• 00:00 – Introduction to Dr. Anna Abraham and The Creative Brain
  
  
• 01:17 – Myth #1: Creativity and mental illness
  
  
• 06:32 – Why myths about creativity persist in culture
  
  
• 11:46 – Myth #2: The right brain is the seat of creativity
  
  
• 16:35 – The metaphorical power (and limits) of right vs. left brain
  
  
• 18:17 – Creativity and dementia: de novo creativity explained
  
  
• 21:56 – Improvisation, jazz, comedy, and breaking the path of least resistance
  
  
• 25:57 – Training yourself to disrupt automatic thinking patterns
  
  
• 29:02 – Defining creativity for business audiences: creativity vs. innovation
  
  
• 30:12 – The Torrance Test and measuring creativity in children and adults
  
  
• 34:55 – Myth of the lone creative genius: why context matters
  
  
• 39:42 – The most pervasive myths about creativity today
  
  
• 42:50 – Practice makes the performance look “natural”
  
  
• 44:25 – Book recommendations: Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act and Bill Bryson’s The Body
  
• 47:51 – Where to learn more about Dr. Abraham’s work

James Taylor (00:09)
Today's guest is Dr. Anna Abraham, a neuroscientist, educator, myth buster, and the E. Paul Torrance Professor at University of Georgia. She leads the Creativity and Imagination Lab and directs the Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development. Anna's work sits at the intersection of brain science and human imagination. She studies mental time travel, the boundary between fact and fiction, self-referencing thought and how creativity works in our minds.

Her latest book, The Creative Brain, Myths and Truths, pulls back the curtain on beliefs we hold about creativity. Ones like the right brain myth, the tortured artist stereotype, or that psychedelics are a shortcut and shows the truths underneath. If you've ever doubted your creative potential because you believed a myth or wondered how science can illuminate what actually helps creativity, then this episode is for you. Anna, welcome to the SuperCreativity Podcast.

Anna Abraham (01:08)
Thank you for having me. I'm delighted to be here.

James Taylor (01:10)
So Anna, what was your earliest encounter with a myth about creativity?

Anna Abraham (01:17)
That's a good one. ⁓ Probably my own. I've ⁓ always been fascinated by creativity, but the first time I got the chance to study it was during my PhD. the main impetus of my study was to try and figure out the link between creativity and mental illness. was my starting point. ⁓ And it's one of the, I'd call them myth truths is the way I kind of handle them in the book. ⁓

of what is really the link between creativity and mental illness. And it's probably the oldest one of all of them, because it's existed since sort of the ancient Greeks thought about it. So that's probably the oldest that I have encountered and really been thinking about for decades now.

James Taylor (02:01)
And I wonder with a myth like that, obviously we have these different myths that have in society and the media, it seems to be one that the media often latch onto, you know, the young rock star that dies of an overdose, for example. So let's do some myth bustings in this episode. What is that? Is there a link, first of all? And if so, what is that link between this?

Anna Abraham (02:29)
So the interesting thing about the myth truth of creativity and mental illness is that there is a link, but it's not really clear what the directionality is, how strong it is. When we think about creativity and madness or mental illness, saying it that broadly is obviously a myth. But when we look closer, ⁓ there are certain types of disorders that are more associated with it. And there are lots of ideas about why that is. Some are sort of saying, well, when you're trying to be creative,

exploring the unknown, you're taking a lot of risks, you're putting yourself, it's quite vulnerable to try and come up with new ideas that may or not, may not be accepted by the larger collective. So it's a, you're in the business of risk taking and potentially getting things wrong, or even if you're getting things right, it may not be actually recognized by others. So you're in a vulnerable position very often, depending on the kind of creative activity it is, it can be a kind of isolating experience. So if you think about writers, they tend to be more.

at risk for a lot of mental disorders. They're the most at risk group. And if you sort of just think about what does it take to write a book, book of fiction, for instance, it takes, it's months and months and months or years sometimes of, you know, getting, being alone with your thoughts, trying to get it out there. And really the most, I think the tricky part is you can't force yourself.

to come up with those lines. have to kind of come out of you. So a lot of it is pretty unpredictable. ⁓ So that's, you're dealing with a lot of precarity ⁓ at all levels from the creation side on one hand, and then the other side, which you have almost no control, which is, will people accept it? Will people like it? Will it bring me my bread and butter? Will I achieve renown through it? And so on. So that's the difficulty with the creative experience. A.

you're putting yourself out there, you're trying to do something that's unusual, stand out in some way. You can't count on it coming in a predictable way, so there's precarity at that level, precarity at level of what you're creating, and then precarity at the level of it being accepted. ⁓ So precarity across these levels is associated with greater vulnerability. You you're much more likely to be more anxious then, ⁓ and so on. And things don't quite work out. There's only so much negative feedback you can get.

without it really affecting you. ⁓ And the final thing I would say is also that creative professions as such are also associated from an economic, socioeconomic standpoint, a lot of precarity. It's the kind of position that's not seen as often associated with full-time employment. ⁓ We saw it at the time of the COVID pandemic. The first jobs to get hit was the food industry and the creative industry, right? Because everything just shut down.

