it up, the fish come they drop the sponge, they get the fish, they eat the fish and the males are totally disinterested in this process they're interested in the females but they're not interested in this process so it's very adaptive at some level in terms of survival capability in this tool use and they figure this out other animals are doing this tool use thing doing this reasoning process and using their surrounding in very creative ways we have to understand this I think it's very interesting it's not just us so this is the special perspus cognitive system rapid and accurate reasoning deductive, it's efficient and powerful it's a very good application this sponge is only going to work in that one limited application of foraging for fish at the bottom of this sandy bay now you have this situation specific now this is an example of someone who's very good at thinking out of the box I don't specifically see the crayon up his nose but very good thinking out of the box of hypothesis testing and thinking of very crazy ideas this situation that he gets in this is very creative problem solving and when the low probability types of tasks come into your life you have to think your way out of problems often times that you've created for yourself there's these two reasoning types of networks if you will in the human brain and in other brains perhaps that I think are very important and that we need to understand it's not just about intelligence it's about creative processing it's about this out of box thinking as well so where is it? where is this creative thing in the brain? we really don't know but thinking about networks in the brain helps it's not just going to be one spot in the brain and it's not going to be everywhere in the brain but from a neuroscience perspective I'm here to tell you that we don't know and if anyone's telling you that they do know they're probably trying to sell you a book I do not have books for sale back there by the way so I am happy to tell you that we don't really know and I do have to tell you that we have some really poor measures of measuring creativity so it depends on what it is when we're measuring creativity here's some of our measures this is called the matches test and you are to take away let's say a match let's say we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight boxes here so you are to take away one match and make six boxes so that's a relatively simple process you can take away Q and then you have one, two, three, four, five, six oh that's seven I can't even do this while I'm standing up here but you basically take away a certain number of matches to make a smaller number of boxes and there's some clever ways to take away some of these matches like R and V you take away two matches and you can have two, four, six, seven boxes by taking away two matches for example that's the match test that's one of our creativity tests really kind of crappy another one this is a measure of insight, lick, mind, shaker you think of one word that binds these all together into compound words can you think of yeah, lots of people are saying it salt lick, salt mind, salt shaker that's our measure of insight also pretty crappy so that flash of insight it's not something that you get through by the process of elimination or deductive reasoning it just pops into your head so that's how we measure insight in the neuroscience laboratory this very old measure tell me as many different ways you can think of to use a brick you've heard this one you can build a house you can use it to hit my brother in the head with you can use it to displace water in a toilet bowl tank you can use it as a mock coffin at a Barbie funeral so these are very different answers they're very traditional using it to build a house some of them are somewhat creative in a technical sense to displace water using it as a negative space some of them are more artistic the mock coffin at a Barbie funeral so you can gauge this in terms of the fluency of ideas the absolute number of ideas the flexibility, the number of different categories whether it's a weapon or whether it's an artistic thing or whether it's a building thing a lot of that paperclip is another one tell me as many different things you can think of to use a paperclip so it's taking a common item and generating as many different things as you possibly can from that common item along the same lines taking a pen this is an fMRI environment so they have blocks of tell me different new uses for a pen so you'll get a common object like a pen you can generate new uses for this pen and then my favorite is the Rorschach this is a blot from the Rorschach inkblot test so people are supposed to say what might this be and people are saying it looks like a jack-o'-lantern or it looks like you know anyone? yeah people are seeing devils and horns and yeah the things that people see and the more that you violate the constraints of the blot the more psychopathology you're supposed to infer from these inkblots it's supposed to look like bats or butterflies or angels holding up a bell or something like that so these are our creativity tests not too great this is my brain to prove but I have a brain in my head so we got an MRI and we're using a very nice MRI technology magnetic resonance imaging these big magnets and this is you've seen the scans of the brains where they cycle through the images but this reconstructs it in three dimensions and allows us to can you play that again for me please allows us to cycle through the images and so you can see the cortical convolutions and you can see different structures the temporal lobe, the frontal lobe the parietal lobe, the occipital lobe and the cerebellum, my cerebellum is not green by the way but you can see the different structures of the brain allows us to really do some nice statistics on these and science on these images so you can look at the cortical thickness of the brain which is very interesting you can look at the which is the analogy I like to use is like a computer the surface of the brain there's these neural cell bodies which are like your computer