Summer 1965. Despite being only twenty-four years old, Bob Dylan seriously considered abandoning his career. He felt exhausted, jaded with his own music; he thought he had nothing more to say. So after a grueling tour of England, he moved into a cabin in Woodstock, upstate New York. He didn’t even take his guitar. But then one day, without really knowing why, he picked up a pencil and a notebook and began to scribble: “How does it feel? How does it feel? … ”(What does it feel? What does it feel? …). His hand didn’t stop moving for hours. “To be on your own, with no direction home, like a rolling stone”. Those seemingly nonsensical verses – “a twenty page long piece of vomit,” according to the artist – resulted in one of the best songs of all time.
Like a Rolling Stone might not exist if Dylan hadn’t decided to throw in the towel. Often times, the creative process begins with a feeling of frustration at not being able to find an answer. And in the best of cases, it ends with a kind of epiphany in which everything is suddenly clear. It is the moment “eureka!”, An interjection that Archimedes supposedly pronounced when he discovered the physical principle that bears his name. Anglo-Saxons call it Aha! Moment. But what exactly happens in our brain in that enlightening moment?
John Kounios of Drexel University and Mark Beeman of Northwestern University, both in the United States, have been trying to answer this question since the 1990s. After analyzing multiple functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and EEGs, scientists have discovered that brain activity linked to visual processing turns off three hundred milliseconds before the light bulb turns on. The phenomenon is very similar to when a person closes his eyes or loses his gaze to suppress stimuli. It is, therefore, a moment of deep introspection.
According to the research of Kounios and Beeman, the brain functions involved are then very different from those that come into play if we seek more methodical solutions. There would therefore be two ways of solving problems. Most people do this through an analytical process: they build a hypothesis and take small steps that lead to the conclusion. In a few people, however, intuition predominates. These individuals have an idea hovering in their heads, but their attention is blurred, they are focused on everything and nothing, until suddenly the light bulb goes on. Using neuroimaging techniques, a burst of activity has been detected in the right temporal lobe –just above the ear–, an area of the brain that works by associating elements that are very distant in space and time.
This is not to say that great ideas are reserved for the privileged few. We are all born eminently creative, but we lose that capacity as we reach adulthood and learn to be governed by belief systems and behavior patterns. In any case, we can improve a lot with training , says Luis Miguel Martínez Otero, director of the Visual Neurosciences group at the Alicante Institute of Neurosciences. “There are many situations in which the ability to carry out a task shows up as a eureka! If you ask an athlete how they made a decisive move to win a game, they probably have no idea. It happens to people who accumulate great experience in a certain task ”.
According to the neuroscientist, in these cases a greater activity of the basal ganglia has been observed, a set of neural structures found at the base of the brain and are of vital importance for movement coordination and cognitive control .
The key, experts believe, lies in being predisposed to reason in a disruptive way. This is the basis of the so-called lateral thinking , an expression that is used in psychology to refer to the alternative paths that we are not used to taking and that allow us to flee from logic and face challenges in a different way. Break with the routine, in short.
That was what Eloy Pardo did, who received the news of the death of two friends the same year. “I realized that all I had done was work, work and work.” One day, walking past an instrument store, he saw a guitar on sale, had an impulse and bought it. This is how, in his early fifties, he took up a forgotten passion: music. In the mornings, he worked in the office in a suit and tie, and at night, he planted his jeans and scarf on his head and performed with his rock band in seedy clubs. Until a customer recognized him.
At that time he had become the CEO of Banca March. “I knew it could cost me the race, but instead of sneaking it in, I decided to unleash my hobby.” He assures that mutating into Still Morris – his musical alter ego – helped him to be a better banker, because he transferred the group’s values – leader’s humility, camaraderie … – to the workplace. “In the end, creativity is getting out of the routine, breaking, innovating … and I constantly rethink everything .”
The story of the rock banker, which he himself has told in the book Change of course (Plataforma, 2014), not only has to do with the ability to connect things that are initially disparate, but also with the ability to undertake a pleasant and relaxing activity . When our mind is comfortable, the alpha waves that arise from the right hemisphere of the brain spread throughout the gray mass and facilitate remote associations.
As Martínez Otero explains, “ insights or illuminations are associated with moments in which there is a change in alpha activity –a type of brain wave– and concentration is diffuse. This is more likely to happen in individuals who tend to find solutions instantly. It’s funny, because magicians try with their tricks to focus our attention a lot so that it is more difficult for us to solve the problem ”.
“In my work it is inevitable that you suddenly become blocked,” says Juan Cruz, author together with José Corbacho of the films Tapas (2005), Cobardes (2008) and Incidencias , currently in the post-production phase. “Normally, I walk around the room where I am writing, I put a washing machine or I go to the supermarket: anything that generates a parenthesis. And many times, what I had not been able to build takes shape at that moment ”. Far from being a waste of time, letting the mind wander at ease makes it possible for us to find a way out of problems that have invaded our head.
