Does Creativity Stem from a Brain Malfunction?
Creative pursuits that add value to our lives, anything invented by creative thinking might be nothing more than a brain malfunction.
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Art, music, movies, literature, and other creative pursuits add value to our lives. However, creative thinking might be nothing more than a brain malfunction. That is the claim of a study published in Nature Neuroscience.
The Brain’s Safe and Valuable Decisions
According to scientists, the brain's job is to make decisions that are “safe” and “maximize predictable value,” decisions made from a strategic perspective.
On the other hand, creative thinking is originally sifting through available information, which isn’t the most practical.
The creative thinking curiosity has been assumed to come from primarily a rational process of inspecting a variety of unknowns to find choices that lead to pleasure or expressive outcomes. Although, the authors of the study strongly disagree.
The brain will reach weird conclusions as the brain malfunctions.
The lead scientist Valentin Wyart of the École Normale Supérieure’s Lab for Computational and Cognitive Neuroscience says, “This discovery is significant as it suggests that many choices are made in favour of the unknown.
The Brain Malfunction Study
The researchers for the study had 100 people play a game on a slot machine that gave people a choice of two symbols, one of them was more likely to earn them a monetary prize.
The scientists took MRI scans as volunteers played — they didn’t always choose that symbol.
Every time they chose wrong by picking the other symbol, their anterior cingulate cortex, which is the brain area connected with our decision-making, lit up, suggesting to researchers a brain malfunction to successfully compute the correct answer.
Wyart said, “Our volunteers have the impression of selecting the best symbol rather than the most uncertain, although they do it because of incorrect information due to errors of reasoning.”
The Limited Computational Precision Brain Malfunction
The study claims that “non-greedy decision-making stems from learning noise” and concludes with, “These findings show that most behavioural inconsistency, instead of echoing human investigation, is because of the inadequate computational brain malfunction accuracy of reward-guided learning.”
Wyart said that not all of these mistakes are bad things. He cited a very questionable example: Christopher Columbus had an accidental discovery in the Western Hemisphere. Of course, this brain blip did not work out well for those already inhabiting the land.
While there are evolutionary benefits to the brain finding solutions which are likely to create the most likely positive outcomes, there is no denying that many of these “errors” absolutely help us.