at home it has a lot of power it does a lot of processing and it has a lot of knowledge in your computer the white matter is like the blue wire that connects your computer to the internet it connects your computer to other computers and makes it more powerful you can get knowledge bases from other regions from the internet and so there's these white matter fibers that allow you to connect up to other computers and leverage the power of your computer so the gray matter, the white matter we're able to look at these different processing modules and interacting networks of the brain so when we started in looking at creativity we have these different scales that we can look at in the brain and we can ask questions what's correlated with cortical thickness of the brain the nerve cell bodies at the surface for example and I'll show you this question that we asked so with these crappy measures of creativity that we have we combine them up to create like an IQ test a composite creativity index and we ask the question where in the brain is cortical thickness correlated or predictive of people's performance on these tell me as many different ways you can think of to work test these divergent thinking tasks and we found something very interesting and the brain has been inflated so that you can see down in the cracks we found something enormously interesting that there is a region in the frontal lobes it's the frontal lobe, temporal lobe so that you're looking at the front of the brain and we found a region in the orbital frontal cortex right above your eyes where there is a region that predicted your performance these college students the lab rats of the modern neuroscientist our captive audience we found a region in the orbital frontal cortex that was significantly predictive of their performance on these creativity tests that wasn't so interesting the frontal lobes are involved in just about everything we do the interesting part is that the relationship was negative cortical thinning was predictive of higher creativity on these measures less cortex more creativity how could that be it's usually bigger, better, stronger, faster in terms of the brain functioning and structure this puzzled us but we interpreted it and published it in human brain mapping in 2010 I'll tell you the secret here in a bit our next study we're looking at the white matter of the brain this is my white matter going through the corpus callosum looking kind of straight on like a mohawk of the brain the blue in the middle goes right through the corpus callosum which connects the two hemispheres of the brain and this is looking at the tractography, kind of the beads that you can see in the different parts of the brain very nice you can see the connectivity of the different cortical networks of the brain and how those computers if you will are connected to each other and we asked the question again in what part of the brain what part of the white matter can you see correlations between that connectivity and our creativity measure we found a region in the frontal lobe again not too surprising predictive of performance on our creativity measure relationship was inverse again negative, lower connectivity higher creativity this is starting to really puzzle us when we started to look at all the creativity studies that had been done looking at lesion studies people that had brain damage through traumatic brain injury or stroke our studies people that had done other studies we started to see a pattern emerge that all these regions in blue were where there were inverse relationships or negative or negative correlations between creativity and measures of brain fidelity if you will or brain strength or brain power this is very fascinating and the few red regions are bigger, better, stronger faster, higher creativity and they're starting to conform to different networks of the brain and the networks are called and this is your second point on your continuing education the default mode network the cognitive control network and the default mode network and I want to take some time to discuss that with you the cognitive control network is what you do to solve problems in the external world now I'm wondering if we can zoom in on this a little bit there we go the cognitive control network is basically the outside portions of your brain and it is used to solve these external problems out in the world when you are getting breakfast when you are driving your car to work when you're interacting and doing things in the external world you are using the cognitive control network it's a tension it's working memory and problem solving this is about the special purpose improvisation that we were talking about rule based cognitive systems deduction cognitive in the external world and it conforms to these regions on the external part of the brain what's called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the external parts of the parietal cortex that conform to an intelligence network that I've described previously in a paper linking intelligence to a specific brain network called the parietal frontal integration theory this is the external thought network the cognitive control network now what we're starting to appreciate is that there is an internal thought network called the default mode network why is it called the default mode network well, people thought that there was a network in the brain when you're in fMRI environment you're usually doing things doing tasks in the fMRI environment your brain is active it's processing it's burning glucose and blood is flowing to different parts of the brain they usually contrasted that to a task where you're doing nothing this was called the default mode because your brain is doing nothing what they found out was that your brain is always doing something and when you're doing nothing they found out that your brain is doing something you're thinking about your grocery list later in the day you're thinking about your relationships and you're thinking about what you're going to do how you're going to spend that money when you get out of this scanner that