Neuroscience and Creativity | Siddharth Warrier | TEDxGLAU | Siddharth Warrier | TEDxGLAU

Transcriber: Emma Gon Reviewer: Sebastian Betti

Thank you for having me. Can you just confirm if I'm audible and visible?

Yes, yes, you are. Yeah.

Good afternoon, everyone.

I want you all to do something for me.

I want you to look back at your life

and try to think about that one moment

when you felt like you were at your creative best.

When you felt what is known as “that spark”,

when you were able to see the world in a way that you haven't seen before

and you have created something that did not exist.

What happened at that moment?

What happened in your brain that allowed you to do that,

to write that poem, to make that song, to sketch that painting?

I’m Dr. Siddharth Warrier

and today we will be discussing some of the mysteries

of the neuroscience of creativity.

And the way we will do this is,

is by talking about some of the myths of creativity

that we have been led to believe.

Myth number one: there is one part of the brain that makes you creative.

The so-called creative center of the brain. This is false.

And in order to understand why this is false,

we need to understand how the brain works.

We perceive the environment,

we perceive the universe through our senses.

We see things, hear things, touch things.

All of these enter our brain and go to the TOP of the brain.

And when I say TOP, it is an acronym for Temporal Occipital Parietal area.

So these are the three lobes of the brain,

the three areas of the brain that deal with sensory information.

The TOP of the brain takes all the sensory information,

processes them, puts it together

and gives us the sense of reality that we see around us.

But it’s not enough to just take in information,

we also have to do something,

we have to interact with the environment.

So the TOP area sends this information

to the front of the brain called the frontal lobe.

And this is where the motor cortex is situated.