May 13, 2024 • 42 mins
From a neuroscience point of view, what is creativity? How does it shine light on the current lawsuits over large language models and whether they produce anything fundamentally new... or are simply remixing the old? How do the arts expose something important about what's happening in the human brain? What do we know about the cultural evolution of ideas? And what does any of this have to do with how cell phones got their names, and why koala bears don’t write novels? Join Eagleman and his guest, composer Anthony Brandt, as they uncover the surprises about creativity.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
What is creativity and how does it work in the brain?
Are all brains creative? And what does that tell us
about the evolution of species and the evolution of ideas?
How do the arts expose what's happening in the brain,
and what does that have to do with how cell
phones got their names? And why koala bears don't write novels.
(00:30):
Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a
neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in these episodes
we dive into our three pound universe to uncover the
most surprising secrets behind our daily lives. Today's episode is
(00:55):
about creativity. What is it and how do brains do it?
And why do human brains do it better than anyone
else in the animal kingdom? So I'm going to start
tangentially with two stories that have hit the news in
recent weeks. The first is that there are no fewer
than nine copyright infringement lawsuits raging in the courts right now,
(01:18):
with groups suing Open Ai and Meta and other companies
for hundreds of millions of dollars. Now, the groups suing
are creatives, they're writers, and they're suing because their books
were consumed in the training of these massive generative AI systems,
these large language models like CHATCHPT. So one of the
(01:42):
suits calls this quote systematic theft on a mass scale.
In other words, the suit asserts that these large language
models are producing nothing fundamentally new. They're just recycling the
old and they're remixing that in different way ways. Okay,
so that was one story. The second story in the
(02:03):
news is that the company under Armour made an advertisement
that featured a boxer named Anthony Joshua, and this set
off a firestorm on Instagram because this claimed to be
the first AI powered sports commercial. Now the critics are
hating on it because they say the ad is just
repurposing work from other humans other creatives without proper acknowledgment.
(02:31):
And the debate around both these stories is highlighting the
broad issue of whether AI is going to undermine human
creativity because it treats all the accomplishments of previous artists
just as training data for doing its own thing, for
generating its own content, which it then takes credit for.
(02:51):
So many creatives are arguing that AI is going to
diminish the value of human creativity. It simply remixes things
that act o people have done before it. So that's
what I want to talk about today, because human creativity
is the most important reason our species has achieved what
it has. When you fly over a forest and you
(03:14):
look down on it from an airplane, the species in
that forest are doing the same thing that they were
doing one hundred thousand years ago. There's no difference. But
when you reach your destination and you're coming into any
modern city, you can see that the landscape has been
so influenced by one single species that it looks like
(03:34):
a giant, colorful motherboard of buildings has risen out of
the ground. There's something really different going on about humans,
And it's a reasonable question to ask, why don't squirrels
design elevators, Why don't alligators invent speedboats? Why don't koalas
(03:55):
spend their free time building an internet to surf? So
we're going to get into that shortly. Let me just
say that the reason we are communicating over a podcast,
shooting zeros and ones across the planet to transmit a
message from one human mouth to multiple human ears, is
because we are doing something very different than any other species.
(04:18):
We have occupied every corner of the planet. We have
a million human beings above the clouds at any moment
because of air travel. We have humans floating in the
International Space Station, and we've landed on other orbiting bodies
like the Moon, and our machines have landed on Mars.
And no other animal has even invented the wheel or
(04:40):
discovered fire, much less coordinated millions of its congeners into
kingdoms and nations. So let's be clear that there's something
very different going on with our species. Homo sapiens represents
a runaway species, and that term the runaway species is
(05:01):
in fact the title of a book that I wrote
with my close friend Anthony Brandt. Anthony is a professor
of music composition at the Shepherd School of Music, which
is part of Rice University, and generally he is a
sharp and sensitive thinker about creativity and he's a real
student of the brain. So years ago he and I
(05:22):
were getting a cup of coffee and we started talking
about creativity from the psychology point of view, from the
neuroscience point of view, from the point of view of
artistic endeavor, and we realized that our views on this
converged so much so that we both learned a lot
and we realized that we had a framework for understanding
(05:43):
what the creative act is, and we ended up writing
this book together. So I called up Anthony today to
be part of this conversation with me, and I started
by asking him what NASA and Picasso have in common.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
You know, back in nineteen seventy there was the famous
incident where the Apollo thirteen spacecraft completely lost power, three
astronauts lives hanging in the balance, and the NASA engineers
basically had just a few hours to improvise a solution,
and they had a very closed system. All they could
use to save those wonderful lives was what was on
(06:28):
board the spacecraft, and they had to use a shrink
wrap to help make an air scrubber. They had to
power the main capsule with the lunar module. Everything that
they did was spur of the moment, working together as
an amazing team bringing home the astronauts safely. Cut to
(06:49):
Picasso working alone in his studio near the turn of
the twentieth century painting this radical painting, the likes of
which no one had ever seen before, and he was
so nervous about it. He invited his mistress at the time,
his gallery distributor to come, and they laughed at it,
and he was feeling so uncomfortable and a shame. He
(07:10):
actually rolled up the painting and hid it in his closet,
but he kept feeling drawn to it, kept working on it,
but still when he finished, he wasn't even quite sure
he was finished, rolled it up again, put it in
his closet for nine years, and then put it out
into the world and became one of the breakthrough paintings
(07:32):
of the twentieth century. Le Demoiselle Davignan. And so you've
got the NASA engineers working collaboratively, Picasso working all by himself.
The NASA engineers with a very targeted result. What they
do has to work, it has to succeed otherwise the
astronauts parish. Picasso is doing something much more open ended
and speculative. He's inventing a new type of art. And
(07:55):
yet when you look carefully at what they were doing,
essentially their brains were doing very similar mental operations. They
were creating variations on things that were already there. They
were tearing up the world as they knew it and
putting it back together in new ways, and they were
mixing things in combinations that hadn't existed before, and each
(08:17):
was applying it in their own domain, but under the
hood of their brains what was happening is very deeply related.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
And it seems to be the key with creativity, right
is absorbing everything in the world around you, absorbing your
own experiences, and then remixing them, making something new out
of it. And what we did when we wrote our
book together is outlined sort of three different ways that
this can happen, three different cognitive operations that the software
(08:49):
of the brain is running. So tell us about those
three operations. So we called them bending, breaking, and blending.
Bending is making a copy and altering it. So fonts
are a great example of bending. I mean, why do
we need different typefaces for the same letters. They convey
(09:10):
the same information. But we have this compulsion to bend,
and so we create this unbelievable proliferation of variations. Jazz
improvisation is a type of bending. Different car models are
a type of bending. Anytime you take a prototype and
you remake it in some way, that's.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
A version of bending. So breaking involves taking something complete
and deconstructing it, tearing apart, pulling it apart into little
pieces that's what makes an LED screen possible. It's where
the birth of cell phones happened. Originally, there was only
one phone tower per urban area, and as a result,
(09:50):
only a few dozen people could get on their mobile
phones at the same time, and calls were dropping. It
was very frustrating, and then engineers at Bell Labs had
this idea, oh wait, what if we break up the
urban area into individual cells and give them each their
own tower, And then they design software so you could
drive in your car from one of those cells to
(10:10):
another without losing the call. And basically, modern mobile communication
was born out of that cognitive process of breaking and.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Not everyone is aware, but that's how cell phone gets
its name because the landscape is divided up into different.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Cells exactly exactly, and like so many things, that ingenuity
is hidden behind the scenes. We just take it for granted,
not realizing that this fundamental cognitive operation is responsible for it.
So blending, which is a term first introduced by our
colleagues Mark Turner and Jills Fauconnier, involves combining two or
(10:46):
more sources. And you know, a smartphone is a beautiful
example of a blend. Mermaids and centaurs are blends of
humans and animals. Compromise is a form of blending where
you work out with another person, Oh, you know, what
is our middle ground. I'll contribute something to the solution,
and you'll contribute to something to the solution. Blending is
(11:10):
so much a part of how we just approach our world. Again,
we take it for granted, but that's how we get
metaphors and house boats and fusion cuisine and so many
of the things that are familiar to us in our world.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Actually, so let's talk about that for a second, about
the things that are hidden behind the scenes and the
things that are obvious. So one of the things about
the world of art is that the bending, breaking and
blending is overt, is done so that everybody can see it.
And in the case of scientific breakthroughs or technological breakthroughs,
(12:02):
it's typically covert, as in most people don't see the
things that's happening there. But the argument we made is
that it's actually the same processes happening under the hood.
Tell us about that.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Yeah, I think that's one of the art's great cultural contributions.
In a sense, they are contributing to science in externalizing
internal features of how our minds work in a way
that is often hard to see. You know, there's a
cool example with YouTube. When you're watching HD video, you're
(12:34):
actually not watching HD video. You're watching a mosaic of
different levels of resolution, where YouTube is monitoring your computer's
bandwidth in real time and sending the resolution that'll make
it through. And the hope is that if there's enough
HD in that stream, you just think you're watching a
perfectly wonderful HD video and you don't realize that it's
(12:57):
actually created by all these little fragments.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
So you mean, what I'm seeing is some sort of
rough video, and then when my bandwidth is better for
a moment, I see the very clear high definition video,
and then I see some mixed up stuff in there.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
If it's done well, it happens all so fast that
you don't notice the pebbles among pearls, and you just think, oh,
this is great, My streaming is working perfectly. I'm not freezing,
and so on and so forth. And if YouTube engineers
have done their job, the creativity is completely hidden and
you don't even know that it's there. You just think
(13:31):
you're watching a video. What's wonderful and significant about the
arts is that the goal is actually to share the
inner workings of the creativity and have it be out
in the open, so you see the bending, breaking and
blending in a way that everyone can share. There's an
exhibition that the installation artist Christian Markley made where essentially
(13:53):
he told the time by clips from movies that showed
a clock in the background at that specific time. So
the way that installation works is it runs twenty four
hours a day. You can show up at any time
you want and say as long as you want, and
each second is shown by a different scene from a movie.
(14:14):
It's exactly the same principle at work in the YouTube,
but now you're actually experiencing the bending, breaking and blending
in front of you.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
Okay. So one of the questions that comes up often
is you look at some new invention and you think, wow,
that came out of the blue. For example, in two
thousand and six, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, one
of the reporters there called it the Jesus phone, by
which he meant it was an immaculate conception, nothing like
that had existed before, and then it just showed up.
(14:45):
But in fact, every idea has a genealogy that can
be traced in this case. You know, in nineteen ninety three,
IBM had introduced a cell phone with a touch screen.
Now this was very you know, earlier technology, So it
was a big brick of a cell phone and it
had just allows you little touch screen. But the idea
(15:07):
is that there's a smooth progression from there to here.
And this is true of all ideas. And this doesn't
reduce anything about the amazingness of the idea, the importance
of the idea. But everything has a genealogy because we
are remixing what's already in there and coming up with
new versions of things. So the question is, you know,
(15:29):
how do new ideas evolve.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
So new ideas evolve, we would say through this cognitive
process of bending, breaking, and blending. We take our storehouse
with experiences and essentially our minds are like a food
processor that scrambles it all up and comes up with
new possibilities. And that ability to generate what ifs and
(15:53):
hypotheticals is frankly part of what makes it most fun
to be a human being. I don't think we appreciate
just how much improvisation is part of our daily lives.
I mean, having a conversation is an improvisation. You know,
cookie dinner can be improvising. It takes a lot of
improvisation to raise your kids. Every time, we're making flexible solutions,
(16:18):
combining our inputs and coming up with some new wonderful
way to you know, entertain the kids or keep our
loved ones interested in us. We are being creative and
all of that relies on the bending, breaking and blending.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
So given this, given that we absorb our world and
remix it and spit out something new, how does your
time and place matter?
Speaker 2 (16:43):
So one thing very beautifully you've shared with your podcast
audiences is that a lot of our brains development happens
out in the world rather than in the womb. And
that makes us neurologically incredibly susceptible to our environment and
our upbringing. And you that with human creativity and our
way that we build community, and you end up with
(17:05):
incredible diversity around the world. I know this very well
in music my field, because you take somebody like Beethoven,
who was probably the most experimental, radical European composer of
his day, doing extraordinary things that were far ahead of
his time, but he never asked people to detom their
(17:27):
instruments to create beating. He didn't use the breathing into
a fluid for expressive purposes and make extraneous noises, and
consider that part of the drama. But that was happening
in honored traditions in Japan and the Far East at
the same time, halfway around the world. Their notion of
(17:47):
what was beautiful, what was meaningful was very different from Beethoven,
and to the people in each of those cultures, those
were complete, self contained, absolutely compelling worlds, and yet in
many ways not with much overlap.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
That's right, and this is why all new ideas evolve
from the old based on your culture. One of the
pictures that we have in the book is the evolution
of Greek helmets through time, and it's fascinating to see
the way that the models evolve and change, but each
one is clearly a function of what came before it.
(18:24):
But if you look at war helmets from across the
world and some other place in the world, they are
quite different. And this is because we take whatever we
have around us, whatever we absorb, and we use that
as the fodder that we're operating on. So what's fascinating
is that humans are so compelled to bend, break and
(18:48):
blend all the time. We sort of never stop doing this,
and so tell us about that.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
You know, sometimes there's this sphere everything that can be
done has already been done. There was even a book
at the turn of the twentieth century that said all
diseases had been cured. There was nothing left to do.
And you know, artists are always anxious. You know, it's
all been done, there's nothing new. But the story of
(19:14):
humanity is that there is no finish line because this
software is running in our brains all the time, and
just by bouncing off of what came right before us,
we're constantly pushing the envelope and going farther and farther.
And so, you know, you go from the stone age
of the very first knives to this amazing display in
(19:39):
countries like Polynesia of knives of every shape and size,
to you know, Swiss army knives and the latest gizmos
that are sold on late in ITV and on and
on it goes without stop, without stopping, and there's really
nothing where you can say, well, we reached the endpoint
and it can't get any better, including strativarious violins, where
(20:01):
now they're making them out of carbon fiber. They're lighter,
they are more durable, they don't warp in different weather
and people can't even tell the difference sometimes, and the
new instrument sounds just as beautiful as a strad umbrellas
you think, you know, most of us are like, okay,
(20:21):
the umbrella. You know, it's functional, it does what it
needs to do, keeps the rain off pretty much. People
have stopped working on that. Actually, so many people are
trying to make umbrellas that there are four people whose
full time job it is in the patent office to
review patents for new umbrellas. There's nowhere you look where
you say case closed, it's finished. Just stop right.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
People are trying to patent umbrellas where the for example,
the ribs bend the other way, or it's asymmetrical for
the wind, or you wear it like a backpack, and
on and on. Yeah, exactly. And in your field in music,
how do you see that, this constant compulsion to bend,
break and blend.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
Well, you see that in covers of songs in a
jazz improvisation, I mean, night after night, the same performer
will go and play the same wonderful jazz standard somewhere
over the rainbow. But it will never be the same
way twice. And you know, if you walked up to
that performer and said, well, you know, is that the
(21:25):
last time you're ever going to do this, then will
look look at you, you know, like what are you
talking about. The whole thrill of it is to constantly
reimagine and you know, come up with a new version.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
And you see this bending, breaking and blending in language
all around us too.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
Language is really built as a wonderful bending, breaking and
blending tool. For instance, there's fringe for lan slang where
syllables are flipped. So the word meshon, which means you're
being mean, is sean May and originally it was developed
by you know, people in the underworld, so the Katalkan
(22:04):
code and the police wildn't understand what they were saying,
but verlong became so commonplace that now just everybody in
France uses it, and then abbreviations are great examples of breaking.