So there's also sort of socioeconomic precarity there. All of these things are vulnerability factors when it comes to mental illnesses. So that's what I mean by we don't know whether it is the process of pushing yourself out there, creating something that is a vulnerable space to be in. ⁓ Is it also just the situation of being a creative person in the world as it is set up now, where there's a lot of unsteadiness in your profession? What is it that leads to it? It might be a combination of both, of course.

But that's, so we know that's related to certain forms of mental illness, but we don't know what's really, which way it goes. Or perhaps it's just way more complicated than we think it is. But so to just say that there's a link is somehow not satisfying because it seems to say like, if you do it, you're going to be more mentally ill or the other way around. That's not true at all. There's lots of people who have all sorts of ⁓ problems in terms of the mental health and wellbeing that don't go on to do anything creative. And there are lots of people on the other side who are pretty stable.

So it's not an all or none phenomenon. And the more interesting story for me is to try to think about what is it about the act of creating, or what is it about the environment you're creating, and that pushes our vulnerabilities in a specific way.

James Taylor (06:32)
Sometimes I remember when I was first getting interested in this and you're reading like the Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and you're reading all these other books and all these wonderful books about creativity and it almost felt like there was two camps. There was the ⁓ kind of Elizabeth Gilbert, Julia Cameron kind of woo woo in a nicer sense. I can say that as someone who's lived in California but I love part of that. But it was a very... ⁓

Anna Abraham (06:51)
you

James Taylor (06:57)
emotional kind of almost spirit type of energy way of thinking about things. And then there was the neuroscience folks and the kind of brain science that kind of were trying to bring it down to almost the singular. So you mentioned this one myth and in the book, The Creative Brain, you kind of lay out these seven in total, these myths as well. What made you want to write this particular book? Because you have so much experience in this area. You could have written probably about 20 different books on creativity.

Why was this the book that you felt compelled to write?

Anna Abraham (07:30)
Well, the 19 are going to come as well. But this is the first one to come out. ⁓ Well, first of all, when one gets to a certain level of being a creative neuroscientist, and I don't know if this is true of all of us in the field, but certainly for me, when I started to do a lot more public engagement events, you know, speaking to the general public, I started to notice when you get away from your community and you're speaking to people who don't have a great curiosity about creativity, which

I I've never met anyone who's not. ⁓ And have a lot of notions about what it is. And some things started to consistently come out as things that people held to be true, such as the creativity mental illness link, the link between the right brain and creativity, psychedelics and creativity. And there was something else that fascinated me, not just the questions, but that even if you told people, well, it's not that simple. Well, it's not that, well, it's a little more complicated. It didn't seem to satisfy.

a person's need to know what that was. And I thought, and that actually made me even more interested. Okay, there's a they've heard. I'm sure they've had a lot of myth busting from a lot of people. I'm not the first person to do myth busting when it comes to creativity, but it doesn't, it doesn't, it just falls flat. doesn't seem to, it doesn't even take hold. And I was very interested in why that was. So the book, I think was trying to make a case for, let's examine.

I picked seven myths about the creative brain, myth truths I was always referring to it as, about the creative brain to think we have these specific notions, let's see how they started, let's do an archival troll, so to speak, when did they start, what do we know about it, and what is the best way to understand it? To sort of not see it as a black and white issue, it's right or wrong, it's myth or truth, but to essentially come to the conclusions I did in every single one of them, which is that

Every myth has a kernel of truth in it. And it's about how the story gets told that it becomes flattened and like one dimensional in the telling of the tale. But if you actually explore the stories, it's really interesting what you learn about creativity and how people came to these assumptions about why this works in this particular context, why do psychedelics work sometimes, but not other times. ⁓ The story, the, you know, our

story making brain is such that we highlight the things that work, not the things that don't work. Things that don't work are kind of boring, right? So there's something about our need for storytelling that it's not enough for us to tell people, for people to be satisfied. I said, well, that's not the case, but we don't really know. Nobody wants to don't know. They'd rather go with this is close enough, or it feels good enough, because I know when one of the big questions I always get is children are so creative, grownups grow out of it.

And I'm thinking, why do you think that way? And they're like, well, let's say all eight year olds draw, almost no 28 year olds draw, right? So they're coming from a place of like sort of lived experience. They don't see it around them. They see a lot of children doing a lot of creative fun things. They don't see adults do it. So it's very difficult to misplace that notion and say that's not actually true that adults in general are not creative because it doesn't, and if I don't have a better story to offer in place.

they're going to cling to the thing that's based on what they think to be true or what they know from their own experience or what someone else influential is told, you know, influential, I don't know, critic or whatever's told them. So that's the interesting thing about why we, it's almost a story, it's almost a book almost about why we like these stories ⁓ because a lot of these explanations are pretty magical and there's something about creativity that is so impressive, of course. ⁓ So fills us with awe and wonder that we also want

explanations that kind of feed, you know, our representative are worthy of this thing that you're trying to explain. So we like outlandish explanations more than sort of boring stuff. So that's what the book explores, a little bit about what the myths are, why we think this way, and to get a sense of what the human brain does in terms of why it makes us want good, stories over truth. We like the poetic truth more than the real truth, so to speak.

