An Unqualified Armchair-Neuroscience Rant

First, a disclaimer: What I am about to tell you is a load of crap. It is a steaming pile of unqualified, hand-waving generalizations. It is based partially on a lot of reading I have done, but I might venture that none of those authors were qualified to say these things either. It is also based largely on GUESSING. Also, it's too long to edit; I don't have the time. So that out of the way:

This post is about curiosity and creativity. I want to define both concepts in pseudoneuroscientific terms, with the specific aim of addressing what happens to our curiosity and creativity as we get older. Children seem to have an abundance of both, and adults often lament the loss of those qualities. Does pseudoneuroscience agree? [Spoiler: it's complicated.]

First, curiosity. But before that:

Here's how unsupervised learning works. Let's start way-way back at the beginning (REAL examples from a 3-day old). We all start with a very rudimentary model that attempts to explain everything we know about the world.
  1. Make observations.
     "I moved some muscles. Also, the stuff I see changed. Also, I pooped."
  2. Notice correlations in your observations (we are really good at this, often to our detriment)
     "OH, when I move THIS muscle, the stuff I see changes THIS way."
     "That blob I like to look at always moves the same as that other blob."
  3. Were you able to predict these correlations before they happened, or were you surprised by them?
        --> If NO, then can you update your model of EVERYTHING to include this new information?
             --> If YES, then update your model! You are smarter!
                  This process releases neurotransmitters that make you feel good.
                  (tangentially, this feelgood is also what makes stand-up comedy entertaining)
             --> If NO, then you are confused.
                  This process releases neurotransmitters that make you feel frustrated.
        --> If yes (you did predict what you saw), but you weren't really sure about that part of the model, then strengthen that part of the model. You are more confident!
             This process releases neurotransmitters that make you feel good.
        --> If yes, and you were not remotely surprised, then get bored.
  4. Repeat.

As we get older, our model improves, which makes it harder to find novel observations that challenge the model. It also becomes harder to figure out how to fit new observations into the model. But we keep trying, because it still feels good. Our model continues to improve. We also learn to direct our learning to answer specific questions.

Curiosity is our word for our innate desire to run this loop. It is part of a motivational system that rewards its host (you) for learning new information. It is why we look longer at things that are new to us, or that don't make any sense. It is also (at least in part) why children think everything is awesome.

We also learn about supervised learning, where observing other people who know stuff can quickly reveal new information. In school, we take this process to its most abstract, where people who know can simply tell you the things they know, and you can integrate this into your model (to some extent) without ever going through the 4-step process (although we learn much more strongly by going through the process). Supervised learning generally doesn't feel nearly as good, sometimes to the extent that students are bored out of their skulls and learn to hate learning. We keep learning anyway, because our curiosity demands it of us.

Eventually, however, the real questions become so incredibly complex and difficult to explain, that most people give up, at least to some extent. Rather than continue to feel frustrated, we find more comfortable shortcuts (for examples: Zeus is responsible for lightning. My favorite radio persona said it, so it's probably true. It's in the bible, so it must be true.) Or we just learn to stop caring. We lose our childhood curiosity.

We also become more _resistant_ to altering the model, even in light of contradictory evidence. This is extremely detrimental in some cases, but it is also a very important part of learning--if we were comfortable throwing out 20 years of experience based on one new experience, we would probably do that _too_ frequently. In many cases, forgetting things you already learned is much worse than learning something new.

We are said to learn much more quickly at a young age. Some of theis change is actually physiologically pre-programmed; certain parts of the brain 'solidify' at an early age to prevent further changes. Language acquisition is a good example of this (try learning a new accent; it's really hard now, but seemingly effortless at 3). (Tangential: I suspect solidifying language learning early on actually helps to stabilize language (which is an enormous learning investment) itself. If language changed too frequently, there would be fewer people who speak the same language as you, and it would become less valuable) We also learn less quickly because information is harder to get, and sometimes too costly to integrate into our world model. (This is not remotely the end of the story, of course; I would argue that the _quality_ of learning improves over time, even if the rate declines.)

