Got creative block? Get out of your office and go for a walk

 

(Medical Xpress) -- The next time you're in need of creative inspiration, try thinking outside the box—or cubicle.

New research by Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks and Suntae Kim of the University of Michigan Ross School of Business shows that engaging in physical acts and experiences enhances creative problem-solving.

"Metaphors of creative thinking abound in everyday use," said Sanchez-Burks, associate professor of management and organizations. "By thinking 'outside the box,' by considering a problem 'on the one hand, then on the other hand' or by 'putting two and two together,' creativity presumably follows. Such prescriptive advice is no stranger within research labs, advertising teams, the halls of higher education or other contexts where pioneering novel approaches to pressing problems are valued. These metaphors suggest a connection between concrete bodily experiences and creative cognition."

Sanchez-Burks and Ross School doctoral student Kim assembled a team of international researchers who conducted five studies with nearly 400 college students to examine the psychological potency of creative metaphors by investigating whether creative problem-solving is enhanced when people literally follow these metaphors.

The studies ranged from requiring participants to generate ideas while first holding out their right hand and then their left hand ("on the one hand, then the other hand") to completing word tasks by either physically sitting inside or outside a box or engage in problem-solving by walking in a rectangular path vs. freely walking ("thinking outside the box") to converging multiple ideas to find solutions while combining two objects ("putting two and two together").

In all five studies, the findings revealed that physically and psychologically embodying creative metaphors promotes fluency, flexibility and originality in problem-solving, Sanchez-Burks said.

"The acts of alternately gesturing with each hand and of putting objects together may boost creative performance," he said. "Literally thinking outside or without physical constraints, such as walking outdoors or pacing around, may help eliminate unconscious mental barriers that restrict cognition.

"We shed new light by demonstrating that embodiment can potentially enlarge, not just activate, the repertoire of knowledge by triggering cognitive processes that are conducive for generating creative solutions. In other words, our body-mind linkages attest not only to processes of knowledge activation, but also knowledge generation. Embodying creative metaphors appears to help ignite the engine of creativity."

The research will appear in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science

 

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Provided by University of Michigan

"Got creative block? Get out of your office and go for a walk." January 31st, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-01-creative-block-office.html

 

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Robert Karl Stonjek

Short-term memory is based on synchronized brain oscillations

A monkey has to carry out a classic memory task: The animal is shown two consecutive images and then has to indicate whether the second image was the same as the first one. Credit: Stefanie Liebe, MPI for Biological Cybernetics

Scientists have now discovered how different brain regions cooperate during short-term memory.

Holding information within one's memory for a short while is a seemingly simple and everyday task. We use our short-term memory when remembering a new telephone number if there is nothing to write at hand, or to find the beautiful dress inside the store that we were just admiring in the shopping window. Yet, despite the apparent simplicity of these actions, short-term memory is a complex cognitive act that entails the participation of multiple brain regions. However, whether and how different brain regions cooperate during memory has remained elusive. A group of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany have now come closer to answering this question. They discovered that oscillations between different brain regions are crucial in visually remembering things over a short period of time.

It has long been known that brain regions in the frontal part of the brain are involved in short-term memory, while processing of visual information occurs primarily at the back of the brain. However, to successfully remember visual information over a short period of time, these distant regions need to coordinate and integrate information.

In each of the two brain regions (IPF and V4) brain activity shows strong oscillations in a certain set of frequencies called the theta-band. Credit: Stefanie Liebe, MPI for Biological Cybernetics

To better understand how this occurs, scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Biological Cybernetics in the department of Nikos Logothetis recorded electrical activity both in a visual area and in the frontal part of the brain in monkeys. The scientists showed the animals identical or different images within short intervals while recording their brain activity. The animals then had to indicate whether the second image was the same as the first one.

The scientists observed that, in each of the two brain regions, brain activity showed strong oscillations in a certain set of frequencies called the theta-band. Importantly, these oscillations did not occur independently of each other, but synchronized their activity temporarily: "It is as if you have two revolving doors in each of the two areas. During working memory, they get in sync, thereby allowing information to pass through them much more efficiently than if they were out of sync," explains Stefanie Liebe, the first author of the study, conducted in the team of Gregor Rainer in cooperation with Gregor Hörzer from the Technical University Graz. The more synchronized the activity was, the better could the animals remember the initial image. Thus, the authors were able to establish a direct relationship between what they observed in the brain and the performance of the animal.

