SCIENCE
The massive 86 billion neurons in our
brain is organised in a pretty special way.
Roughly speaking, one group of neurons
sense the environment and another
group react to it. In most animal brains,
there is a hard-wired path from the
sensing neurons to the acting ones.
However in your human brain, there are
lots of paths connecting the two, and
even way more that generate random,
spontaneous thoughts. Creativity
depends on the cooperation of two
competing brain networks; one that
generates spontaneous thoughts (default
mode network) and the executive control
center of the brain that governs
everything else. To produce new ideas,
we start with a pool of random, free-
flowing thoughts - those worthy of
further exploration are then approved by
the executive control network.
According to George Land’s Creativity
Test, young children are creative geniuses,
and become less creative as they age. His
study took a group of 1,600 five-year-
olds and tested to see how creative they
were. Ninety-eight percent were deemed
creative geniuses, thinking in novel ways
similar to the likes of Picasso, Mozart,
Einstein and other creative personalities.
He tested them again at 10 years old.
That number dropped to 30 percent. By
15 years of age, it had declined to 12
percent. He gave the same test to
280,000 adults and found that only 2
percent were creative geniuses.