they're going to give you to do this research you're thinking about things it's that internal thought processing you're doing mental simulation you're doing induction and abduction oftentimes you're doing situation specific improvisation often times in this default mode network and we're coming to appreciate that this default mode network is critically important to reasoning and problem solving it's the other side of the coin of deductive reasoning it's what you do before you put problems out into the wet world where the costs are high you need to do mental simulations you need to figure out how you might act before you put your before you put your skin in the game so this mental simulation is extremely important and the default mode network is part of that and we are finding there's significant overlap in these blue regions where there's lower connectivity there's lower brain fidelity there's higher creative cognition, creativity appears to significantly with this default mode network this is very interesting so now coming to the part how many people hearby dragons comes from well now you do comes from the hunt Lennox globe 1510 there are different maps where you see this phrase hearby dragons comes from and you can't see this very well but this is the hunt Lennox globe I think it's in a British museum it's made of copper 1510 and here way off to the side it says hik sunt draconis way out at the edge of the world somewhere off of the Indian coast hearby dragons is what that says in this map of the old world pretty cool when you get down to it so here's the the very speculative portion of my talk and last year 2014 called evolution, creativity and intelligence intelligence and madness hereby dragons and this was a thought paper about how creativity and intelligence might overlap in the human brain and how these cognitive processes emerge and are very adaptive and I want to bring you into that fold now this is very hard to see and I'm going to raise the bar a little bit excuse me I'm going to zoom in on this a little bit so that we can see it a bit better there we go I believe and our research supports the notion that there are these two networks in the brain the cognitive control network and the default mode network there's other networks in the brain as well visual networks, motor networks but the cognitive control network and the default mode network are two critically important networks in the brain now I think one is involved in intelligence and intelligent behavior out in the world this is involved in useful problem solving and this kind of 95% of the time we're doing useful problem solving out in the world deductive reasoning cause effect relationships convergent thinking explicit types of things that we are thinking of that are in our conscious awareness neuronal fidelity you see bigger, better, stronger faster types of neural relationships if you will associated with measures of intelligence and a cognitive control network now at the extreme of this and this is where it gets more controversial you start to see rigidity and perseveration so in terminology why do we see some disorders that are characterized by rigidity and autism for example at the very extreme which is characterized by very rule based behavior things have to be a certain way and I've worked with individuals diagnosed with autism in the past and it's very individuals that I've worked with are like things a certain way it's very rule based type of thinking and if you deviate from that rule things can get very upsetting over time so this type of devolving or overshoot if you will to that rule based problem solving I think is adaptive to the extreme you get an overshoot of this deductive intelligence network in the autism spectrum I believe now this is very controversial and I don't expect I expect you to be like Julie Tamar and want to beat me over the head with a glass and we can discuss this in the question section at the other end of the spectrum you have abductive reasoning abstraction and metaphor divergent thinking implicit processing and at the very end of the spectrum on that you get schizotypal type of personality characteristics and psychosis everything is related to everything I am God God is talking to me the psychotic type of behavior everything on the other extreme there is no rule based behavior everything is related to everything I think both of these are adaptive but they are adaptive to the extreme the brain is shooting for a optimal set point where you can have both of these reasoning characteristics live in the human brain but you have an overshoot in one direction or the other so this is a hypothesis that I continue to test and I have experience working both with persons diagnosed with autism and individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia so I come at it from a unique perspective I expect very controversial as you might expect but there are other theories out there looking at the social brain Crespi and Braddock talked about the extreme social brain with psychosis on one end of the spectrum and autism on the other I think this works from a reasoning perspective as well I think it's highly adaptive to have both of these reasoning processes exist side by side in the human brain but that you will occasionally get overshoots to one end of the extreme or the other you will continue to get this overshoot at one end of the extreme or the other thank you for your attention I want to take your questions and leave some time to take your questions thank you do we have a mic that we can I've got it does anyone have any questions don't be shy let me make sure I cover it all I don't know what to do about what other topics would you like presented and how to rank that on a scale of one to five so I was wondering you said earlier the lower the productivity of your brain the more creative your brain is does that mean the less knowledge that you try to make a sense of things then the more creative you are no so I think there are networks in the brain that are either the metaphor I like to use are highways versus byways so you have in big cities