The word gymnasium is the Greek word for exercising in
the nude, and we very comfortably turned that into jim
(22:25):
with you know, a less exacting dress code and blending
happens all the time in composite words railroad, heart, throb, suitcase, etc.
And in fact, one of the interesting things is different
languages will blend different words to express the same idea.
(22:46):
So we call it a rail road. In French, it's
chamande fair, which means iron road. And part of the
fun of excavating languages is to see how different brains
in different communities are marring eye in different ways.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Yeah, you know, it's always been interesting to me how
invisible these blends become to us. For example, I think
it's the case that most people don't think about the
word rainbow as you know, a bow like a bow
and arrow that you get from the rain. But that's
how language evolves, is by putting things together like that.
Let's come back to this issue about science and art.
(23:24):
So one example that is very cool is with chimeras.
So in the world of art, there's this idea of
putting together different creatures. You mentioned a mermaid before, we're
putting together a woman and a fish, and you get
this mermaid. And what's interesting is that you see these
same kind of things happening in science. So tell us
(23:45):
about the goat named freckles.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
So there's Freckles, a spider goat. How did that come
to be? Well, spider silk is one of the strongest
materials in nature and could potentially be used for things
like bulletproof bests. But the problem is it's very hard
to harvest spider silk. You put enough spiders together and
(24:10):
they eat each other. It takes literally millions of them
just to create a few square yards of silk. So
scientists were wondering, you know, is there a more efficient
way that we could produce this, And there was a
biologist who came up with the idea of splicing the
gene or spider silk into the genetic code of a goat,
(24:31):
and thus was born Freckles, the spider goat who secretes
spider silk in her milk. And they've been able to
harvest significant quantities of that by creating an actual, real
life chimera.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
So is what is happening in the brain of a
chemist different than what's happening in the brain of a composer.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
To some degree, of course, it takes special expertise and
knowledge to be a chemist. That's really different from the
preparation that takes to write a piece of music. But
the amazing thing about human beings is that we apply
our creativity to everything we do. So there is a
part of what we are born equipped with that is
a general purpose creativity software that can be mobilized for
(25:19):
anything we care to apply our creativity to. That, again,
is one of the superpowers that we have as a species.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
This is really what has launched humans into this success
that we've had compared to all our animal neighbors. You know,
we've erected skyscrapers and composed symphony and invent you know,
medicines and get to the moon and stuff like that.
Because each generation that's born doesn't have to you know,
just live the life of what happened before them, they
(26:00):
can learn about that because of brain plasticity, they can
absorb everything that came before them and then springboard off
that into the future. And the way they do that
is by taking in all that data and then remixing
it and coming up with new versions of things.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
No, I mean again, not to take anything away from animals,
but if you were like a guidance counselor for crocodiles
fifty thousand years ago, and you know, what are you
going to do with your life. The answer would be
pretty much the same then as it is now. And
if you were a guidance counselor for the earliest hominids,
(26:37):
I mean to say they would be astonished at the
possibilities of what a human being can do now, you know,
would be a big understatement. And every single bit of
that is due to creativity running in every single human brain.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
That's right, And we do see creativity happening in various
ways in the animal world. There's just not nearly as
much of it.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
So, yes, there's creativity in the animal kingdom, for sure,
but it's very targeted. So there are birds that design
very colorful creative ness, but they sing the same song
all the time. There are whale songs that change in
pods over time, but they don't apply their creativity in
other parts of their lives. What makes human special is
(27:24):
we treat creativity as this all purpose, general purpose tool
that we apply to everything that we do.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Right, So, as brains take in data, they're constantly bending
and breaking and blending that data to come up with
new things. And we do this more than other animals.
And when we look at what is different or special
about human brains, what we see are a few things.
One of them is just the size of the core
texas the wrinkly outer part. We just have much more
(27:53):
of it than any of our neighbors as a relative
to our body size. And one of the things that
gives is much more real estate in between the inputs
and the outputs. So if you're a cat and I
put some food in front of you, your visual system
is going to see that and your motor system is
(28:14):
going to eat the food. But with humans, because we
have more computational capacity in between the in and the out,
we can say, Okay, maybe I won't eat it, I'm
on a diet, maybe I'll eat it later. Things like that.
We just have more options, more possibilities that we can
take as a result. The other thing is we have
these huge frontal lobes, that's the part behind the forehead,
(28:34):
and this is what allows us to simulate what ifs,
possible futures. And this is a really big deal. And
this is what I've suggested in a different episode is what,
at least at the moment, as far as we can tell,
separates us from AI is that AI can be massively
creative because it's constantly bending and breaking and blending things.
It does a really good job at that. But the
(28:56):
thing that allows humans to do scientific discovery, at least
the moment that AI can't do is think about what
ifs and then evaluate those and think about, Okay, how
would I know if I were writing on a photon
and going the speed of light? What would things be like?
What would things look like? That's what we are really
good at.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
Doing, building out what you're saying. A lot of the
large languid models are also aimed towards the mean. They're
aimed towards the average. They're aim towards the most common solution,
because that makes the AI more likely to be correct.
And humans are able sometimes to choose unlikely propositions and
(29:36):
then develop them and build them. So you know, you
think about the theory of relativity, for instance, and so
I sign comes up with the idea, wait, the speed
of light is constant to all observers, rather than trying
to fold that into our real life experience and our
common sense says with how the world works, he's able
(29:57):
to go beyond that, beyond any availab data that he
had in his time, to realize that that meant you
get heavier as you approach the speed of light, that
absolute simultaneity doesn't exist, that there's such a thing as
superluminal connections. And right now AI systems are totally constrained
by their data and they will always attempt to normalize it.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
What's interesting is that you can push the AI by
the way and force it to give you less and
less probable answers. And interestingly, people talk about this as
hallucination of these large language models. But another way to
view this is hypothesis generation. It's really great actually at
saying okay, well maybe this maybe that. The interesting part
(30:43):
is it doesn't have the capacity right now to say, hey,
here's an interesting hypothesis. Now I'm going to actually evaluate
that and think about it that way. It just doesn't
have the capacity to do that. But what it does
seem to have is the capacity to bend, break, and blend,
which is very cool. So you know, ten years ago
when people were talking about computers, people said, okay, well,
(31:06):
computers can't be creative, and the reason was because they
weren't doing bending, breaking, blending. They were just repeating whatever
was put in. Now they're actually doing that remixing all
the time, which allows us to be creative. The interesting
part is there are actually two sides to creativity. One
is the generation of new ideas, and the other is
(31:31):
the filtering. You say, Okay, well that was not so good.