James Taylor (11:46)
So one of those ones that we often hear people come up to you, if I'm on a plane and they say, what do you do? I said, I speak about creativity, innovation, AI. And they say, yeah, I'm really left brain or I'm really, I think I'm really more right brain. So this is one of the myths that you kind of myth truths that you kind of talk about in the book. So tell us this whole right brain thing when it comes to creativity, is there a kernel of truth in that?

Anna Abraham (12:11)
Yeah.

⁓ There certainly is. ⁓ It's a very old story. It's one of the myth truths that was birthed at the time when ⁓ a lot of exciting work was happening in the neurosciences that were focused on hemispheric lateralization. And it was very clear that from patients with certain types of atypicalities who had to have certain types of surgery that severed communication between their left hemisphere and the right hemisphere to sort of

solve the problem or at least make an intractable epilepsy and think of the past. You know, there were these sorts of surgeries that needed to be done. It's really strange that people were almost like completely themselves, even though this major surgery had happened where large sections of their white matter tracks that allow for the left and right hemisphere to communicate with each other in a way that's really fast and efficient. There are other tracks through which they can do that, but it's a little slower.

people tend to be fine. And then when they did these sort of clever experiments, it became really clear that the left hemisphere was so important for all sorts of functions, right? So the first area, the first, let's say the throne of glory went to the left hemisphere and it came to things like intentional actions, language, and so on, which, and because we're human beings and we use language a lot, we think of it as sort of defining our species in very specific ways. And so,

a really weird thing happened in that the right brain began to be attributed everything that was not, you know, goal-directed, everything that was more passion, thoughtlessness, everything else, almost as a sort of, there must be an area that does this, because there are people who are not as rational, and so on. So the right brain decided to get to be seen as like, it doesn't seem to be that important for the things that really matter, know, logic, communication, and analytical ability.

⁓ And then came along ⁓ the idea that it was the right brain had something of worth came from the original team, the Roger Sperry team who found out about hemispheric lateralization differences. And I think it was because one member of that team, so it came from the group that was very respected as opposed to some random person, know, saying, well, when it comes to creative acts, and again, he didn't really have

the data for it. He was very, very ⁓ articulate person. He said, that, why am I blanking on his name? I am blanking on his name right now. But he said, and which is unforgivable, I'm sorry for that, but he, ⁓ I don't know why I'm blanking.

James Taylor (14:51)
Is that the-

which is- maybe that's the part with the right part is memory. Maybe that's what it is. That's why we're going that way. Short term memory.

Anna Abraham (14:57)
⁓ It's deteriorating in real time. ⁓

Well, he said was that the right and the left are both important. And the right is really important for certain aspects of the creative process, such as when you work away from the problem, the incubation stage and so on. He never said that the left is not important. All he said was that the right brain being delegated as this nothing-y hemisphere is incorrect. And it plays a big role in creative ideation.

And so of course he's not wrong because if you do fMRI studies for instance, and so on, you usually find both hemispheres involved in some way, you know. Depending on the type of task, you might see more left or right depending on if it's verbal or if it's ⁓ a figural task and so on. ⁓ But that sort of revolutionized a lot. ⁓ That understanding that the right brain is really important potentially for creative functions. Again, he didn't really have a lot of data to show this.

⁓ But it didn't really matter. ⁓ That was enough. And over time it went from, in no time it went from the right brain is important to the right brain is the seat. But none of the people who were talking about the importance of the right brain ever said that the left brain has no role. Just over time that that became the sort of, because it was neglected, let's give it a spotlight. The good thing about having that happen, even if it's not particularly correct,

is that it led to real changes in the way curriculums were designed, for instance, because people thought, well, let's cater to both sides of your mind. A more holistic. Yeah, let's not just make everything abstract about something written on a board. Let's think of it as visual and auditory. And let's try and work with more multimodally in the classroom to... ⁓

James Taylor (16:35)
Holistic be a more holistic education education system

Anna Abraham (16:52)
reach out to students, particularly those with issues, right? Have issues concentrating, have issues ⁓ perhaps even with learning and so on. And so over time, the whole right brain, left brain thing, I think at this point, ⁓ it doesn't even matter if it's right or wrong. It serves a purpose as a metaphor, you know? So if you and I were to want to do a collaboration together and we spoke to some company.