The study highlights how synchronized brain oscillations are important for the communication and interaction of different brain regions. Almost all multi-faceted cognitive acts, such as visual recognition, arise from a complex interplay of specialized and distributed neural networks. How relationships between such distributed sites are established and how they contribute to represent and communicate information about external and internal events in order to attain a coherent percept or memory is still poorly understood.

More information: Stefanie Liebe, Gregor M Hoerzer, Nikos K Logothetis & Gregor Rainer (2012) Theta coupling between V4 and prefrontal cortex predicts visual short-term memory performance. Nature Neuroscience, 29 January 2012, doi: 10.1038/nn.3038

 

Provided by Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

"Short-term memory is based on synchronized brain oscillations." January 31st, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-01-short-term-memory-based-synchronized-brain.html

 

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Robert Karl Stonjek

Gene mutation in autism found to cause hyperconnectivity in brain's hearing center

New research from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) might help explain how a gene mutation found in some autistic individuals leads to difficulties in processing auditory cues and paying spatial attention to sound.

The study has found that when a suspected autism gene called PTEN is deleted from auditory cortical neurons—the main workhorses of the brain's sound-processing center—the signals that these neurons receive from local as well as long-distance sources are strengthened beyond normal levels. These effects, the study shows, can be blocked by a drug currently in use as an immunosuppressant.

"It's long been hypothesized that autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) arise from a partial disruption of long-range connections in the brain during development," explains Professor Tony Zador, who led the study. "Our finding that PTEN-deficient neurons receive stronger inputs suggests that one way this disruption can be caused is by signal enhancement." His team's work appears in the Journal of Neuroscience on February 1.

Although ASDs could arise from mutations in any of dozens of candidate genes, a core triad of symptoms defines all cases: impaired language, impaired social interaction, and restricted and repetitive behaviors. "The challenge therefore has been to understand how this diverse set of candidate genes and the pathways they control converge to cause the common signature of ASDs," Zador says.

The auditory cortex, which plays a critical role in auditory attention and perception, forms functional connections with other sensory cortices and critical brain areas. The neural network within the auditory cortex has therefore been a target of studies aimed at understanding how alterations in neural circuits contribute to dysfunction in ASDs.

Zador's team focused for several reasons on the role of one suspected autism candidate gene, PTEN, on circuit alterations within the auditory cortex. Well known for its role as an anti-cancer gene that powers down cell growth, proliferation and survival, this gene has also been linked to ASDs by a slew of studies in humans and mice. PTEN mutations have been found in autistic individuals with extreme macroencephaly – an increase in brain volume. PTEN loss in mice has been found to boost cell size and the number of neuronal connections in the brain.

To decipher the role of PTEN on functional connectivity in the auditory cortex, Zador's group selectively disrupted the function of the PTEN gene in adult mice, only in a subset of neurons of the auditory cortex, while leaving the gene intact in neighboring neurons. The scientists then assessed the effect of the loss of PTEN on connectivity within the auditory cortex using techniques that involve stimulation by laser or flashes of blue light to trigger neuronal activity either locally or in other brain areas that send neuronal projections into the auditory cortex.

The rapid and robust increase in the strength of both long-range and local inputs observed following PTEN loss could possibly be explained by an increase that the scientists observed in the length and density of dendritic spines – the tiny, knob-like structures jutting out of a neuron that act like signal-receiving antennae.

These effects could be blocked, however, by chemically negating the effect of PTEN loss. One of the pathways regulated by the PTEN protein involves shutting down an intracellular enzyme called mTORC1, which promotes cell growth, among other things. Zador's group found that treating the PTEN-deficient mice for 10 days with the mTORC1-inhibitor rapamycin prevented an increase in dendritic spine number and signal strength.

While Zador is excited about "this finding that suggests that mTORC1 could be a good therapeutic target for some cases of PTEN-mediated brain disorders," he is also keen to further pursue his team's new evidence that cortical hyperconnectivity could be the "final pathway" by which diverse ASD genetic pathways lead to a single ASD phenotype. "Using cortical connectivity as a paradigm for assessing ASD candidate genes could provide insights into the mechanisms of the disorders and perhaps even give us clues to formulate new therapeutic strategies," he states.

More information: "PTEN regulation of local and long-range connections in mouse auditory cortex" appears in the Journal of Neuroscience on February 1.

Provided by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

"Gene mutation in autism found to cause hyperconnectivity in brain's hearing center." January 31st, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-01-gene-mutation-autism-hyperconnectivity-brain.html

 

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek