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Guest Lecture - Rex Jung

Sarah Kintner

Rex Jung from the Mind Institute gave a slide presentation and lecture on the creativity and genius. His lecture was split into three parts the good, bad and ugly parts of creativity.

He spoke at length about how IQ is a good predictor of the future life of a person from IQ tests early in life based upon Wexler IQ tests. He stated creative people lie more than less creative people and it has a more social implication.

To be a successful artist or creative person, they must produce much output during their life and only a small proportion will of their work will be recognized as creative. Creativity requires that that which is produced be novel and useful for the society it is created in.

Rex admitted that his one study did not have any conclusions simply because there was too much diversity in how creativity occurred. His did clarify that the study did not image the students while they were performing tasks, but that there was recorded images while the students were performing task in the DiffusionTensor imaging device would make it into another study. He explain that the radial diffusive (RD) and axial diffusive (AD) was related to how water traveled through the axon myelin sheath. The recent research of Rex has shown that as people age from birth to about 45 years old the myelin sheath builds up essentially insulating the axon interior from the external water filled channel. Then as people age past 45 years their myelin sheath get thinner and may assist in the ability of the brain to operate in a more uninhibited manner.

To be more creative Rex gave the 5 P's for creativity:

Prepare: collect ideas to put together in a novel way

Practice: It takes about 10 years (10000 hours) to master a skill

Play: Allow your mind to be free in unstructured cognitive activity

Produce: Put out a lot of ideas out into the world and let the world decide which are good - don't say your ideas are bad before they get out.

Persevere: Keep trying and failing and trying - don't give up or listen to anyone else telling you can't do something

Three questions I did not ask

  1. Are there any side effects from Tensor Imaging?
  2. In the White Matter Integrity, Creativity, and Psychopathology paper on page 6, what are the units units on the side of the graphs and how were they derived from Tensor Imaging of diffusivity?
  3. How closely do your studies adhere to your 8 suggestions for performing creativity testing using brain imaging?

Three Future Directions:

  1. One future direction is to complete the study that had student performing tasks while being imaged
  2. Perform future testing while adhering to the 8 suggestions would begin to set a precedence.
  3. The creativity research might be applicable to PTSD and schizophrenia based upon some overlap in those areas as presented in the studies.