It wouldn't matter to the company what's right or wrong. If I say, we want to engage in more right brain thought, they immediately get it. It's because this metaphor, it's just now the way we think about things. So it has become powerful because it's important, but not because it has any particular truth value in its extreme form, ⁓ but because it essentially caused a revolution in the way we think about human thought. And so it's become that placard for

a more imaginative style of thinking means engaging the right brain in some way as opposed to this left brain, logical brain in some

James Taylor (17:56)
there is also even within that let's say there's this kind of plasticity within that I know I remember reading years ago some patients with forms of dementia or Alzheimer's as they get further into their their disease as attacks different parts of the brain suddenly they

become a little bit more creative. They start to paint and it kind of, you know, they're a little bit to the point where they maybe start to take off all their clothes, which can go a little bit maybe too far. so what's going on that that can be attacking, killing the right brain, you know, that just must be going for different, different things in the brain.

Anna Abraham (18:17)
Yes.

Yeah, first of all, it's Joseph Bogan is the name of the man who started this all. Thank you, Joseph Bogan. So in the case of neurodegenerative disorders and many others, it's a, explore that in another chapter actually, because it's more than just the right brain and left brain thing. You see this interesting phenomenon ⁓ in certain types of dementia like frontotemporal dementia, where it was, think, first properly studied.

James Taylor (18:37)
Got there, we got there, we got there. We'll put a link to Joseph as well. work.

Anna Abraham (19:03)
⁓ in the mid 90s it started, where they noticed that ⁓ not all patients with frontotemporal dementia, which is essentially characterized by the atrophy of the most anterior portions of the frontal lobe and the temporal lobe. So the frontal pole and the temporal pole gradually started to deteriorate and depending on which area is more affected, there are different types of ⁓ subtypes of frontotemporal dementia or FDD.

In a subset of these patients, they noticed something really strange. ⁓ In a subset of them, even though they had no prior artistic training or actually any particular interest in the arts, a sub, this small subset, but sizable, you keep seeing this again and again and again, they develop an incredible interest in the arts and start to engage and practice in the arts. It's primarily visual art.

But there have been some cases of musical as well and just a few of literary arts, but it's primarily in the visual domain. ⁓ So it becomes like, ⁓ it's not just a passing interest, it becomes almost a compulsive interest in wanting to engage more and more in it. And it becomes everything that they do. So a lot of these patients, you know, perhaps they can't go back to what they were doing before, ⁓ but start to spend a lot of time painting, ⁓ sketching, doing things like that.

James Taylor (20:25)
Is that also

because maybe other parts language, other parts have been closed down? So they're looking for, almost like the brain's trying to rewire, trying to find an outlet for that, that's already within that person.

Anna Abraham (20:36)
Yeah,

that's great observation. That's exactly what Dalia Zadel from UCLA, who studies this phenomenon of de novo creativity, would say it is, is that as human beings, really have a sort of powerful drive to express yourself and to communicate. And so when your most obvious form of communication, which is to speak or write, shuts down, that needs to...

to express, to communicate, to be yourself, in some way is still there, that drive is still there. And so it becomes, let's say, operationalized through these other mediums that you weren't necessarily particularly exposed to. But after some point, that becomes your only way, because very often in these types of situations, slowly the ability to understand, produce language just slowly diminishes over time. And this continues all the way till the end. ⁓

James Taylor (21:19)
course.

So the

thing that inhibits that, I'm also, wondering, so why anyone, you don't have to get dementia or forms of Alzheimer's to kind of go there. I'm wondering, like, when I, my father's a jazz musician, jazz guitarist, and I noticed something with great jazz musicians and comedians, they are almost able to switch something off in their brain that you and I probably have all the time, which says, don't do that.

don't say that, it's almost like, it's like a train where suddenly all the paths are open and they can just go for good or for bad, because sometimes it can take them down tracks that they can't figure out how to get out of, but is that, is also what's kind of going on there and this creativity in general, is that something that we over time we can learn to just kind of switch off, to switch on, or is it something that's just we, what's kind of going on? Is it a chemical thing, what's happening?

Anna Abraham (21:56)
Mm.

It's a good question. I think it's not studied in the lab and so on as much because it's impossible to. It's so in the moment, it's so unpredictable. Things that are unpredictable are very hard to study in neuroscientific labs. ⁓ as you've just mentioned, if you have any contact with people who are in the business of producing creative acts and so on, ⁓ that's part of who they are. ⁓ They have learned with time.

James Taylor (22:32)
in the moment.

Anna Abraham (22:54)
For one thing, what's really common to all creative people that I've met and I've read about and we live in an age where you can read so many interviews of all these incredible achievers. ⁓ They all differ in terms of their particular practices, but what they do have in common is that they're all incredibly reflective and curious about their own minds and how they operate. So they have what they've, you what you see is this metacognitive ability is

what they have in common. They're really curious about how they do it. There these great interviews with Pat Metheny, who's improvising all, tries to improvise on a nightly basis, it seems, or something. And he creates, he writes extensive notes about, because he's very interested in getting into the flow state.