versus little towns so you have Houston for example which I just traveled through which was just a nightmare last night there is some brittle rigidity in that big town that would have been solved I think by a distributed network of smaller nodes now we could only get through from terminal B to terminal C by the train going between the terminals train was down so they had buses set up to terminal B to terminal C but you have thousands of people taking these buses so it was like a lord of the flies situation where people are trying to get on these little buses that carry about 12 people at a time to get from terminal to terminal so it creates this brittle rigidity if you're trying to get too much information too much traffic through a situation that's not allowed to not capable of handling to answer your question in terms of the brain all of our brains are set up like this where there are nodes and highways that are set up like whatever the big interstate is that runs through here I-40 or 410 I was just on 410 there's a big interstate and we all have highway 410s that run through our brain you have to get information from A to B very quickly some people in their brains have ability in the white matter where there's a by ways that allow information I think to spread to more distant regions of the brain bypassing those highways so it allows information to be connected in such a way from disparate regions that wouldn't otherwise have been connected by those highways so Houston and San Antonio can get connected by a super highway but I don't know what the towns are here another little town that otherwise wouldn't have been connected by the super highways that makes sense that metaphor so I think people's brains some people's brains and these are college students again are organized in such a way and there's no damage to the brain it's just that they have more dirt roads in their brain to get information pulled that preparation that happened that information pulled together from more disparate or diffuse regions of their of their brain one more over here could you comment on the recent research that mindfulness and the idea that some of the parts of the brain were actually shrunk after 8 weeks of mindfulness training so mindfulness is kind of like the the new coke of the last few it's kind of a new fad that people are very excited about and it's a technique of meditation that allows you to and one of my colleagues actually researches this so you can build up certain regions of your brain and thicken certain regions of your brain but it can also shrink other regions so mindfulness is not a panacea it's not a cure all I'm not familiar with the research you're talking about of it shrinking regions of the brain I'm more familiar with it building up regions that are associated with aging for example so I know it's good for that I could see that I could hypothesize if I were to do abductive reasoning I would hypothesize that in people that have mental illness or disorders where some regions are overdeveloped and doing too much like the anterior cingulate or the amygdala for example can be too big that mindfulness meditation might allow that to shrink down to more normal sizes through that concerted effort they reported that the part that was shrunk was the part that has to do with fight flight yeah that's the amygdala yeah so that makes sense so my abductive reasoning worked so I'm not surprised that they would find the fight or flight regions these would be somewhere in the limbic structures whether it's the amygdala the cingulate anterior cingulate or some part of this limbic loop would have reduced that the fight and flight regions that were overdeveloped would have shrunk so I'm not surprised and a lot of people this is kind of one of the well this is the underappreciated facts a lot of westerners who engage in meditations happen to be highly neurotic so they're anxious and a little high strung to start with so it's good activity for them to engage in to decrease that kind of neurotic tendencies so I'm not surprised that it's used as an adaptive behavior to decrease that kind of neurotic tendencies and I'm speaking from a loving perspective not a clinical's perspective hi is there any particular disorders that you see more affiliated with creativity you know depression versus anxiety or bipolar bipolar is most depression after that and schizophrenia the least often on that spectrum my hypothesis is that psychosis you I should be very clear there is no overlap between being overtly psychotic and being creative you cannot be creative in that psychotic state so anyone who is creative and who talks about their creative process whether it's William Styron or people who have written about this they talk about the phase between their depressive episode or between their manic episode as being that sweet spot where they can be creative and not overtly manic or overtly depressed in the clinical stage of depression so there's that looseness of the brain that's associated with that disease state that we call depression or bipolar disorder that is conducive perhaps to making these associations but then also is associated with what we call bipolar disorder so bipolar is most associated depression schizotypal type of personality characteristics kind of strange loose type of belief systems and then schizophrenia is least associated can you expand a little bit on the contributing factors to autism from the brain development perspective oh boy if I knew that I think I'd have a Nobel Prize by now there's lots of they've linked all sorts of different things to autism people have there's a cerebellar hypothesis to autism there's a big brain overdeveloped hypothesis to autism there's a white matter hypothesis to autism that it's overdevelopment of the white matter there's I think one of the most interesting hypotheses that I've seen recently is a lack of neuronal pruning there's a pruning process a selection a Darwinian selection process as we grow older through childhood that we're actually pruning neurons like pruning a tree and selecting ones that are strong and