That was that's so good. And humans, you know, we
happen to know what it is like to be other humans,
and so we're pretty good at saying, okay, I'm going
to bag that one and kill that one because that
won't be interesting to my fellow people. But computers at
the moment aren't so good at the filtering part.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
I one hundred percent agree that. Get back to the
whole time and place. We're born into a particular cultural situation,
and we are very aptible, and we're very sensitive to
the community and how they will respond and what's taking
things too far, what's so implausible, No one will understand it,
(32:10):
what's so ordinary, it'll just get overlooked. And the computer
right now isn't able to evaluate itself in that way
exactly as you're saying. It doesn't recognize when it has
its own best ideas and then says, wait a second,
that was a really good one. Let me build on that.
And it has no sense at all of this. One
will fly and that joke is just not funny at all.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
Right, because it doesn't know what it is like to
be a human and find something funny.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Right. Yes, And I think one of the most interesting
things about AI creativity as it's developing is the light
it shines on some of the unexplored and underappreciated facets
of human creativity. So, for instance, AI is essentially a
great improviser. It works on the same principle as the
yes and principle in theater, going from one thing to
(33:01):
the next, to the next to the next, but never
looking backwards, never questioning itself, never saying, oh, well, now
that I ended up here, let me go back and
revise the first chapter. We have this incredible time jumping,
reverse chronology, flexible way of looking at things holistically and granularly.
I mean again, one is just awe struck at the
(33:24):
power of the machinery that we have in terms of
the flexibility of turning things right side up, upside down
and inside out.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
So how does our social context affect our creativity?
Speaker 2 (33:38):
So it's great to have this machinery we've been talking
about working in our heads, but what really supercharges is
our need to engage each other. As you've shared on
the podcast, brains are infotropic, so they're attracted to new information,
and that's really critical for social bonding. Imagine waking up
every day and saying that the same thing to your
(34:01):
loved one, getting them the same present for their birthday,
cooking them the same thing for dinner. It's hard to
imagine that a relationship is going to last very long
because we tune out to the familiar, and there's a
phenomenon repetition suppression, where the more stimulus is repetitive or predictable,
the less attention we pay to it. And you can
(34:23):
see this on neuroimaging scans, where the first time someone
has shown a surprise, you know, a huge part of
their brain lights up. But then if you keep repeating
that surprise at regular intervals, eventually becomes a tiny little
dot in the brain. Their brain has made it part
of its internal model of reality and doesn't care anymore.
(34:44):
And that is fatal to social relationships. And as essentially
the most social species on the planet, we learned to
leverage our creativity to keep the people around us enchanted.
You know, often it's talked about the birth of human
culture was sitting around a campfire telling stories after hunting
(35:05):
wooly mammoths, and to a large degree, that probably gets
to the heart of why we are such a creative species.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
That's right. Yeah, you see it. At dinner party, someone
tells the funny story and everyone laughs. You would never
see someone then tell that story a second time, right then,
right exactly, And nobody watches the basketball game from last
week a second time. There's no reason to watch it
a second time. What we care about is the surprise,
(35:33):
the new information, that's right, And this is because the
brain is constantly seeking to update its internal model, and
it does so by surprise. When it sees something that
it was not expecting, then it knows, Oops, there's a
place that I need to improve the model over there.
And so that's why we're totally attracted to surprise and
things that are novel.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
And I would go so far as to say that
creativity became one of our most useful tools for self
generating surprise. In other words, we like our internal model
of reality to always be under construction because that keeps
us very engaged in alert and in a sense partners
with consciousness and keeping us present in the moment and
(36:16):
connected to each other.
Speaker 1 (36:18):
Yeah, And in the animal world we see this trade
off between exploration and exploitation. In other words, animals explore
their environment and they try to figure out what's going on,
and once they get it, okay, I can get the
grubworms under these rocks or whatever. They spend about eighty
percent of their time exploiting the data that they know,
but across the animal kingdom they spend about twenty percent
(36:40):
of their time exploring new things. And it turns out
this is evolutionarily very useful because you never know when
the world is going to change. So if you're constantly
keeping a finger on the pulse of other possible paths,
that's the way to stay alive when things change.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
And in a sense, that's the evolutionary roots of our creativity.
We have the rest of the animal kingdom to thank
for that exploration necessity being built into our brains, and
then our need to build community kind of took that
to the next level.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
So that was my friend Anthony Brandt, and in the
book we co authored, The Runaway Species, we examined how
human brains generate creativity by constantly remixing its inputs, and
this is we argue part of the basic operating system
of the brain. So the way to think about this
is if you look at a graphics program that says, hi,
(37:41):
I rotate photographs by forty five degrees. The program doesn't
care what the photograph is. The photo can be of
ostriches or kazoos or volcanoes or whatever. The program doesn't care.
It just performs the rotation operation on the pixels. It
just doesn't matter what the photograph is about. And this
is the same thing your brain is doing. You are
(38:05):
born in your moment of space and time, and you
move through the world and absorb the art and science
and language around you, and that's what you remix. So,
as Anthony said, if you're born in Japan five hundred
years ago, you will write one kind of music, And
if you are Beethoven born in Europe at the same time,
(38:28):
you'll write a different kind of music because you're absorbing
different data. And if you are in New York in
the current day, you have a very different set of
worldwide music to draw from. And if you're composing twenty
five years from now, your diet will consist of ai
music and things you never even realized. You hadn't thought
(38:50):
of new innovations driven by humans and by machines, and
that's what you'll take to be the background furniture, and
you'll in on that. So, given what we talked about today,
I want to circle back to the controversies I highlighted
at the beginning of the episode where Open AI is
getting sued and Under Armour is getting criticized because people
(39:15):
are saying that the AI is merely absorbing what is
out there and then remixing its own versions. And I
think it's an interesting question to ask whether humans have
ever done otherwise, because that's what human creativity is, and
we typically like to compliment ourselves and tell the story
(39:36):
of how we came up with things out of the blue,
leveraging our individual brilliance. But the fact is we are
each born in a particular place, in a particular moment
of time, and all we ever have to work with
are the pieces and parts that our culture provides, pieces
and parts that have each been touched on and worked
(39:58):
over by the people before us. So, although it's a
jagged pill to swallow, it's interesting to consider this possibility.
Let's say about that Under Armoured commercial that was accused
of copying the styles of work from several other creatives
without proper acknowledgment. If a human director had made that
(40:20):
same ad a few years ago, we would have agreed.
Of course, he took inspiration from the work of other creatives.
That's his diet, that's what he has to draw from,
and we certainly would have no expectation that at the
end of his commercial he would list all the sources,
all the other commercials from which he took inspiration. We
(40:41):
wouldn't say, hey, you remixed all these inspirations without proper acknowledgement.
And in fact, this is what companies like OpenAI and
Meta are arguing in court now that their language models
learn from books the same way that humans do. The
language models original work that is a transformation of its sources,
(41:04):
just like humans do. Therefore, these companies are arguing in
courte that this training is legal. It is quote quintessential
fair use unquote. So we're in an interesting time. Is
it just human chauvinism where we're okay remixing things ourselves,
but we don't want a machine doing it because it
(41:25):
can do it faster. I don't know the answer to this,
but I do think the questions about creativity will gain
refinement as we get clearer on what human brains actually
do and what AI does, and what these have in common.
In any case, one of the great pleasures of being
here on this planet, whether we're surrounded by other humans
(41:47):
or by machines, is that, even though we often feel
like everything that can be done has already been done,
there's just no end on the horizon for what this
run of way species and our inventions will create. Next.