Just because someone's trying to improvise and be there doesn't mean they're always doing what they think is the absolute pinnacle of what they can achieve. know, they seem to be doing great and we listen to it and it's wonderful, but for them each person has a certain bar. And to get into that state is a little bit outside their control, but they know the conditions that are more likely to lead to it. ⁓ The person who's talked a lot about this rather well about it, not a lot perhaps, is John Cleese actually. When he talks about

the, you know, he's got a little creativity book out that came out, I think, two years ago. ⁓ But he has this very famous lecture now online that he has delivered to, delivered in the 90s to like a business crowd. ⁓ And he identifies conditions that you create. And I think this is what I think all creative, like people who are in the business of trying to be, like, know, it's either their profession or they love to do it, whatever it might be. Recognize that they need to shift something.

intentionally about the way their minds are going down. Because our minds are mind brains if you want.

essentially work on the principle of the path of least resistance, right? So if you want to get out of your room now, you're not going to take a zigzag path, you're going go straight to it. That's just automatic. It's what you're going to do. And that's because our brains are that way. We're just not going to do things that are unnecessary. This is not a problem in our daily life. This is absolutely excellent for our daily lives. When it comes to creativity though, going down the path of least resistance means going to the same boring space. So you have to essentially disrupt

these pathways, these normal pathways that you're on. And most creative people have some way of getting disrupting their own ⁓ ability to take the easy way out. And they do it a number of different ways. And so someone like John Cleese points out, for instance, as a writer, ⁓ what you need to do. You need to sort of try and get into the open mode, the space where it's more playful. It's a little bit.

It's zany and so on, but essentially you have to create a space time kind of, what does he call it? A space time oasis where you understand that there's going to be that voice that tells you don't do this, don't do that, but actually just wait for it to die down. Yeah. And then engage. When I had the opportunity to try and do some workshoppy things with some really eminent creators, composers, writers, and so on.

James Taylor (25:57)
Yeah.

Anna Abraham (26:08)
I tried to like engineer some disrupt some things for them. And they were, I remember one of the feedback I got was just sort of like, had this work for you? They're like, well, you could have, you could have made it really hard for us and we would have still managed to step out of it and do what we do because we literally have to train for this, you know, to not, to just break away from the path of least resistance. If there's noise in the area around you, you still have to work through it. If, ⁓ you know, ⁓ if you have a deadline, you have to, you have to get this composition done by then. You have to finish your writing by then.

You just, you can't create a perfect, ⁓ there'll be lots of situations where you know that something is going to disrupt your ability to do it. And even in like high performance athletes, this is sort of like why they will do a lot of visualization to try and visualize all of the possible things that could go wrong here or change and defer from what you've trained for, ⁓ at least visualize it so that you can get down that different path. it is definitely neuro, I mean, to say it's chemical would be probably too basic, but it's,

It's a behavioral, it's a cognitive behavioral sort of top-down thing you do that just blows things apart. And that can come to you easily when you're with enough practice.

James Taylor (27:20)
You were mentioning John Cleese. I was doing an event actually in Stockholm in Sweden and I was staying at a hotel and I bumped into him because he was staying at the same hotel and I actually had a we had a conversation, I was asking him about it. And one of the things I remember he said, maybe on the well-known videos or something else I'd seen him, was this idea of like a lens focusing and defocusing. And...

Anna Abraham (27:28)
Wow.

James Taylor (27:42)
And something I often talk and I've delivered this, I've mentioned this in Bogota and Colombia and I thought they were gonna kill me on stage when I said it, but there was some great work by Martha Farrar, a neuroscience professor from the University of Pennsylvania, where she said she discovered that high levels of caffeine coffee will reduce the number of insights that you have.

Anna Abraham (28:02)
Mmm.

James Taylor (28:04)
And what I was explaining to the audience, I said, there's nothing wrong with caffeine, coffee's great. And I use it for like the preparation stage and I'll use it for the last stage, like when you're building something. But often in these middle stages, like going back to the John Cleese thing, you actually want to defocus your brain and caffeine works exactly in the opposite. And when you tell the audience, business audiences that, they go, ah, I get it. But what I know, and I don't know, because you have the joy of speaking to all these students every day and they're lit up and...

Often the audience I have to speak, I speak to and I love speaking to are very grounded business audiences that are thinking about KPIs and pharmaceutical companies or whatever the company is. And so my job is to go there and make the case for creativity in an audience that might not necessarily think there's great value, maybe the advertising department or the marketing. So I'm normally going in, speaking of a technical people, mechanics, chemical engineers, mechanical engineers for example.

Anna Abraham (28:42)
sure.

James Taylor (29:02)
One thing I have to do at the very start is I have to define what I mean by this word creativity. Because in the language we often hear it's like artistic or music. say, well that's not what I'm talking about here. That is important. For me and the definition I give, which is one of many I guess, creativity is about bringing new ideas to the mind. Innovation is about bringing new ideas to the world. But without creativity there is no innovation. Creativity is the engine of innovation. So once you're to get them on that, the other one that often they go, they're surprised at,

is that creativity is a teachable or a trainable skill, like a language something can be improved upon. And the thing, and kind of coming back to the work that you do, I talked to her about the Torrance test. And I could have measured all of your creative levels when you came in today using something called the Torrance test, and I'll do a workshop with you, and at the end, we could have measured your creative, and we'll see it increase. And a lot of people are really shocked that there is something that actually, that this is a measurable thing. So,

We should probably first, like you are at the Torrance Center, so we should probably describe, first of all, who is Torrance? And we're thinking about creativity. What is this Torrance test? And does it still hold up today?

Anna Abraham (30:12)
Yeah. Yeah, so I'm at the University of Georgia and my position is of the E. Paul Torrance professor. ⁓ Upon his retirement in 86, his graduate student founded the Torrance Center for Creativity. ⁓ Torrance was an educational psychologist and he realized, and you know, for those of us who aren't necessarily in education, ⁓ he realized that something was being, was not.

being focused on at all when it came to child development and the development of children's skills, which was creativity. People focused on math, on language, science skills, and so on. But there was very little focus on creativity. And he was sort of prescient in realizing that this was something that was really necessary in the time. And so when he started to do this kind of work in the 50s and the 60s, the 1950s and the 1960s.

And again, very prescient of him. was very aware of a lot. That was kind of the golden age of, you know, from the fifties on to the seventies, maybe creativity research, just a huge amount of impetus of work there. And he was very much in touch with all of those ⁓ theories. And I think spoke extensively to all of the big people in the field there. And what he recognized was that for education, the field of education and practice to take something seriously, you're to have to devise a test because they only

you have to be able to pick, ⁓ create something measurable so that they know, we can target something, we can see a skill and we can see it develop. So again, very prescient in realizing that, it's great what the psychologists do in terms of like coming up with tasks and assessing creativity, but he took it a step further to say, I'm gonna take, I'm gonna devise a test for creativity, just like you have a test for anything else. And ⁓ it's still in use, it gets.

⁓ re-normed every 10 years. The last norming happened just last year. And so it's all constantly updated. And he had a range of tests of which only two are really widely used now because they have a lot more predictive value than the others. ⁓ And that one is ⁓ the verbal test and the other one is the figural test. So things like the one sounds and movement and all are not really used as much, not for the testing of creativity. Certainly...

You could use them for the engagement of creative imagination in a big way to use in classrooms and so on. ⁓ So the test is still in use. It's used very widely in the United States and some other parts of the world, Turkey, not in South Korea and so on, where there is a huge amount of focus on creativity as one of the many traits that might distinguish highly capable children ⁓ from others who are less capable. ⁓

James Taylor (32:50)
think Singapore,

I seem to remember, were very big into, because obviously the PISA rankings, all these countries are obsessed about reaching the top of the PISA rankings.

Anna Abraham (32:53)
yeah.

Yes.

Yes, and speaking of PISA, PISA's last variant of PISA essentially added a new component which was critical in creative thinking. So ⁓ it's now part of the PISA measurements as well ⁓ to assess creative thinking. When you said Singapore and PISA, was like, because Singapore is part of that.

James Taylor (33:15)
And

many of these tests then, they're measuring basically what we think like divergent and convergent thinking, your ability to do these different ways.

Anna Abraham (33:23)
Yeah.

So I think what we have to be very careful about is like a lot of these tests, it's not, they measure very specific aspects of creativity. So there's some things that you can't measure through those test batteries because it involves, let's say, engaging in a creative practice in real time. doesn't test for flow. It can't because you have to be doing something to be engaged in flow. And you can ask about something retrospectively, which a lot of flow questionnaires do.

⁓ So there's lots of things that can't be tested in that format. But the things that they do look at are your ability to think, come up with a lot of different ideas, think divergently, think beyond the obvious, beyond the path of least resistance. And the focus is really on children more than adults because that's kind of what is this population, ⁓ especially because the norming goes from like, goes across childhood to adulthood, but isn't.

continue after that. Like a lot of tests, it doesn't matter if you're 18 or 24, how you perform on a test. But there'll be a big difference depending on whether you're 10 or 15, right? So...

James Taylor (34:26)
I

think for lot of these audience, business audiences, they kind of go, okay, realize, where can I do this test? And so then I tell them, you go online, they can take this test. The other one, which I'm not sure if you can have spoke so much about in the book, but kind of links, it's almost the historical thing you spoke about at the start. And I quote this myth of the lone creative genius. And I think it works very well because most large organizations are...

Creativity is collaborative in most work. And one of the things I sometimes do, friend of mine, Frederick Haran, who's a wonderful speaker, speaks on creativity as well. He asked audiences at the start, how many people you consider yourself to be creative? And he said, depending if I'm speaking in America or Europe or South Korea, it's gonna be vastly different. Where it tends to be in Asia and especially South Asia, they tend to vote lower. And...

Anna Abraham (34:55)
Yeah.

James Taylor (35:20)
One of the things that I often talk with audiences about is this idea of this lone creative genius test, which you said at the start, it's a good narrative, it's great. And then, and you'll be able to kind of probably correct me on this, the one I, my understanding of where a lot of that kind of came from, if you go back in many societies, it was always felt that we were...

we were vessels for creativity. That could come from the genius loci as the Romans recorded, the places themselves had their own creative genius or community or your tribe. And then a guy called Giorgio Vasari wrote a book, Lives of the Artists and the Renaissance. And he said, no, Leonardo.

is the genius, it's not that he has genius, but by doing that he kind of painted out all the contribution of the Medici's, the sponsors, the paint, the supplies of all the equipment, all the assistants as well. So this, is this lone creative genius, is that something that kind of comes up or is it really a substrand of like something, this kind of myth that we often talk about?

Anna Abraham (36:02)
Hmm.

Yeah, don't think a lot of the person, the people who've worked a lot on that are people like, you know, um, Simon and Dean, Simon and people like that. So there's.

I think

James Taylor (36:35)
It's more

cultural, isn't it? I guess more than it necessarily is scientific.

Anna Abraham (36:39)
Yeah, I think it's just

in a time where I think a lot of the time you have to think about, were they alone by choice? There suddenly are people who are alone when they did it, or was it just not available? We live in a hyper-connected world, a hyper-social world. ⁓ So it's very hard to imagine the kind of person who would be sort of isolated in some little room.

James Taylor (37:02)
The Zen Master sitting on a mountain somewhere in Japan or...

Anna Abraham (37:05)
But it's there,

right? Like there are certain types of fields for which that sort of solitariness is absolutely key to the, I would say it's not that it's a myth that it's there, it just depends on what type of creativity you're talking about, what field. I would say in the field of math, there's a lot of silence sitting around doing your thing, know, focusing very much on your task at hand. In writing, there's a lot of that. In music, there is not. There's a lot of, it really involves a lot.

a huge set of people and increasingly more and more now as productions get more complex. ⁓ In writing, if you're writing a novel alone or a poem, that's a solitary thing. If you're writing for a show, there's a lot of group writing. So it just depends on the context and some content, you know, an athlete trying to get better and better, there's parts of it that's going to be very isolating, very, very themselves on their own trying to hone their techniques and others that

demand that you are working with other people to hone your skills, to be able to react better and so on. So I think of this loan versus not loan question as a bit sort of, well, it kind of depends. The answer for me is a little bit banal because it depends on what you're trying to do. There are situations in which we would always say you need to get away and get into yourself. And there are others and it might be doing the same process and then other parts where you have to exchange. So

in a scientific lab. There are parts by your way and other parts where you're exchanging with others. And as they say, exchange is oxygen, right? Like, I forget who said that. it is, there is no one part that, and I think anyone who would sort of put forward that there's one part to being creative is going to necessarily be wrong. There are, if anything, many, many routes. If you are going to be entirely on your own, it doesn't mean that you can't be creative. Of course you can, yeah? And so on.

James Taylor (38:56)
I always wanted to have a

t-shirt, I always wanted to have a t-shirt, and you would go to, so I could go to these demonstrations about something, so someone was like very like fixed about, this is the right way, and another group was like, no, this is the right way. And I always wanted to have a t-shirt, which just said, I think you'll find it's a little bit more complicated than that. Sorry, because then, so anyone wants to make a t-shirt? Because it is, but what, I mean, you're teaching, you're around, you're...

Anna Abraham (39:13)
Please make that one.

James Taylor (39:24)
like lots of educated people, incredibly smart women, but what is the most pervasive myth of all these myths that you share in the book? What is the most pervasive myth, even amongst people that you think probably should know better?

Anna Abraham (39:42)
I wouldn't say any one. I think a lot of the problem of how people approach creativity, and I think that's, I will count it as a myth, is that they see creativity on one hand as this magical thing that they don't or don't have, and like, please give me a bullet. Can I take psychedelics and then become more creative? So there's...

A real lack of understanding, I think, of what it is, and that's primarily because we're very, notions of creativity are very much based on what we think of as creative. And for some of us, we will be looking at musicians. For others among us, we will be looking at authors and so on. But just like people are very famous, and that gives you a very skewed understanding of what creativity is. For me, the biggest myth is a lot of our notions about what creativity is are mythical or not completely correct.

because it's based on exceptional creativity. People who've done things that are incredibly important for their fields and have really received the recognition for it, which is like the top 5%. But there is creativity that is most of the things that are more interesting about creativity for everyday regular people is based on, would say, is general creativity, everyday creativity. And things there look slightly different.

actually. And so that, think, is the main reason why they're so mistaken about what creativity is. And the second thing is, I would say, related to that is that people looking at exceptionality think, exceptionality, came to them easy, they're talented. All of that is all wrong, by the way. People at that stage have had to work so, so hard. And so part of looking at things that look amazing and otherworldly,

makes us think that this comes to people easily. They've not had to work hard. And the other side is the unglamorous part of creativity is where the real truth is, which is that it's a craft. You have to keep working at it. It's actually better to think of it as akin to physical fitness. That, you know, we never tell people, well, don't bother running because you can't run as fast as the St. Both. That's exceptional physical prowess. What we're looking at is like normal physical fitness. And it's good for me.

to try and run a little bit, even though they're not going to be the fastest, right? And so that's way to think about creativity is as more like your own creative fitness is about pushing yourself, but only doing things makes you understand what you are uniquely capable of. And that's where creativity is. A lot of bad focus on creativity, I think, comes from understand thinking of creativity as externally determined. Only if someone recognizes that I'm creative, am I being creative. That's also.

very separate from what you create, what you come up with, because that's the starting point. The starting point is not how someone else sees it. The starting point is actually what you come up with. So there's just, for me, it's hard to pick on one because there are so many terrible notions we have about creativity ⁓ that come from a very skewed understanding. We're looking at a distinct few, ⁓ and we think about it as more simple than it is, if you see what I mean.

