 Macmillan Audio presents Brainstorm, read for you by William Dufres and Helen Litchfield. Welcome to Brainstorm. I'm Mariette DiCristina, executive editor at Scientific American Magazine and Scientific American Mind. We've called the program you're about to hear Brainstorm because all of us have experienced moments of inspiration and wonder, times in our lives when the creative juices are flowing and everything just seems to click, but it's not easy to know when or if those moments will come and what, if anything, helps us to be more creative. The four articles you are about to hear appeared in Scientific American and each of these articles takes a close look at creativity and problem solving and the ways in which psychologists and neuroscientists are thinking about creativity and even finding ways to help all of us to be more creative in our own lives. Following the four articles you'll hear a roundtable discussion in which I ask three panelists, psychologists Robert Epstein and John Houts and writer Julia Cameron to take us through some of the specific steps and changes we can make in our own lives that can help us all be more creative in business and in our day-to-day living. Whether you're an aspiring artist seeking inspiration, an employer looking to boost creativity in the workplace, an educator looking for ways to inspire your students, or a parent looking for ways to help your children grow intellectually, a better understanding of creativity and the ways in which each of us can harness our creative powers to improve our world will benefit all of us. Unleashing creativity. Moments of brilliance arise from complex cognitive processes. Piece by piece, researchers are uncovering the secrets of creative thinking. By Ulrich Kraft. Jansy Chang, a high school art teacher in San Francisco, had been painting since she was a child. She varied her technique from western-style watercolors to classical Chinese brushstrokes, but she always drove for realism, painting landscapes and people in social settings as literally as she could. Then in 1986, at age 43, she began to have problems performing her job. Grading, preparing for class, putting together lesson plans, everything that she had previously done with ease became increasingly difficult over the next few years. By 1995, she can no longer remember the names of her students and was forced to take early retirement. Understandably frightened, Chang had started seeing urologist Bruce L. Miller, clinical director of the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California at San Francisco. He diagnosed...