Yearly Archives: 2017

How can creativity and innovation give rise to positive changes in ourselves and the world around us? Wilma Koutstaal, University of Minnesota Professor of Psychology, and Jonathan Binks, who runs the organization InnovatingMinds4Change, tackle this challenging question in their book Innovating Minds: Rethinking Creativity to Inspire Change. They offer a framework of five key questions to consider in undertaking endeavors that call for creativity. First, we should identify the ideas that capture our attention and consider how we shape those ideas. To see a problem differently, we should consider changing the level of abstraction with which we think about it. We should allow spontaneity and deliberateness to be part of the creative process. The authors encourage us to recognize the role of emotions, motivations, and perceptions in our creative endeavors. Finally, we should consider how our physical, symbolic, and social spaces and tools impact our ability to demonstrate creativity. Koutstaal and Binks conclude each chapter with stimulating questions to challenge their readers to think about how their habits impact their creativity. This book will provide help to the creative individual seeking to accelerate her work, as well as to the leader of an organization wishing to bring about change.

Our ideas come about from cyclical interactions among our minds, brains, and environments. Thinking occurs in our minds, supported by our brains. Our brains integrate signals from our bodies, and our bodies are continually exploring our environment. Depending on these interactions, different ideas can come to mind with differing levels of ease or challenge. To generate new and creative ideas it can be helpful to allow our thinking to oscillate between “zooming in” and “zooming out.” Changing levels of abstraction can help us reason by analogy, reduce our working memory load to create more space to think openly, and diminish our tendency to see objects in terms of only their intended use rather than in terms of all their possible uses.

Several distributed networks in the brain work together to orchestrate our creative thinking. The executive control network helps us plan, pay attention, and monitor progress towards a goal. The default mode network is important for imagining, thinking about the future, and taking others’ perspectives. The salience network helps us detect information in our environment, integrate information that is important to us, and switch between the utilization of other networks in the brain. Koutstaal and Binks explain that the brain’s prefrontal cortex is important for abstract thinking. They also explain the role of dopamine, a neurochemical, in producing cognitive stability and flexibility and in seeking new experiences, which can prompt creativity.

Either by our own violation or because of factors in our environment, our focus can shift from being pointed and deliberate to being expansive and free-flowing. The creative process necessitates both deliberate and spontaneous thoughts. Reducing our intense, pointed attention or allowing our minds to wander can foster creativity by making space for a greater variety of stimuli in the environment to enter our awareness. This, in turn, can shape the way we think about a challenge and impact our ability to notice opportunities to fill a need. On the other hand, intense focus and control allow us to persist through obstacles to achieve a creative goal.

The authors identify several factors that can boost creativity. A few of the examples the authors offer include: instructing people to think differently, having practiced and prepared for the demands of a creative task, explaining creative ideas to others to prompt shifting levels of abstraction, minimizing distractions to allow for a state of flow, adding and removing constraints within a creative problem, improvising, and thinking about the future without losing sight of the present.

Change begets change. More experience can foster more creativity. When teams or organizations seek to change or innovate, both the individual members of the group and the group as a whole impact the group’s adaptability. Teams that are more receptive to novelty, more emotionally stable, and more reflective about their practices are better able to change. Optimism is beneficial in promoting creativity, but it must be paired also with the ability to critique and be skeptical from time to time.

Ultimately, Koutstaal and Binks suggest identifying meaningful goals, finding synergy among one’s goals, being driven by one’s goals while remaining open to change in light of new information, modulating the extent to which our goals come to mind when we need them, and modifying our goals when needed. Because of the insights in this book into the innovation process and the examples of successful creative individuals and teams, Innovating Minds is likely to advance the way any reader thinks about the creative change process.

Koutstaal, W., & Binks, J. (2015). Innovating Minds: Rethinking Creativity to Inspire Change. New York: Oxford University Press.

