David Eagleman
David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University and an internationally bestselling author. He is co-founder of two venture-backed companies, Neosensory and BrainCheck, and he also directs the Center for[…]
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Scott Barry Kaufman
Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D., is a humanistic psychologist exploring the depths of human potential. He has taught courses on intelligence, creativity, and well-being at Columbia University, NYU, the University of[…]
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Tiago Forte
Tiago Forte is one of the world’s foremost experts on productivity. He has taught more than 20,000 people worldwide through his programs and writes and speaks on how technology can[…]
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3 experts explain your brain’s creativity formula
Our brains weren’t built for the amount of info we deal with now. That’s why scientists have made the case for a “second brain” — a place to dump ideas so you can actually see how they connect later.
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3 min
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with
David Eagleman
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What makes the human brain capable of creativity?
Neuroscientist David Eagleman, creativity researcher Scott Barry Kaufman, and productivity expert Tiago Forte each explore a different part of the puzzle: how humans evolved additional cortical “space,” how imagination builds on the knowledge we gather, and how organizing your thoughts in a “second brain” helps ideas take shape. Together, their perspectives explain why creativity depends on storing, combining, and transforming the raw material we collect over time.
DAVID EAGLEMAN: What is it that's special about the human brain that allows creativity to happen?
What humans do that’s special is we absorb all of these ideas, all these inputs, and we smush them up in various ways and come up with new things. During the evolution of the cortex, we got a lot more space in between input and output.
Other animals have these much closer together, so when they get some stimulus, they make an essentially reflexive response. In humans, inputs can come in and percolate around, get stored, get thought about, and then maybe you make an output or maybe you don't.
And there’s one other thing that happened with the expansion of the cortex, which is that we got a much bigger prefrontal cortex. And that is what allows us to simulate “what ifs,” to separate ourselves from our location in space and time and think about possibilities.
Now, there are almost 8 billion brains running around the planet, and as a result, the creativity of our species has gone up in this mad, amazing way because there's so much raw material to draw on.
SCOTT BARRY KAUFMAN: It’s useful to distinguish between intelligence and imagination. I like to view intelligence as all the things—all the thought processes, behaviors—that allow us to learn what is. Learn the way the world is.
Imagination is all the processes that allow us to imagine what could be. A lot of creativity requires learning what is so that we can go beyond it. But if we're just at the stage of learning what is—so we just have the knowledge—I don't think knowledge necessarily equals creativity.
So creativity requires both intelligence and imagination.
TIAGO FORTE: We are trying to run complex, modern lives, take in and make sense of more information than ever, on brains that haven’t changed biologically in 200,000 years.
My message to you is that you need a second brain. A second brain is a personal system for knowledge management. It's note-taking. It’s saving little bits of material and information—your environment and also your own thoughts—to cultivate, retrieve, and review over time.
By saving all of these observations in one single, centralized place—your second brain—you drastically increase the odds that you're going to notice how things connect and relate.
And this is innovation. This is creativity. It is not inventing something from nothing. It is just applying a tool or a technique or an insight from one domain and translating it to another one. That is the very essence of creativity.
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