Creative Brains in Singapore

Singapore.
I'm spending the next few days at the ISEA 2008 conference in steamy Singapore. My last ISEA was 2004 in Helsinki and Tallinn (and on the cruise ship to Helsinki), an experience which will be very hard to top - but I'm sure the local organisers have a great deal of interesting events in store for us, too. ISEA - the International Symposium on Electronic Art - is always a strange beast: a wild mixture of new media artists and performers, free culture and open source activists, and more conventional new media researchers (like me). Well, we'll see...

We start today with a keynote by Ken Mogi from Sony Computer Science Laboratories which, with its title "The Contingent Brain" sounds a bit like a counterpart to the Susan Greenfield keynote at the recent CCi conference. The Sony labs he works for are conducting a great deal of research into brain functions; and the interest here is especially in what drives human creativity. Ken begins by going back to Charles Darwin's work on evolution, and traces further research developments from here; he notes the lengthy process of identifying the material basis for evolution, and links this to the understanding of creativity, the material basis of which also remains poorly understood.

He suggests that evolution is a result of the brain's attempts to adapt to contingencies; put differently, open-endedness in the brain's learning process is an adaptation to the contingencies of life. Human memory is encoded, retrieved, and edited in the presence of contingencies (and often influenced strongly by our emotional state at the time of experiencing an event) - this selective, externally influenced process of remembering is clearly different from the way information is stored in and retrieved from computer memory, for example.

There still is no hugely effective way for digital devices to store information selectively - and in humans, accurate, machine-like memory storage occurs only in anomalous cases, for example in some people with autism, and there is usually a trade-off between such increased abilities and a deficit in social functions. Interestingly, there are similarities between the highly accurate images drawn by some people with autism and cave paintings from the neolithic, indicating perhaps a different stage of braing development in such prehistorical times.

Brain science researches how the brain engages in such selective storage. Its findings point to a further trade-off, between accurate memory and creativity - and further, they indicate that there is a similarity between trying to remember (that is, trying to lift a stored memory to the active part of the brain) and being creative (which Ken describes as trying to create or envision a 'new' memory), based on existing memories. (Perhaps the logic here is that if memory naturally comes easy to a person, the mental functions which would otherwise be required to tease out knowledge and ideas remain relatively undeveloped...)

What's particularly interesting is the study of one-shot learning (the 'aha experience' of generating new ideas or knowledge apparently out of nowhere) - such experiences allow the study of how the brain realises new information. Also important in this context is the release of dopamine in the brain, which encourages repetition of recent actions, but is released often in reaction to unexpected events.

Ken suggests that sites such as Google or YouTube are constructed to maximise interesting contingencies for the brain. Sometimes, what is encountered is what was expected, sometimes, we encounter surprises. Designing new (or embodied) contingency structures may therefore constitute a pathway towards innovation in interactive media. There needs to be a balance between exploiting certain rewards and exploring uncertain rewards in order to encourage reinforcement learning. We need both a secure base from which to explore, and an open space which we can explore. Contingency provides this connection between regularity and randomness.

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