Humans are capable of horrifying aggression, dehumanization, destruction, and violence and at the same time inspirational altruism, compassion, and forgiveness. Drawing on an astounding array of evidence from across subfields within biology, neuroscience, psychology, and anthropology, Robert M. Sapolsky explains how people come to display these behaviors. Sapolsky, a Stanford University professor of biology and neurology, has recently written Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and our Worst. The book traces behaviors to occurrences in the brain, body, environment, and culture preceding an action on timescales ranging from seconds to thousands of years. Although long and intricate, the arguments are easy to follow because of the captivating integration of interdisciplinary research, the use of an informal, engaging tone, and appendices that aid in understanding basics of neuroscience, endocrinology, and proteins. This book is an excellent choice for those looking for a non-fiction book recommendation and for those committed to understanding how to harness the best of human behavior.

Although our best and worst behaviors do not begin in the brain, in the seconds before we act the factors that enable our actions converge in the brain. Sapolsky describes how our nervous system and particularly certain parts of the brain (e.g., the amygdala) contribute to our aggressive behaviors and how other parts (e.g., the frontal cortex) contribute to difficult but appropriate behaviors. Immediately preceding a behavior there are also cues in the environment that impact the decisions we make. These cues may be subliminal, verbal, visual, or from our body. Hormones such as testosterone and oxytocin impact the way we behave on a protracted timescale and as a function of their ratios relative to one another. Although the interaction between our genes and environment shapes our behavior, our genes influence our behavior to a lesser extent than most think, Sapolsky argues. Nonetheless, he offers an evolutionary perspective on how we have evolved to cooperate (or not).

A human development perspective is helpful in understanding how people behave the way they do. For example, Sapolsky reviews the fact that adolescence is a time during which individuals across cultures (and even species) engage in greater risk-taking, exploration, peer affiliation, and emotional reactivity. The brain’s frontal cortex, which supports engaging in self-regulation, is not yet able to operate at maximal efficiency. This contributes to adolescents exhibiting some aberrant behaviors. However, well before adolescence, during infancy and childhood, people are developing social and moral skills such as empathy, perspective-taking, and the delay of gratification that will contribute to their propensity to act in certain ways as adults. A child’s environment, including the parenting practices, culture, and socio-economic status to which they are exposed, affects their development on both biological and psychological levels. Sapolsky is careful to caution, however, that it is unlikely that childhood experiences will definitively lead to a specific adult behavior.

Sapolsky reviews cornerstone social and affective psychological research about how we identify with others, rank members of our groups, obey authority, act morally, and understand and alleviate other’s suffering. We naturally tend to form groups of “us” and “them,” and we tend to think of “them” more negatively than “us.” We form hierarchies that formalize unequal access to resources, although humans are unique among species in that sometimes those at the top of hierarchies try to serve the common good, and not only their own. All societies have rules about moral and ethical behavior, although there are cultural differences in morality. Religion likely evolved to help us do right, and belief in a judgmental god facilitates strangers interacting cooperatively.  While empathy can help us understand how others feel, it is actually an emotionally distant stance that helps us act more compassionately. Social neuroscientists have made sweeping claims about the role of “mirror neurons”—neurons that activate both when we perform an action and when we see someone else perform that action—in feeling and understanding other’s pain. Sapolsky cautions that the importance of mirror neurons in understanding and mimicking others’ behavior and taking their perspective has likely been oversold.

Sapolsky concludes by expressing his concern about flagrant injustices in the criminal justice system. Although he calls for major revision to the system and to how we treat those found guilty of crimes, on the whole he ends on a hopeful note. Overall, there is a trend towards the worst of human behavior declining (e.g., fewer murders, less denial of rights) and example after example of remarkably inspiring behavior occurring even in the most unlikely of circumstances. People are on average more generous with others than it is logical for them to be. Moreover, we have reason to be hopeful because, as Sapolsky demonstrates, we have an ever-growing body of knowledge about how to inspire the best of human behavior.

Sapolsky, R. M. (2017). Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. New York, NY: Penguin Press.