able to solve problems out in the world and internally and in autism that pruning process is underdeveloped and I think that is an interesting hypothesis that there's a lack of neuronal pruning like you would see in normal development so there's so much there's a lot of brain and so much possibility of connections that it's not as efficient as it could be otherwise if the pruning had happened so I'm interested in that current hypothesis Dr. Young Yes Have you done any brain research on children who are gifted and you said you've worked where you work with children with autism how many of them have you noticed are highly gifted do you have a percentage or I mostly worked with I have not worked with individuals in the gifted program at all so that answers that question I've worked in the past with I got into this field from Special Olympics so I volunteered for Special Olympics after college for a number of years and my undergraduate degree was in finance and was in that world and was volunteering for Special Olympics and I thought I want to do this work this is interesting I want to do stuff with brains how do I do that so I ended up going back to school and long ten year process getting a PhD and turned out you had to do a lot to do stuff in brains so I didn't quite know what I was getting into but I worked with people with pretty severe mental retardation so I can't say I worked with Alonzo Clemens I was in Boulder, Colorado I don't know if any of you know Alonzo so he's a highly gifted artist savant they say that he's autistic he had traumatic brain injury and I don't know that he's autistic he's highly gifted artist amazing savant artist but I don't know that he's autistic per se he had a pretty severe traumatic brain injury which I think is the cause of his behavioral symptoms but in the classic sense of the word I don't think that he's autistic in the classic diagnostic sense so I didn't answer any of your questions Dr. Young, over here to your left yes good morning, thank you I was a bit struck by the video clip of how they determined people with mental illness as either taking medication or seeking therapy can you talk a little bit more about how you were able to identify populations with a mental illness that had high levels of creativity yes so this was research, it was not my research but it was research that was done in the 70's I believe Dean Keith Simonton was the person that was presenting that research unfortunately I was part of that panel it was a great panel, a very dynamic panel and Dean Keith Simonton is a very famous researcher who studies eminence and was presenting research I think by Ludwig who looks at the overlap between creativity and psychopathology and so they did a very careful, this was before Kay Jameson, Nancy Andreason but Ludwig was before them where he was looking at the overlap and so did a systematic study of different professions whether it was mental scientists of all ill artists and whether they were and asked them whether they were taking medication or undergoing psychotherapy and then the prevalence of their endorsement for depression or psychopathology based on that so it's a pretty nice study it is still self-report it's a nice study as opposed to Van Gogh cut off his ear so we think he might have had a mental illness and been bipolar because he cut off his ear and acted kind of crazy towards the end so it's a much nicer epidemiological type of study Yes, one question I had was as the cognitive control network is that similar to the executive functions of the brain is that broader? And it's sometimes called the executive network And then the other question is on the abductive reasoning is there a developmental process to that because I'm thinking about children and play therapy and practicing things that may or may not have happened through play? I think there is and there's three types of reasoning inductive, abductive and deductive and inductive is kind of learning by example so my dog has four legs animals so you know how children call everything a cow four legs I'm trying to think of a way to create this so there's an error that children make where everything that has four legs is a cow for a while that's inductive reasoning because it's like that thing has four legs, that thing must be a cow that's inductive reasoning where it's learning by example so inductive reasoning comes first where they see an example and they put that in their head and then they start to learn that there's different categories abductive reasoning where they do hypothesis testing how might that work? Well that thing has four legs but it doesn't you know it doesn't bark so what might that thing be? that thing might be a cow, that thing is on a farm dogs aren't usually on a farm so abductive reasoning, deductive reasoning is the highest level of processing where there's this is this, that is that and so A equals B equals C and so there is a developmental process that I think starts with inductive reasoning where examples learning by example, abductive reasoning hypothesis testing and then deductive reasoning where you have rule based learning. Hello, my question is about maybe the implications of your ideas for psychotherapy and I was thinking that you know they're kind of there's kind of a continuum in psychotherapy there's a lot of different ways to categorize but I was thinking of like cognitive methods that seem to be more external thought oriented versus like dynamic or psychoanalytic kind of approaches which are more associational in nature and maybe have some reflection I would disagree so cognitive behavioral therapy and so I'm trained as a clinical psychologist but cognitive behavioral therapy is designed to to better integrate your internal thought process with your external behaviors so it's that mismatch between your internal cognate internal voice you hear in your head I'm stupid I'm doing a bad job with the external reality you know I hear people laughing every once in a while when I say stuff so maybe I'm doing an okay job so that cognitive behavioral therapy is creating a better match between that default