(42:09):
Go to eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information
and to find further reading. Send me an email at
podcast at eagleman dot com with questions or discussion, and
check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for
videos of each episode and to leave comments. Until next time.
I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.
What is creativity and how does it work in the brain?
Are all brains creative? And what does that tell us
about the evolution of species and the evolution of ideas?
How do the arts expose what's happening in the brain,
and what does that have to do with how cell
phones got their names? And why koala bears don't write novels.
(00:30):
Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a
neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in these episodes
we dive into our three pound universe to uncover the
most surprising secrets behind our daily lives. Today's episode is
(00:55):
about creativity. What is it and how do brains do it?
And why do human brains do it better than anyone
else in the animal kingdom? So I'm going to start
tangentially with two stories that have hit the news in
recent weeks. The first is that there are no fewer
than nine copyright infringement lawsuits raging in the courts right now,
(01:18):
with groups suing Open Ai and Meta and other companies
for hundreds of millions of dollars. Now, the groups suing
are creatives, they're writers, and they're suing because their books
were consumed in the training of these massive generative AI systems,
these large language models like CHATCHPT. So one of the
(01:42):
suits calls this quote systematic theft on a mass scale.
In other words, the suit asserts that these large language
models are producing nothing fundamentally new. They're just recycling the
old and they're remixing that in different way ways. Okay,
so that was one story. The second story in the
(02:03):
news is that the company under Armour made an advertisement
that featured a boxer named Anthony Joshua, and this set
off a firestorm on Instagram because this claimed to be
the first AI powered sports commercial. Now the critics are
hating on it because they say the ad is just
repurposing work from other humans other creatives without proper acknowledgment.
(02:31):
And the debate around both these stories is highlighting the
broad issue of whether AI is going to undermine human
creativity because it treats all the accomplishments of previous artists
just as training data for doing its own thing, for
generating its own content, which it then takes credit for.
(02:51):
So many creatives are arguing that AI is going to
diminish the value of human creativity. It simply remixes things
that act o people have done before it. So that's
what I want to talk about today, because human creativity
is the most important reason our species has achieved what
it has. When you fly over a forest and you
(03:14):
look down on it from an airplane, the species in
that forest are doing the same thing that they were
doing one hundred thousand years ago. There's no difference. But
when you reach your destination and you're coming into any
modern city, you can see that the landscape has been
so influenced by one single species that it looks like
(03:34):
a giant, colorful motherboard of buildings has risen out of
the ground. There's something really different going on about humans,
And it's a reasonable question to ask, why don't squirrels
design elevators, Why don't alligators invent speedboats? Why don't koalas
(03:55):
spend their free time building an internet to surf? So
we're going to get into that shortly. Let me just
say that the reason we are communicating over a podcast,
shooting zeros and ones across the planet to transmit a
message from one human mouth to multiple human ears, is
because we are doing something very different than any other species.
(04:18):
We have occupied every corner of the planet. We have
a million human beings above the clouds at any moment
because of air travel. We have humans floating in the
International Space Station, and we've landed on other orbiting bodies
like the Moon, and our machines have landed on Mars.
And no other animal has even invented the wheel or
(04:40):
discovered fire, much less coordinated millions of its congeners into
kingdoms and nations. So let's be clear that there's something
very different going on with our species. Homo sapiens represents
a runaway species, and that term the runaway species is
(05:01):
in fact the title of a book that I wrote
with my close friend Anthony Brandt. Anthony is a professor
of music composition at the Shepherd School of Music, which
is part of Rice University, and generally he is a
sharp and sensitive thinker about creativity and he's a real
student of the brain. So years ago he and I
(05:22):
were getting a cup of coffee and we started talking
about creativity from the psychology point of view, from the
neuroscience point of view, from the point of view of
artistic endeavor, and we realized that our views on this
converged so much so that we both learned a lot
and we realized that we had a framework for understanding
(05:43):
what the creative act is, and we ended up writing
this book together. So I called up Anthony today to
be part of this conversation with me, and I started
by asking him what NASA and Picasso have in common.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
You know, back in nineteen seventy there was the famous
incident where the Apollo thirteen spacecraft completely lost power, three
astronauts lives hanging in the balance, and the NASA engineers
basically had just a few hours to improvise a solution,
and they had a very closed system. All they could
use to save those wonderful lives was what was on
(06:28):
board the spacecraft, and they had to use a shrink
wrap to help make an air scrubber. They had to
power the main capsule with the lunar module. Everything that
they did was spur of the moment, working together as
an amazing team bringing home the astronauts safely. Cut to
(06:49):
Picasso working alone in his studio near the turn of
the twentieth century painting this radical painting, the likes of
which no one had ever seen before, and he was
so nervous about it. He invited his mistress at the time,
his gallery distributor to come, and they laughed at it,
and he was feeling so uncomfortable and a shame. He
(07:10):
actually rolled up the painting and hid it in his closet,
but he kept feeling drawn to it, kept working on it,
but still when he finished, he wasn't even quite sure
he was finished, rolled it up again, put it in
his closet for nine years, and then put it out
into the world and became one of the breakthrough paintings
(07:32):
of the twentieth century. Le Demoiselle Davignan. And so you've
got the NASA engineers working collaboratively, Picasso working all by himself.
The NASA engineers with a very targeted result. What they
do has to work, it has to succeed otherwise the
astronauts parish. Picasso is doing something much more open ended
and speculative. He's inventing a new type of art. And
(07:55):
yet when you look carefully at what they were doing,
essentially their brains were doing very similar mental operations. They
were creating variations on things that were already there. They
were tearing up the world as they knew it and
putting it back together in new ways, and they were
mixing things in combinations that hadn't existed before, and each
(08:17):
was applying it in their own domain, but under the
hood of their brains what was happening is very deeply related.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
And it seems to be the key with creativity, right
is absorbing everything in the world around you, absorbing your
own experiences, and then remixing them, making something new out
of it. And what we did when we wrote our
book together is outlined sort of three different ways that
this can happen, three different cognitive operations that the software
(08:49):
of the brain is running. So tell us about those
three operations. So we called them bending, breaking, and blending.
Bending is making a copy and altering it. So fonts
are a great example of bending. I mean, why do
we need different typefaces for the same letters. They convey
(09:10):
the same information. But we have this compulsion to bend,
and so we create this unbelievable proliferation of variations. Jazz
improvisation is a type of bending. Different car models are
a type of bending. Anytime you take a prototype and
you remake it in some way, that's.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
A version of bending. So breaking involves taking something complete
and deconstructing it, tearing apart, pulling it apart into little
pieces that's what makes an LED screen possible. It's where
the birth of cell phones happened. Originally, there was only
one phone tower per urban area, and as a result,
(09:50):
only a few dozen people could get on their mobile
phones at the same time, and calls were dropping. It
was very frustrating, and then engineers at Bell Labs had
this idea, oh wait, what if we break up the
urban area into individual cells and give them each their
own tower, And then they design software so you could
drive in your car from one of those cells to
(10:10):
another without losing the call. And basically, modern mobile communication
was born out of that cognitive process of breaking and.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Not everyone is aware, but that's how cell phone gets
its name because the landscape is divided up into different.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Cells exactly exactly, and like so many things, that ingenuity
is hidden behind the scenes. We just take it for granted,
not realizing that this fundamental cognitive operation is responsible for it.
