Creativity and Concept Cells
I read an article this week that blew my mind enough to get me to restart writing here. (Sorry. Busy year.) Concept Cells Help Your Brain Abstract Information and Build Memories in Quanta magazine.
The concept cell for ‘swamp’ is probably lighting up in your brain right now.
TLDR from a non-scientist’s perspective: Neuroscientists realized that a specific neuron would light up every time you looked at a different photo of Jennifer Aniston, and a different one for the Leaning Tower of Pisa, ad infinitum, and voila! Concept neurons, or concept cells, might exist for every concept in your life — including carrots, olives, a bar, even abstract ideas like government or taxes. They even light up in different contexts. If you identify a Shrek concept cell and then start a sentence about Shrek with ‘He lived in a swamp …’ the concept cell for Shrek will light up again.
“There are time cells, there are place cells, there are border cells, boundary vector cells, there are concept cells ...”
Creativity comes from your PIPE
I don’t think creativity comes from where society thinks creativity comes from. Concert pianists aren’t necessarily terribly creative people. Scientists or businesspeople can be more creative thinkers than artists. People don’t usually have more than a handful of Aha! moments in their entire lives. If that. Frustration, boredom, envy, desperation and deadlines are probably bigger drivers of creativity than any other emotion or prompt. I’ve published over a million words in my career, and deadlines were responsible for 999,000 of them.
For me, creativity starts with your PIPE: Your preferences/passions, your interests, your unique perception and your experiences. In essence, the memories created from a lifetime of being you in the world. Figure out and hold onto your PIPE, as that's what gives you your voice.
Good news: you don’t even have to identify your PIPE or your voice to find your creative mojo. Creativity comes when you basically mush together a whole bunch of concept cells in as many ways as you possibly can until you get a connection that sticks. And, this is key: To be creative, you need to pay an absolute metric shit-ton of attention to these new connections.
Creativity teachers love concept cells
On Tuesday, I was in a workshop of creativity consultant Bruce Honig’s, where he had folks simply figure out how to connect two ‘Object’ cards. Make a product out of a compass and paint: go! The amount of creativity that poured forth in two minutes was absolutely astounding.
If you’ve taken one of my workshops, you’ll know the Sense Ratings exercise. If you haven’t, a) you should; they’re really fun and b) I’ve been using ‘concept cells’ for over a decade now to light the spark to this creative connection machine.
In fact, I’m betting the next step in my wildly random creativity career on the concept that concept cells helping elicit creativity. I’m designing a board game with my partner Jarmo that we’re calling …
Lincoln Hates Beets (Working Title)
The concept of the game is to connect over concepts — and our unique perceptions of concepts. We don’t realize how much concept cells affect us, but they’re intimately tied to memory, the article says. You can take away health, money, family, even body parts, and you’ll still be you. But if you take away your memory and your connection to concepts?
“Quick quiz: Would you rather lose your left leg or all of your memories, past, present and future? ”
I want to get people to play Lincoln Hates Beets with their closest friends and family, with new people, with their colleagues. The goal of the game is to … well, have fun. But the secondary goal is to create connection, laughter, empathy, insight and creativity, all the good stuff.
I’ve been doing this work for decades, and the closest I’ve come to a creativity magic bullet is to be aware of concept cells and how you feel about them, and then put them together in as many weird configurations as possible. Voila, a piano concerto (or marketing plan, or new recipe for a hydration cocktail, or so on …) is born!