Loss of childhood curiosity is both good and bad. It is USEFUL that we are no longer delighted to discover that the light switch makes the lamp turn on. If it were not so, we would not move on to more important questions. In this sense, being an adult means simply that we delight in discovering much more challenging or profound knowledge. That delight is the very same curiosity you had as a child, it's just grown up with you.

On the other hand, it is a shame (but somewhat understandable) that some people become disillusioned or disinterested in learning. So much for curiosity.


The life-cycle of creativity follows a similar developmental arc, but for a very different reason. I'll start with another algorithm:

How we solve problems:
  1. There's a problem! Identify your goal. What is the endpoint you wish to reach?
  2. Search your memory (at random, but with some hints). Does anything you remember
     have a vaguely similar result?
     --> If NO, keep searching! Broaden your search criteria and your definition of 'vaguely'
     --> If YES, then predict what happens if you try to solve the problem using what you remember.
           Do you have a complete working solution?
           --> NO! Why not? If the solution created a new problem, go back to 1.
                 If you think the solution is hopeless, go back to 2.
           --> YES! You are done. Good job. (it feels good)
       
This is, in a nutshell, what I call creativity. I'll throw in some caveats: creativity has many overlapping definitions, not all of which fit this description perfectly. Also, if it seems like I'm suggesting that creativity is simply repeating the things we already know, that is partially true (but read on). Also note that "solving a problem" can mean forming a sentence, or painting a picture, or solving the mysteries of the universe, etc.

Notice something very important about this process: it is recursive. Finding a partial solution can lead to several new problems, all of which need to be solved before the original problem is solved. These new sub-problems may have partial solutions as well, which introduce new sub-sub-problems (and so on). The object is to keep adding components onto this recursive tree of dependency-hell until, finally, you come across something that you think will work.

At your disposal is a vast library (your memory) of information from which you will construct the tree. Some of the components in the library are very simple (example: rocks are hard), and some are more complex (the transition from G major to B minor makes people sad). Often, constructing you solution from very high-level pieces is the easiest way to go, but at the extreme end of this, you are simply copying. Novelty lies in the particular arrangement of pieces you have chosen, so if you work harder to build a solution from smaller pieces, then the solution will be more novel (but not necessarily better).

At the other extreme, building your solution from the smallest possible pieces may be prohibitively difficult--your tree is too complex to juggle in your head and each sub-problem takes longer to solve because you are searching through a much larger library of tiny objects.

In general, the longer you search, the more (and hopefully better) solutions you can come up with. Being a good problem solver comes from 1) having a really good library, 2) being able to search quickly, and 3) being able to search efficiently--knowing where to look and, more importantly, where not to look. Knowing where not to look is tricky business. It's essential to being a good problem solver, but often invites us to overlook a less obvious solution.

People are called 'creative' for having strengths in various parts of this process. Some people are just better (or more persistent) at finding non-obvious solutions. Some people prefer to use smaller pieces and thus construct more elaborate solutions. Some people simply find any solution using the most non-obvious components (even if the solution is not good, it is certainly creative and novel).

Children are in an interesting situation here--they are forced to work with smaller libraries of simpler pieces and they have not yet developed the skill (or handicap, depending on your viewpoint) of ignoring useless pieces. Thus the solutions they do come up with are often not the ones we would find (or even consider), and sometimes serendipitously their solutions are clever as well as non-obvious. For all these reasons, we call children creative.

Like with curiosity, there is a developmental story here as well. Early in development, our brains are growing (literally) quite rapidly. Our neurons furiously form new branches and synapses, expanding their receptive fields in search of new correlations to represent. As time goes on, this process of growth slows and is eventually replaced by the opposite process--refinement of connectivity by removing those connections which get in the way or get little use. This, in the hand-wavingiest way, is exactly the process of expanding one's library, then learning to limit one's search paths.

Like with curiosity, creativity changes as we age in order to maximize our ability to learn and understand our world. These changes come with a price, though. Losing your childhood creativity means learning how to solve problems more quickly (or how to come up with better solutions in the same amount of time). It also means losing the ability to explore solutions broadly and free of bias. Of course you can practice creativity, but to some extent these changes are physiological and inevitable.