Exploring the Secrets of Human Creativity
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Major funding for The Pulse is provided by a leadership gift from the Sutherland family. The Sutherlands support WHYY and its commitment to the production of programs that improve our quality of life. This is The Pulse, stories about the people and places at the heart of health and science. I'm Maiken Scott.

Sam Baker is a successful folk musician who has performed all over the world. But that career almost never happened. In 1986, he was on a train in Peru, having a great time exploring the world with a bunch of friends. We were all young and we were like, hey, we're young. We have U.S. passports. We are invincible.

He was talking to other passengers when a terrorist bomb exploded in the luggage rack right over his head. Seven passengers were killed and Sam was badly injured. I had a cut artery and

and really went into the whole dying process. He almost bled to death. He suffered brain damage. He couldn't move his left hand. And once he got through the worst of it, he had surgery after surgery to fix his many injuries. You know, I couldn't think. My hands didn't work. I couldn't walk. He was in constant pain. He had buzzing in his ears, head injury. He felt rage and despair.

And he thought if he could write down what had happened to him, it would help him process it all. You know, when the bomb went off, you know, it flattened my lungs. And I was like, well, how do I describe that? And I wrote obsessively. It was a page after page after page after page.

of really mostly the same stuff over and over and over again. It wasn't helping. Instead, a melody kept popping into his head. And I kept pushing it back. I'd be like, that melody is not what I need. Melody is not what I want. Melody doesn't help me. I think looking back, it was me trying to control something that's uncontrollable. If I can define it, if I can give it a name,

if I can hold it in a way in my head where I understand it, then it can't come back. Then you and I, as we sit here, the glass won't all blow in and shred everybody. So the melody kept... The melody kept coming, and I would be like riding these over on this melody. It was like... La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la,

And I didn't know what to do with it. And then I had, I'm sitting on the train to Machu Picchu. The passenger car explodes. There's not enough time to say goodbye. There's not enough time to know what's gone wrong. God have mercy, I believe. My heart has failed. Smoke rises through a hole in the roof. The dead say fare thee well. And that's what described it.

And I felt it. There was something in Sam's song that was so much more powerful than hearing him talk about what had happened to him. It felt like his song transmitted his emotions to me and the sadness. And for Sam, his creativity and music helped him through his pain and it's become his career and life.

Creativity allows us to express human experiences through music, painting, writing, dance. It allows people to connect, to feel something deep and beautiful. Beyond the arts, creativity helps us solve difficult problems, to learn better and understand more quickly. And researchers are learning more about the mechanisms that are at play when we're being creative.

On this episode, how creativity works and how we can use it in unexpected ways. ♪

First up, we've long prized creativity as a defining human quality. But now, AI is starting to encroach on that space. These programs are writing poems and stories in seconds. They are spitting out songs and images that seem to be getting better quickly. So what does this mean for the future of creativity? Liz Tang found an example of a unique human-AI collaboration.

Fatima Mohammed Alshindi never really thought of herself as a writer. She was a busy mom with a job. And before the war in Gaza started, she and her husband had a pretty normal middle-class life. Before the war, I worked as an online marketer for a private company in Gaza. My husband had his own workshop for

for fixing cars. He made by himself many classic cars. If Fatima sounds a little stilted here, it's because she wrote out her answers in English ahead of time. The internet situation is a little difficult in Gaza, so we weren't able to connect via Zoom. Instead, she sent her answers over WhatsApp.

Anyway, her husband, Mounir Alshindi, made a name for himself with his business. Here is a snippet of an interview he did a couple years ago with AFP, a French international news agency. Of course, there were obstacles in my work when I worked with them because the original parts were not available.

Munir and Fatima and their five kids had enough to get by. They were happy. Then the war started and their world exploded into chaos and violence. Like most people in Gaza, they struggled to get enough to eat.

And so, in December 2023, Munir and their son, Azaldin, were driving to a friend's house in Egypt to get some food when Israeli military forces started an air raid. Then my husband, after the first attack, my husband come out of the car, went behind a building, and the forces targeted the car another time and burnt it.

So my son, his body burned. While my husband was bleeding on the ground, no one can to help him to save his life.

