What are the wellsprings of creative insight?
According to a recently completed scientific study in the United States, people are more likely to solve word puzzles in a flash when they are amused. This finding points to humor as a potentially powerful tool for stimulating the creative process and strengthening the creative impulse.
In “Tracing the Spark of Creative Problem-Solving,” an article that came out in the December 6, 2010 issue of
The New York Times, Benedict Carey reports that researchers at Northwestern University made the finding in experiments on subjects asked to solve word puzzles. They found that the subjects were most likely to solve the puzzles with sudden insight when they have just seen a short comedy routine.
Mark Beeman, a neuroscientist who conducted the study with graduate student Karuna Subramaniam, gave this interpretation of the phenomenon: “What we think is happening is that the humor, this positive mood, is lowering the brain’s threshold for detecting weaker or more remote connections [to solve puzzles].”
Carey reports that this and other recent research suggest that the appeal of puzzles goes far deeper than the dopamine-reward rush of finding a solution. He explains: “The very idea of doing a crossword or a Sudoku puzzle typically shifts the brain into an open, playful state that is itself a pleasing escape, captivating to people as different as Bill Clinton, a puzzle addict, and the famous amnesiac Henry Molaison, or H.M., whose damaged brain craved crosswords.”
Read Benedict Carey’s “Tracing the Spark of Creative Problem-Solving” in The New York Times now! RELATED READING:In “No Memory, but He Filled In the Blanks,” a companion article also written by Benedict Carey for the December 6, 2010 issue of
The New York Times, the story is told about Henry Gustav Molaison who, at 27, lost the ability to form new memories after an experimental brain operation in 1953. Up to his death in 2008, Molaison cooperated with scientists to help identify and describe the brain structures critical to acquiring new information. He would do books and books of puzzles until his death, an effort that helped the scientists figure out the power and limitations of puzzles in stretching a damaged mind.
Read Benedict Carey’s “No Memory, but He Filled In the Blanks,” in The New York Times now!
