Creative Brains in Brisbane

Brisbane.
The CCi conference is about to start, with the opening keynote address by the wonderfully titled Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield. She begins by highlighting the role of creativity as a key commodity of the 21st century, and (as a neuroscientist) points especially to the question of what happens physically in the creative brain. The brain determines our perspective on the world, yet it is impossible to convey to others exactly what that perspective is (we resort to various forms of communication as a means for doing so); some views say that the abilities of the brain are themself determined by DNA.

However, the levels of brain organisation can be distinguished as our overall consciousness, various dysfunctions (schizophrenia, depression), key functions such as memory and vision, and sub-functions which process colour, form, motion, and other sensory perceptions; these combine into brain regions, which themselves break down into large-scale assemblies, isolated neuronal circuits, and further into synapses and their specific components. Here, finally, we return to the role of genes in shaping these - but it would be strange, Susan suggests, to jump from genes to functions straightaway: genes and brain functions are only indirectly linked, and genes are necessary, but not sufficient determinants of the range of a person's brain functions. Indeed, even in cases where brain diseases are directly linked to specific malfunctioning genes, environmental factors significantly affect the level of impairment - a clear indicator of how such factors have a stronger influence on brain functions than the genes per se. Nurture, in other words, trumps nature.

We shift, then, from the stereotype of genetically determined behaviour to an understanding of mental capacity as a function of nurture and education. Human brains, importantly, continue to develop after birth, and are constantly forming new synaptic connections (Susan points to a recent study of the navigation-related brain functions in London taxi drivers, for example), and such formation is driven both by doing and by thinking exercises. Stimulating experiences enables our brain cells to make more connections; these connections wither in patients with Alzheimer's or senile dementia, and are temporarily disabled through drug use and similar primarily sensory experiences. So, the development of the mind is the personalisation of the brain through the development of unique brain cell connections in each person.

What does this mean for our hyperconnected, hypermediated future, then? Susan points to suggestions like Stephen Johnson's that Everything Bad Is Good for You or Kevin Kelly's view that truth is now no longer "delivered by authors and authorities but is assembled by the audience" - but she also warns that this is fine for those of us who already have a developed cognitive framework, but perhaps not for those growing up in these environments. She points to the rise in prescriptions of medication for attention deficit disorders; she highlights the perhaps shorter attention span in screen culture, its strongly visual focus, questions of the literal versus the abstract, the lack of a conceptual framework, and the focus on process over content in many screen environments. She also highlights the rise of virtual environments like Second Life, of collective intelligence in Wikipedia, and of the absence of anything but sensory experience in some other screen media forms.

Some of the options here are for us to be somebody (a consumerist individual), anyone (part of a collective, mass identity), or nobody (to lose our identity in these environments). How much creativity is possible to us in any of these states? One prerequisite for creativity appears to be to have small networks (as is also the case in childhood, forms of mental illness, and cases of drug taking, all of which could be seen as highly creative states); other prerequisites, however, are also to deconstruct experiences to abstract representations, to make unusual and idiosyncratic connections, and to create something new and meaningful - and it is this last which may be missing in these otherwise 'creative' states. Ultimately, then, Susan suggests, to build and maintain our identity becomes a core determinant of our ability to exercise our creativity.

Responses to Susan's presentation now follow, and Erica McWilliam makes a start. She highlights the question of how we do learning optimally, and how education may provide an optimal environment in a digital world for formal education - which is currently more important and less relevant than ever. Digital environments may enable the triumph of the pleasure of learning over the drudgery of formal educational environments, but also offer a myriad of false hopes and wrong directions. Traditional literacies remain a gateway to high-level digital literacies; merely routine use of digital tools may indeed stifle users' capacity for the creative use of such technologies. So, how can education add value in the future - by buying into the standard, fast-changing patterns of the digital age, or by holding fast to more traditional forms of pedagogy?

John Hartley is next, and highlights the interdisciplinary nature of this CCi conference - the importance of sciences and humanities to speak to one another and identify the common problems which cut across their scholarly domains. This would enable us to move past standard media panics relating to computer games, the online world, or various other cultural influences. For the past 250 years, John suggests, there has been an ongoing discourse about the relationship between identity, creativity, and their textual carriers, and many once-controversial artists and creators are now part of the creative canon of world culture; so, the most important question is this: what would it take for sciences and humanities to take seriously and investigate in collaboration the impact of digital media, and what can that 250-year history contribute to this investigation? How can we focus just as strongly on the impact within persons as on relations between persons - examining the science of creativity and culture?

Finally, Arun Sharma points to the question of workforce creativity, and highlights the importance of being exposed to different forms of knowledge. In the IT world, the big challenge is to determine what type of graduate will be best suited to the current environment - what are the kinds of issues that they will need to address, what sorts of services will they need to provide? This necessarily combines a number of disciplinary fields, which no longer exist side by side in large organisations, but need to be combined within the same individual. The question is now how to integrate these disciplines in this form - and Arun points to the Indian software industry, for example, as one highly successful sector which has achieved at least a workable first approximation of this goal (by combining computer science and business knowledges, in the first place).

Susan briefly responds now, by pointing to the importance of being aware of and understanding context in any of this; mere process skills are nowhere near enough any more, and it is much more important to be aware of the wider range of questions within which one operates.

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