The grief of losing both her husband and her 14-year-old son, especially in such a violent way, was overwhelming for Fatima. But there wasn't much she could do. She still had four other kids to take care of and the daily struggle of keeping them safe

Even finding enough food and clean water was hard. But there was one thing she could do. She could write. I find myself writing without any planning. Maybe it helped me to release my feelings. Fatima found herself pouring out her emotions in these sort of prose poems that she posted on Instagram. She wrote them mostly for herself, as an outlet for her grief.

But last summer, one of her posts captured the attention of someone halfway around the world, an American artist and musician named T.J. Arriaga. One of the amazing things about Fatima is she's able to write about this very personal stuff and, you know, being vulnerable through your art. Fatima is really great at doing that. T.J. doesn't have any personal or family ties to Gaza.

But about a year ago, he became super invested in the plight of Palestinians there. I think because of grief, just seeing people in situations of grief,

grief that I find unjust, like I connect with very deeply because I've experienced a lot of loss and grief in my life. A while back, TJ lost his mom, his sister, and his grandmother and got a divorce, all within the span of about two years.

Ever since then, he says he's been especially sensitive to the grief of others. And I think a lot of times the world is moving so fast and, you know, the world keeps spinning when you're grieving.

And I feel like that's what almost the people in Gaza are experiencing. The world just keeps spinning, but their world is stopped and like it feels very isolating and cold. So TJ decided to help in the most direct way he knew how, through online advocacy and fundraising, boosting and sharing the posts of Palestinians,

The first post by Fatima that TJ read was a poem written in Arabic. It was posted next to a picture of her husband's and son's death certificates.

TJ doesn't speak Arabic, so he used the translation feature on Instagram. And it was writing about how empty her home felt without her husband and just kind of like this almost not haunted house vibe, but just this deep emptiness and talking about how the house itself was mourning him. Here's a translation of the first stanza.

He is gone. This house mourned. It wept for the one who gave it life. Its walls sighed in sorrow. Its doorways grieved in silence. The house still holds his scent, echoes his laughter. But its light has dimmed. Its joy has fled. It has lost its Mounir.

It just resonated deeply with me because she'd been through so much and she was somebody that I could tell was in that deep state of grief. I just really felt her words. The effect Fatima's writing had on TJ got his gears turning. As an artist, TJ's a strong believer in the power of the creative process to frame stories and give them impact.

So what if he could find a way to share Fatima's writing in English and in a format that would hit people emotionally the same way it hit him?

Then he got an idea. He could turn Fatima's poems into music, music that he hoped could help bridge the cultural and linguistic divide. I think a lot of times, you know, when we listen to music, we kind of in a way become like the character of the song or, you know, we see things through that perspective. We're feeling it from the perspective of the writer. Yeah.

And I think when you're watching news stories or hearing about these horrible things or seeing all the images coming out, there's this detachment there that when you're listening to music, I think it is different. As a musician, TJ had the skills and equipment to make it happen. But he was reluctant to insert himself, his voice, into the music. If I was to compose the song and then sing it and record it, then...

It's like an observation and me singing about it rather than trying to tell their story from a first person perspective in their words, because it's important that it's their words because they're trying to be heard.

Using Fatima's voice wasn't an option either. She's not a singer or musician, nor did she have access to recording gear. But for the last few months, TJ had been playing around with this AI music production program called Suno that's capable of generating entire songs with whatever instruments and voices you might want.

including a voice that might sound like a Palestinian woman. So DJ approached Fatima with his idea. She was a little confused about the concept, but gave him her approval to go ahead with it.

So TJ got to work. One of the early songs he completed was based on a poem Fatima had written about the death of her son. That was a tough one because, you know, I know like the subject matter in it is just so intense. He gave the program a translated version of the poem and started entering prompts like you would with chat GPT to give it an idea of the kind of sound he was looking for. I've had like Ghazawi in there, um,

I had, you know, Arabic female singer, emotional, Mother's Lament, I think was one of the prompts. You know, there was a lot of prompts. And then once I generate one that is, you know, kind of along the lines that I wanted it to be, then I would redo it with different prompts and it would change it, but still be based off that original version. And I would just keep evolving it with the prompts.