So blending, which is a term first introduced by our
colleagues Mark Turner and Jills Fauconnier, involves combining two or
(10:46):
more sources. And you know, a smartphone is a beautiful
example of a blend. Mermaids and centaurs are blends of
humans and animals. Compromise is a form of blending where
you work out with another person, Oh, you know, what
is our middle ground. I'll contribute something to the solution,
and you'll contribute to something to the solution. Blending is
(11:10):
so much a part of how we just approach our world. Again,
we take it for granted, but that's how we get
metaphors and house boats and fusion cuisine and so many
of the things that are familiar to us in our world.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Actually, so let's talk about that for a second, about
the things that are hidden behind the scenes and the
things that are obvious. So one of the things about
the world of art is that the bending, breaking and
blending is overt, is done so that everybody can see it.
And in the case of scientific breakthroughs or technological breakthroughs,
(12:02):
it's typically covert, as in most people don't see the
things that's happening there. But the argument we made is
that it's actually the same processes happening under the hood.
Tell us about that.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Yeah, I think that's one of the art's great cultural contributions.
In a sense, they are contributing to science in externalizing
internal features of how our minds work in a way
that is often hard to see. You know, there's a
cool example with YouTube. When you're watching HD video, you're
(12:34):
actually not watching HD video. You're watching a mosaic of
different levels of resolution, where YouTube is monitoring your computer's
bandwidth in real time and sending the resolution that'll make
it through. And the hope is that if there's enough
HD in that stream, you just think you're watching a
perfectly wonderful HD video and you don't realize that it's
(12:57):
actually created by all these little fragments.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
So you mean, what I'm seeing is some sort of
rough video, and then when my bandwidth is better for
a moment, I see the very clear high definition video,
and then I see some mixed up stuff in there.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
If it's done well, it happens all so fast that
you don't notice the pebbles among pearls, and you just think, oh,
this is great, My streaming is working perfectly. I'm not freezing,
and so on and so forth. And if YouTube engineers
have done their job, the creativity is completely hidden and
you don't even know that it's there. You just think
(13:31):
you're watching a video. What's wonderful and significant about the
arts is that the goal is actually to share the
inner workings of the creativity and have it be out
in the open, so you see the bending, breaking and
blending in a way that everyone can share. There's an
exhibition that the installation artist Christian Markley made where essentially
(13:53):
he told the time by clips from movies that showed
a clock in the background at that specific time. So
the way that installation works is it runs twenty four
hours a day. You can show up at any time
you want and say as long as you want, and
each second is shown by a different scene from a movie.
(14:14):
It's exactly the same principle at work in the YouTube,
but now you're actually experiencing the bending, breaking and blending
in front of you.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
Okay. So one of the questions that comes up often
is you look at some new invention and you think, wow,
that came out of the blue. For example, in two
thousand and six, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, one
of the reporters there called it the Jesus phone, by
which he meant it was an immaculate conception, nothing like
that had existed before, and then it just showed up.
(14:45):
But in fact, every idea has a genealogy that can
be traced in this case. You know, in nineteen ninety three,
IBM had introduced a cell phone with a touch screen.
Now this was very you know, earlier technology, So it
was a big brick of a cell phone and it
had just allows you little touch screen. But the idea
(15:07):
is that there's a smooth progression from there to here.
And this is true of all ideas. And this doesn't
reduce anything about the amazingness of the idea, the importance
of the idea. But everything has a genealogy because we
are remixing what's already in there and coming up with
new versions of things. So the question is, you know,
(15:29):
how do new ideas evolve.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
So new ideas evolve, we would say through this cognitive
process of bending, breaking, and blending. We take our storehouse
with experiences and essentially our minds are like a food
processor that scrambles it all up and comes up with
new possibilities. And that ability to generate what ifs and
(15:53):
hypotheticals is frankly part of what makes it most fun
to be a human being. I don't think we appreciate
just how much improvisation is part of our daily lives.
I mean, having a conversation is an improvisation. You know,
cookie dinner can be improvising. It takes a lot of
improvisation to raise your kids. Every time, we're making flexible solutions,
(16:18):
combining our inputs and coming up with some new wonderful
way to you know, entertain the kids or keep our
loved ones interested in us. We are being creative and
all of that relies on the bending, breaking and blending.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
So given this, given that we absorb our world and
remix it and spit out something new, how does your
time and place matter?
Speaker 2 (16:43):
So one thing very beautifully you've shared with your podcast
audiences is that a lot of our brains development happens
out in the world rather than in the womb. And
that makes us neurologically incredibly susceptible to our environment and
our upbringing. And you that with human creativity and our
way that we build community, and you end up with
(17:05):
incredible diversity around the world. I know this very well
in music my field, because you take somebody like Beethoven,
who was probably the most experimental, radical European composer of
his day, doing extraordinary things that were far ahead of
his time, but he never asked people to detom their
(17:27):
instruments to create beating. He didn't use the breathing into
a fluid for expressive purposes and make extraneous noises, and
consider that part of the drama. But that was happening
in honored traditions in Japan and the Far East at
the same time, halfway around the world. Their notion of
(17:47):
what was beautiful, what was meaningful was very different from Beethoven,
and to the people in each of those cultures, those
were complete, self contained, absolutely compelling worlds, and yet in
many ways not with much overlap.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
That's right, and this is why all new ideas evolve
from the old based on your culture. One of the
pictures that we have in the book is the evolution
of Greek helmets through time, and it's fascinating to see
the way that the models evolve and change, but each
one is clearly a function of what came before it.
(18:24):
But if you look at war helmets from across the
world and some other place in the world, they are
quite different. And this is because we take whatever we
have around us, whatever we absorb, and we use that
as the fodder that we're operating on. So what's fascinating
is that humans are so compelled to bend, break and
(18:48):
blend all the time. We sort of never stop doing this,
and so tell us about that.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
You know, sometimes there's this sphere everything that can be
done has already been done. There was even a book
at the turn of the twentieth century that said all
diseases had been cured. There was nothing left to do.
And you know, artists are always anxious. You know, it's
all been done, there's nothing new. But the story of
(19:14):
humanity is that there is no finish line because this
software is running in our brains all the time, and
just by bouncing off of what came right before us,
we're constantly pushing the envelope and going farther and farther.
And so, you know, you go from the stone age
of the very first knives to this amazing display in
(19:39):
countries like Polynesia of knives of every shape and size,
to you know, Swiss army knives and the latest gizmos
that are sold on late in ITV and on and
on it goes without stop, without stopping, and there's really
nothing where you can say, well, we reached the endpoint
and it can't get any better, including strativarious violins, where
(20:01):
now they're making them out of carbon fiber. They're lighter,
they are more durable, they don't warp in different weather
and people can't even tell the difference sometimes, and the
new instrument sounds just as beautiful as a strad umbrellas
you think, you know, most of us are like, okay,
(20:21):
the umbrella. You know, it's functional, it does what it
needs to do, keeps the rain off pretty much. People
have stopped working on that. Actually, so many people are
trying to make umbrellas that there are four people whose
full time job it is in the patent office to
review patents for new umbrellas. There's nowhere you look where
you say case closed, it's finished. Just stop right.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
People are trying to patent umbrellas where the for example,
the ribs bend the other way, or it's asymmetrical for
the wind, or you wear it like a backpack, and
on and on. Yeah, exactly. And in your field in music,
how do you see that, this constant compulsion to bend,
break and blend.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
Well, you see that in covers of songs in a
jazz improvisation, I mean, night after night, the same performer
will go and play the same wonderful jazz standard somewhere
over the rainbow. But it will never be the same
way twice. And you know, if you walked up to
that performer and said, well, you know, is that the
(21:25):
last time you're ever going to do this, then will
look look at you, you know, like what are you
talking about. The whole thrill of it is to constantly
reimagine and you know, come up with a new version.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
And you see this bending, breaking and blending in language
all around us too.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
Language is really built as a wonderful bending, breaking and
blending tool. For instance, there's fringe for lan slang where
syllables are flipped. So the word meshon, which means you're
being mean, is sean May and originally it was developed
by you know, people in the underworld, so the Katalkan
(22:04):
code and the police wildn't understand what they were saying,
but verlong became so commonplace that now just everybody in
France uses it, and then abbreviations are great examples of breaking.