mode network and the cognitive control network and getting them better synced up I think so I think that's why cognitive behavioral therapy works so well in terms of the what's it called evidence based literature is because you're doing a really good job of syncing up those two networks that are really mismatched the default mode network and the cognitive control network yeah so I think that would be the goal is to see if there is a mismatch between that internal thought process and that behaviors out in the world and try to get those better in line with each other and at the extreme schizophrenia for example there's a real disconnect between the internal process where you have hallucinations and delusions and the external reality of what is likely going on so that's the most glaring extreme that we don't have therapeutic methods that effectively treat that mismatch so we use pharmacological agents to down those voices and delusions to get a better match between the two and I'm thinking on the fly so I might be saying stuff that how are we doing on time I want to do you have any other questions please raise your hand thank you I'm not sure if I have the right question or a question there's a lot of us here that are school counselors and so I'm trying to put in perspective your whole idea which is great when you started out as you know here are dragons I'm sorry you said it was great great so when you started you touched on the dragons and I think all of us have those dragons and I didn't hear what you said I really didn't hear what you said oh dragons yeah so all of us obviously have those dragons somewhere and some of them do speak and some may not speak but I try to put this whole aspect of creativity in line to the student that I have as a third grader for example that in reality he has creativity but because something is happening to his whether it be the brain or something else it lacks the preparation or doesn't have the preparation for the critical thinking start test needs and is looking for and so a lot of times we as counselors get the student in our office A to calm them down or B to try to understand them and after a period of time we don't know what to do so we end up sending them to you and you know to clarity you know which they do a great job but I am not sure if I'm asking a question or it's just trying to in my own thinking put things in perspective for myself when I go back to my office and to my school and have this student or students that have these issues and where do I connect their creativity versus their illness and so perhaps I was a bit too harsh on the young children earlier and you know they are being creative they are doing that creative thing it's focused on novelty generation earlier on while they're getting the preparation in place and getting the knowledge base in place we certainly need to cultivate that novelty generation that creativity as much as we can some kids get out of control to where they can't do the preparation part effectively and that's where I suspect they're being sent to you because they're not they might be doing the novelty generation but they can't get the preparation in place I think both need to happen I don't have a good answer sounds like clarity is doing a great job of teaching some techniques that allow students young minds to allow that preparation to occur and that incubation to occur so that it's not just random types of processes going on I don't have a good answer for you I'm glad that there's places like clarity to provide that and that it's not strictly you know well medicating students to calm them down I think there's lots of different ways to allow different minds to emerge in all of their gruesome beautifulness and on that note I think we'll end thank you very much for your attention be around for a few minutes yes I have such a long just back on are we on don't leave I'm supposed to be on Dr. Young if we could get you back up here one more time it's one of the voices in your head this is our thank you for the trials that you went through last night to get here that I heard about but especially what we have here is a shadow box with a pinwheel what we look at is the childhood symbol of hope and caring and play and joy and all of that and that's what we like to think clarity helps kids get back to in many ways but we appreciate all the work you've done your great presentation and what you're doing to help our families in the long haul so thank you for that and thank you for the hassle you went through last night just a couple of quick things here before I let you get out of here we have breakout sessions coming up at 10 o'clock and they're out in the rooms and I've got a couple of changes I'll tell you in just a second the exhibitors are out there in the halls so if you would spend some time and look at what's out there remember they've got little tickets for you that you will be able to use to get into the drawing for free admission next year so Gerard do you have the changes up there he's right you can't see it from up here because of a little bit of rain did anybody notice there was rain last night it was kind of interesting to hear that because we took a tour of our new inpatient facility which is going to be rating about a month on Monday and as we were walking through it I found buckets on the floor with big drips coming into them and I thought boy I sure hope we get this fixed before we open the living unit but last night we got the word that there were a couple of rooms in here that had kind of the same problem so we've had to make a couple of minor changes if your next session is in the Magnolia room don't go there stay here if your next session is in the pecan room again don't go there go to the live oak room and those rooms are up there on the screen I'm assured that they're up there and then that's accurate so please do that please again take a moment to visit with our exhibitors we've got about 20 to 25 minutes and we will see you at lunch lunch will be back in here the doors will open up and everything will be hopefully ready by about 1145 thank you