Secrets of Creativity: What Neuroscience, the Arts, and Our Minds Reveal

Secrets of Creativity: What Neuroscience, the Arts, and Our Minds Reveal draws on insights from leading neuroscientists and scholars in the humanities and the arts to probe creativity in its many contexts, in the everyday mind, the exceptional mind, the scientific mind, the artistic mind, and the pathological mind. Components of creativity are specified with respect to types of memory, forms of intelligence, modes of experience, and kinds of emotion. Authors in this volume take on the challenge of showing how creativity can be characterized behaviorally, cognitively, and neurophysiologically. The complementary perspectives of the authors add to the richness of these findings. Neuroscientists describe the functioning of the brain and its circuitry in creative acts of scientific discovery or aesthetic production. Humanists from the fields of literature, art, and music give analyses of creativity in major literary works, musical compositions, and works of visual art.

About the Author :
Suzanne Nalbantian is Professor of Comparative Literature at Long Island University and an interdisciplinary scholar who is Chair of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) Research Committee on Literature and Neuroscience. She is the author of four scholarly books and two edited volumes. Her book Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience (Palgrave 2003) forged new pathways linking literary depictions of memory to neuroscience. She is the principal editor of The Memory Process: Neuroscientific and Humanistic Perspectives (MIT Press 2011), which features original essays by both humanists and brain scientists. She has lectured widely throughout the U.S. and Europe on the topic of memory at such institutions as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, College de France (Paris), the European Science Foundation, Max-Planck (Tubingen), and the Pasteur Institute (Paris). Paul M. Matthews is the Edmund J. and Lily Safra Chair of Translational Neuroscience and Therapeutics, Head of the Division of Brain Sciences in the Department of Medicine of Imperial College, London, and Associate Director of the UK Dementia Research Institute. He is Fellow by Special Election in St. Edmund Hall, Oxford and holds Visiting Professorships at McGill University, Nanyang Technological University and the University of Edinburgh. Professor Matthews was awarded an OBE in 2008 for services to neuroscience and was elected to the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2014. He is the co-author of over 380 scientific papers. He is also co-author (with Jeffrey McQuain) of the book The Bard on the Brain: Understanding the Mind through the Art of Shakespeare and the Science of Brain Imaging and co-editor (with Suzanne Nalbantian and James McClelland) of The Memory Process: Neuroscientific and Humanistic Perspectives (MIT Press 2011).

Review :
The singular strength of this curated collection is the varied areas of expertise represented, which allows readers to see how creativity is conceptualized at the microscopic and macroscopic levels through hard science and empiricism, as articulated in historical, literary, and personal narratives of creative individuals. This collection draws on multiple disciplines[...] but undergraduates in any of the individual fields of neuroscience, psychology, literature, art, or history can appreciate their respective sections. Readers will hopefully come away with a new understanding, or at least an appreciation, of the challenges involved in deconstructing creativity. In the 1959 Two Cultures, C. P. Snow famously argued for a vast intellectual divide between the sciences and the humanities. Yet the 2019, Secrets of Creativity proves that scientific researchers and humanistic scholars--joined by artistic creators--can meaningfully share their insights concerning a ubiquitous and multifaceted phenomenon. Indeed, creativity can only be fully understood through this conversation among experts in psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, computer science, philosophy, literary studies, art history, creative writing, and musical composition. That conversation renders this volume an interdisciplinary tour de force. In Secrets of Creativity Suzanne Nalbantian and Paul Matthewshave assembledan impressive collection of essays from a stellar group of thinkers in the arts and humanities, as well as from the sciences of mind and brain. This unique volume will have a lasting impact on how we think about creativity. Supernal spirits from La Mettrie to Langer will be smiling over the brilliant assembly of living theoreticians of science and culture gathered here by humanist Suzanne Nalbantian and scientist Paul M. Matthews who striveto rekindle our interdisciplinary discourse over human self-awareness and the astounding range of human expression in light of thenewest advances in study of the brain. Guided by Nalbantian and her team the reader never loses sight of how mysterious is the evolutionary pathway of creativity -- and then how rapid the newest surges in brain science -- leading to this exciting intellectual juncture. Creativity is something we all recognize when we witness it, but a mental process that is difficult to pin down. From conceptions entailing preparation, incubation, illumination and verification, through to neuroscience ideas about the diversity of brain areas involved, Nalbantian and Matthews brilliantly orchestrate a panoply of ideas from the sciences and the humanities. This is not a "how to" book, but a thoughtful reflection, bringing in also social and cultural influences such as those which led to the magical blending of ideas in Cervantes and Shakespeare. A book to help us understand better those amazing "aha" moments of our lives.