The word gymnasium is the Greek word for exercising in
the nude, and we very comfortably turned that into jim
(22:25):
with you know, a less exacting dress code and blending
happens all the time in composite words railroad, heart, throb, suitcase, etc.
And in fact, one of the interesting things is different
languages will blend different words to express the same idea.
(22:46):
So we call it a rail road. In French, it's
chamande fair, which means iron road. And part of the
fun of excavating languages is to see how different brains
in different communities are marring eye in different ways.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Yeah, you know, it's always been interesting to me how
invisible these blends become to us. For example, I think
it's the case that most people don't think about the
word rainbow as you know, a bow like a bow
and arrow that you get from the rain. But that's
how language evolves, is by putting things together like that.
Let's come back to this issue about science and art.
(23:24):
So one example that is very cool is with chimeras.
So in the world of art, there's this idea of
putting together different creatures. You mentioned a mermaid before, we're
putting together a woman and a fish, and you get
this mermaid. And what's interesting is that you see these
same kind of things happening in science. So tell us
(23:45):
about the goat named freckles.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
So there's Freckles, a spider goat. How did that come
to be? Well, spider silk is one of the strongest
materials in nature and could potentially be used for things
like bulletproof bests. But the problem is it's very hard
to harvest spider silk. You put enough spiders together and
(24:10):
they eat each other. It takes literally millions of them
just to create a few square yards of silk. So
scientists were wondering, you know, is there a more efficient
way that we could produce this, And there was a
biologist who came up with the idea of splicing the
gene or spider silk into the genetic code of a goat,
(24:31):
and thus was born Freckles, the spider goat who secretes
spider silk in her milk. And they've been able to
harvest significant quantities of that by creating an actual, real
life chimera.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
So is what is happening in the brain of a
chemist different than what's happening in the brain of a composer.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
To some degree, of course, it takes special expertise and
knowledge to be a chemist. That's really different from the
preparation that takes to write a piece of music. But
the amazing thing about human beings is that we apply
our creativity to everything we do. So there is a
part of what we are born equipped with that is
a general purpose creativity software that can be mobilized for
(25:19):
anything we care to apply our creativity to. That, again,
is one of the superpowers that we have as a species.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
This is really what has launched humans into this success
that we've had compared to all our animal neighbors. You know,
we've erected skyscrapers and composed symphony and invent you know,
medicines and get to the moon and stuff like that.
Because each generation that's born doesn't have to you know,
just live the life of what happened before them, they
(26:00):
can learn about that because of brain plasticity, they can
absorb everything that came before them and then springboard off
that into the future. And the way they do that
is by taking in all that data and then remixing
it and coming up with new versions of things.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
No, I mean again, not to take anything away from animals,
but if you were like a guidance counselor for crocodiles
fifty thousand years ago, and you know, what are you
going to do with your life. The answer would be
pretty much the same then as it is now. And
if you were a guidance counselor for the earliest hominids,
(26:37):
I mean to say they would be astonished at the
possibilities of what a human being can do now, you know,
would be a big understatement. And every single bit of
that is due to creativity running in every single human brain.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
That's right, And we do see creativity happening in various
ways in the animal world. There's just not nearly as
much of it.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
So, yes, there's creativity in the animal kingdom, for sure,
but it's very targeted. So there are birds that design
very colorful creative ness, but they sing the same song
all the time. There are whale songs that change in
pods over time, but they don't apply their creativity in
other parts of their lives. What makes human special is
(27:24):
we treat creativity as this all purpose, general purpose tool
that we apply to everything that we do.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Right, So, as brains take in data, they're constantly bending
and breaking and blending that data to come up with
new things. And we do this more than other animals.
And when we look at what is different or special
about human brains, what we see are a few things.
One of them is just the size of the core
texas the wrinkly outer part. We just have much more
(27:53):
of it than any of our neighbors as a relative
to our body size. And one of the things that
gives is much more real estate in between the inputs
and the outputs. So if you're a cat and I
put some food in front of you, your visual system
is going to see that and your motor system is
(28:14):
going to eat the food. But with humans, because we
have more computational capacity in between the in and the out,
we can say, Okay, maybe I won't eat it, I'm
on a diet, maybe I'll eat it later. Things like that.
We just have more options, more possibilities that we can
take as a result. The other thing is we have
these huge frontal lobes, that's the part behind the forehead,
(28:34):
and this is what allows us to simulate what ifs,
possible futures. And this is a really big deal. And
this is what I've suggested in a different episode is what,
at least at the moment, as far as we can tell,
separates us from AI is that AI can be massively
creative because it's constantly bending and breaking and blending things.
It does a really good job at that. But the
(28:56):
thing that allows humans to do scientific discovery, at least
the moment that AI can't do is think about what
ifs and then evaluate those and think about, Okay, how
would I know if I were writing on a photon
and going the speed of light? What would things be like?
What would things look like? That's what we are really
good at.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
Doing, building out what you're saying. A lot of the
large languid models are also aimed towards the mean. They're
aimed towards the average. They're aim towards the most common solution,
because that makes the AI more likely to be correct.
And humans are able sometimes to choose unlikely propositions and
(29:36):
then develop them and build them. So you know, you
think about the theory of relativity, for instance, and so
I sign comes up with the idea, wait, the speed
of light is constant to all observers, rather than trying
to fold that into our real life experience and our
common sense says with how the world works, he's able
(29:57):
to go beyond that, beyond any availab data that he
had in his time, to realize that that meant you
get heavier as you approach the speed of light, that
absolute simultaneity doesn't exist, that there's such a thing as
superluminal connections. And right now AI systems are totally constrained
by their data and they will always attempt to normalize it.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
What's interesting is that you can push the AI by
the way and force it to give you less and
less probable answers. And interestingly, people talk about this as
hallucination of these large language models. But another way to
view this is hypothesis generation. It's really great actually at
saying okay, well maybe this maybe that. The interesting part
(30:43):
is it doesn't have the capacity right now to say, hey,
here's an interesting hypothesis. Now I'm going to actually evaluate
that and think about it that way. It just doesn't
have the capacity to do that. But what it does
seem to have is the capacity to bend, break, and blend,
which is very cool. So you know, ten years ago
when people were talking about computers, people said, okay, well,
(31:06):
computers can't be creative, and the reason was because they
weren't doing bending, breaking, blending. They were just repeating whatever
was put in. Now they're actually doing that remixing all
the time, which allows us to be creative. The interesting
part is there are actually two sides to creativity. One
is the generation of new ideas, and the other is
(31:31):
the filtering. You say, Okay, well that was not so good.