James Taylor (42:50)
Do it.

The one I

often think about is when someone says, ⁓ of someone who's very, they're doing an amazing job, whatever their field is, you're such a natural. It's so natural. And I think about someone like Nikki Glaser who did the Oscars, I think it was last year, the Emmys last year. And her performance, her opening monologue was so brilliant. And...

but what people don't see is that she rehearsed that 87 times. She workshopped that bit, that 10 minute bit so many times. And someone like Michael Caine said, the practice is the work, the performance is the play. And the audience only ever see that tiny little bit at the front and go, it's so natural. It's obviously so natural. I guess that as a compliment because the person has put in those hours and it's made it like, I mean, I'm sure like when you write that book,

Anna Abraham (43:23)
yours.

Mm-hmm.

James Taylor (43:48)
that is just the smallest part of all that research, all those years you've spent studying as well. As we start to finish up here, I would love to know, we're gonna talk about, we're gonna have links to your book and your work as well, but is there a book by another author just now that you've been, it could be related to creativity or even maybe a bit broader than that, that's really made you kind of rethink?

this field that you're in, or you've come at it and it's just kind of like a breath of fresh air, or you've just kind of reconsidered ⁓ the world and the way you look at it in some ways. Is there a book that's been like that over the past year or so for you?

Anna Abraham (44:25)
book on creativity?

James Taylor (44:27)
It could be on something else, maybe obviously with your kind wide academic side as well.

Anna Abraham (44:35)
There are a few things. When it comes to a book on creativity, would recommend the active, oh my God, no, we're gonna have to redo this. What's his name?

James Taylor (44:49)
We'll put a link to it.

Anna Abraham (44:53)
What's it called? Well, it's Rick Rubin's creativity book.

James Taylor (44:56)
Oh yeah, it's cool. I know it's got the circle on it. I can see it now actually. It's called... Yes, I know the one. I blanked on it. The creative act, that's the one? Yes. Yes.

Anna Abraham (45:02)
Yeah. ⁓

The creative act, the creative, is that what? Yeah, okay. ⁓

I think that is.

For me, I found that just very intriguing ⁓ because a lot of the time when you read interviews or the scientific work can get so divorced from what creativity is that it felt wonderful sort of listening to a practitioner, someone who really is in the business of creativity, but being able to recognize and of course constantly being the business of listening to things that are new, completely new and trying to figure out how this

how it makes you feel and so on. So I just liked the whole experiential nature of how he focuses on the creative act and really makes a case for that internal over the external more than anything else is the starting point. And I think very few, very few books ever do that. ⁓ So I think that was would count because that was maybe in the last year that I read it. ⁓ And more recently,

⁓ In preparation for a class that I'm doing, started to read Bill Bryson's book called The Body. And that's been marvelous ⁓ to really get a sense of how incredible the human body is and how little we know. from what we, know, it's a nice sort of overview of all of our different systems and how much we think we know what we know and how much we get wrong and how sort of the early pioneers.

in these fields, a lot of them were like absolute heroes who died in the cause and then others are just disgusting specimens who stole their students' work. It's just this wonderful sort of outlining of what it takes to build a field of knowledge and all of the remarkable sort of little stories in there, ⁓ including getting a sense of what our bodies are. things like, I don't know, the...

James Taylor (46:52)
Yeah.

Fantastic.

Anna Abraham (47:10)
the brain in your gut, right? Like gut brain. When I started as a neuroscience student, we weren't really taught this, but there's so much now that we know. So it's just wonderful to read that, to have read that, to get a sort of renewed appreciation of how remarkable our physiology is, this thing that allows us to be creative. It all starts from the body, from within you. And that's been wonderful to, yeah, to have that reignited again, that appreciation.

James Taylor (47:13)
Mmm.

Great, we'll put those links here as well. And finally, if people want to learn more about you and your work, we're have a link to the Creative Brain. But if they want to learn more about the research, the other things that you're working on, just now that over there in Georgia, where's the best place for to go and do that?

Anna Abraham (47:51)
Possibly my website is the best place, which is www.anna-abraham.com. ⁓ That's where I keep things updated, but people can always email me if they have questions.

James Taylor (48:05)
Well, Dr. Anna Abraham, it's been a pleasure having you on the SuperCreativity Podcast. Thanks for being a guest.

Anna Abraham (48:11)
Thank you so much for this conversation.