That was that's so good. And humans, you know, we
happen to know what it is like to be other humans,
and so we're pretty good at saying, okay, I'm going
to bag that one and kill that one because that
won't be interesting to my fellow people. But computers at
the moment aren't so good at the filtering part.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
I one hundred percent agree that. Get back to the
whole time and place. We're born into a particular cultural situation,
and we are very aptible, and we're very sensitive to
the community and how they will respond and what's taking
things too far, what's so implausible, No one will understand it,
(32:10):
what's so ordinary, it'll just get overlooked. And the computer
right now isn't able to evaluate itself in that way
exactly as you're saying. It doesn't recognize when it has
its own best ideas and then says, wait a second,
that was a really good one. Let me build on that.
And it has no sense at all of this. One
will fly and that joke is just not funny at all.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
Right, because it doesn't know what it is like to
be a human and find something funny.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Right. Yes, And I think one of the most interesting
things about AI creativity as it's developing is the light
it shines on some of the unexplored and underappreciated facets
of human creativity. So, for instance, AI is essentially a
great improviser. It works on the same principle as the
yes and principle in theater, going from one thing to
(33:01):
the next, to the next to the next, but never
looking backwards, never questioning itself, never saying, oh, well, now
that I ended up here, let me go back and
revise the first chapter. We have this incredible time jumping,
reverse chronology, flexible way of looking at things holistically and granularly.
I mean again, one is just awe struck at the
(33:24):
power of the machinery that we have in terms of
the flexibility of turning things right side up, upside down
and inside out.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
So how does our social context affect our creativity?
Speaker 2 (33:38):
So it's great to have this machinery we've been talking
about working in our heads, but what really supercharges is
our need to engage each other. As you've shared on
the podcast, brains are infotropic, so they're attracted to new information,
and that's really critical for social bonding. Imagine waking up
every day and saying that the same thing to your
(34:01):
loved one, getting them the same present for their birthday,
cooking them the same thing for dinner. It's hard to
imagine that a relationship is going to last very long
because we tune out to the familiar, and there's a
phenomenon repetition suppression, where the more stimulus is repetitive or predictable,
the less attention we pay to it. And you can
(34:23):
see this on neuroimaging scans, where the first time someone
has shown a surprise, you know, a huge part of
their brain lights up. But then if you keep repeating
that surprise at regular intervals, eventually becomes a tiny little
dot in the brain. Their brain has made it part
of its internal model of reality and doesn't care anymore.
(34:44):
And that is fatal to social relationships. And as essentially
the most social species on the planet, we learned to
leverage our creativity to keep the people around us enchanted.
You know, often it's talked about the birth of human
culture was sitting around a campfire telling stories after hunting
(35:05):
wooly mammoths, and to a large degree, that probably gets
to the heart of why we are such a creative species.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
That's right. Yeah, you see it. At dinner party, someone
tells the funny story and everyone laughs. You would never
see someone then tell that story a second time, right then,
right exactly, And nobody watches the basketball game from last
week a second time. There's no reason to watch it
a second time. What we care about is the surprise,
(35:33):
the new information, that's right, And this is because the
brain is constantly seeking to update its internal model, and
it does so by surprise. When it sees something that
it was not expecting, then it knows, Oops, there's a
place that I need to improve the model over there.
And so that's why we're totally attracted to surprise and
things that are novel.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
And I would go so far as to say that
creativity became one of our most useful tools for self
generating surprise. In other words, we like our internal model
of reality to always be under construction because that keeps
us very engaged in alert and in a sense partners
with consciousness and keeping us present in the moment and
(36:16):
connected to each other.
Speaker 1 (36:18):
Yeah, And in the animal world we see this trade
off between exploration and exploitation. In other words, animals explore
their environment and they try to figure out what's going on,
and once they get it, okay, I can get the
grubworms under these rocks or whatever. They spend about eighty
percent of their time exploiting the data that they know,
but across the animal kingdom they spend about twenty percent
(36:40):
of their time exploring new things. And it turns out
this is evolutionarily very useful because you never know when
the world is going to change. So if you're constantly
keeping a finger on the pulse of other possible paths,
that's the way to stay alive when things change.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
And in a sense, that's the evolutionary roots of our creativity.
We have the rest of the animal kingdom to thank
for that exploration necessity being built into our brains, and
then our need to build community kind of took that
to the next level.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
So that was my friend Anthony Brandt, and in the
book we co authored, The Runaway Species, we examined how
human brains generate creativity by constantly remixing its inputs, and
this is we argue part of the basic operating system
of the brain. So the way to think about this
is if you look at a graphics program that says, hi,
(37:41):
I rotate photographs by forty five degrees. The program doesn't
care what the photograph is. The photo can be of
ostriches or kazoos or volcanoes or whatever. The program doesn't care.
It just performs the rotation operation on the pixels. It
just doesn't matter what the photograph is about. And this
is the same thing your brain is doing. You are
(38:05):
born in your moment of space and time, and you
move through the world and absorb the art and science
and language around you, and that's what you remix. So,
as Anthony said, if you're born in Japan five hundred
years ago, you will write one kind of music, And
if you are Beethoven born in Europe at the same time,
(38:28):
you'll write a different kind of music because you're absorbing
different data. And if you are in New York in
the current day, you have a very different set of
worldwide music to draw from. And if you're composing twenty
five years from now, your diet will consist of ai
music and things you never even realized. You hadn't thought
(38:50):
of new innovations driven by humans and by machines, and
that's what you'll take to be the background furniture, and
you'll in on that. So, given what we talked about today,
I want to circle back to the controversies I highlighted
at the beginning of the episode where Open AI is
getting sued and Under Armour is getting criticized because people
(39:15):
are saying that the AI is merely absorbing what is
out there and then remixing its own versions. And I
think it's an interesting question to ask whether humans have
ever done otherwise, because that's what human creativity is, and
we typically like to compliment ourselves and tell the story
(39:36):
of how we came up with things out of the blue,
leveraging our individual brilliance. But the fact is we are
each born in a particular place, in a particular moment
of time, and all we ever have to work with
are the pieces and parts that our culture provides, pieces
and parts that have each been touched on and worked
(39:58):
over by the people before us. So, although it's a
jagged pill to swallow, it's interesting to consider this possibility.
Let's say about that Under Armoured commercial that was accused
of copying the styles of work from several other creatives
without proper acknowledgment. If a human director had made that
(40:20):
same ad a few years ago, we would have agreed.
Of course, he took inspiration from the work of other creatives.
That's his diet, that's what he has to draw from,
and we certainly would have no expectation that at the
end of his commercial he would list all the sources,
all the other commercials from which he took inspiration. We
(40:41):
wouldn't say, hey, you remixed all these inspirations without proper acknowledgement.
And in fact, this is what companies like OpenAI and
Meta are arguing in court now that their language models
learn from books the same way that humans do. The
language models original work that is a transformation of its sources,
(41:04):
just like humans do. Therefore, these companies are arguing in
courte that this training is legal. It is quote quintessential
fair use unquote. So we're in an interesting time. Is
it just human chauvinism where we're okay remixing things ourselves,
but we don't want a machine doing it because it
(41:25):
can do it faster. I don't know the answer to this,
but I do think the questions about creativity will gain
refinement as we get clearer on what human brains actually
do and what AI does, and what these have in common.
In any case, one of the great pleasures of being
here on this planet, whether we're surrounded by other humans
(41:47):
or by machines, is that, even though we often feel
like everything that can be done has already been done,
there's just no end on the horizon for what this
run of way species and our inventions will create. Next.
(42:09):
Go to eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information
and to find further reading. Send me an email at
podcast at eagleman dot com with questions or discussion, and
check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for
videos of each episode and to leave comments. Until next time.
I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.
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