Eventually, you'll kind of it's almost like gambling. You know, you pull the lever and eventually you'll get something close. And it's like, OK, that's close to what I wanted. Here's an early version of that song that the program spit out. Your son has evaporated. He was torn to pieces. His body was consumed by fire. He is no longer.

The evolution of the song wasn't a straight line. One of the benefits of AI music composition is that you can experiment with lots of different styles. But that's also one of its dangers. DJ estimates he ran through roughly 100 different versions of the song. Here's a later one that veered more into a lush, orchestral Middle Eastern sound.

In the end, DJ settled on something closer to the earlier version. Here's the final song. Your son has evaporated. He was torn to pieces. His body was consumed by fire. He is no longer here.

TJ was working under a deadline with this one. He wanted to get it done in time for the anniversary of Fatima's husband's and son's deaths.

So he finished the project in just a few days. Fatima told him she loved it and she thought it was beautiful. But artistic success was only part of what TJ was aiming for. He had a bigger idea for this song and the other ones he was hoping to make.

He wanted to post them on Bandcamp or streaming services so that any earnings would go to Fatima directly. Maybe if this, you know, catches on, it could become a way that families can earn some income directly that they control. It's a goal that lots of people can get on board with, although TJ recognizes that AI-created art is itself pretty controversial.

Most of the public debate has focused on fears that AI will take the place of human artists and human creativity. But Nick Brian-Kins, a professor of creative computing at the University of Arts London who does research on AI music creation, says there's a little more nuance than that.

On the one hand, AI has the ability to enhance or enable rather than replace human creativity. I think the positive things, the gains are maybe reducing the technical effort it takes to make a decent piece of music and get it to a quality that could be broadcast or listened to.

downloaded and so on. If you don't have recording equipment or mixing software or the technical skills to assemble a recording, AI programs like Suno make creating music a lot easier. On the other hand is the concerns we've been hearing about related to AI, that it's putting people who record and mix music out of business. There's the risk of having your work sucked up and copied by another AI model.

atrophying people's musical skills and the tendency for these programs, at least the mainstream ones trained on mainstream music, to generate a predictable sound. So you will get a sort of very bland kind of music coming out of it, very sort of homogenized, middle-of-the-road kind of music, which is fine if you're making something where maybe the music isn't the main point of it. But Nick says these programs don't mean the end of human creativity.

Instead, he sees them as just another tool.

Case in point: TJ's work with a palm. Part of the point there is about the person who created this music using Suno, they did have to go through a sort of creative process, an iterative process. They had to listen to it several times, they had to think about the prompts, they had to change the way it sounded and so on. So to me that is forming part of a creative process. Also, Nick says, this isn't the first time the music world has gotten a little upset over a new kind of technology.

Take, for instance, gramophones. People were freaking out saying, oh, this is going to be the music and so on. But it actually, in many ways, democratized music because instead of having to pay a lot of money to go to the opera or listen to a classical music concert, you could buy the record and listen to it at home. And that kind of democratization is a big part of what got TJ interested in this project in the first place. People love to hate on AI, and I understand that, but

there also is like some privilege in being able to take that stance. I think that one of the benefits of AI is it can give people opportunities to create art that don't have access to all the tools or maybe the money or even sometimes the time. It can be a luxury, you know, to like, I spent a lot of time learning how to use Pro Tools and play all these different instruments. And a lot of humans, they don't have that, the experience.

I guess, to even learn all the skills, but they may have the ideas and the vision. And even if they're using AI, like that's not a bad thing. People being able to have access to a vision in their mind and to see it through. That story was reported by Liz Tang.

Coming up, we'll visit an arts-driven preschool program that's essentially been under a microscope for years. And it has offered some surprising insights into how creativity helps kids learn. We launched an investigation titled, Can the Arts Get Under the Skin?

The answer was a resounding yes. Later on, we'll find out how creativity could come into play in terms of redesigning our healthcare system. We need to spend time thinking about how can we change the future of healthcare. That's still to come on The Pulse. This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking about creativity.

Almost 20 years ago, psychologist Ellie Brown was looking to do research on a Head Start preschool program to examine how it affected kids from low-income families. She made a bunch of calls, and she found a program that put a lot of emphasis on music and arts classes.

And staff there was excited about the opportunity. Please conduct research on our program. We think it has a really positive impact for children. But Allie's colleagues cautioned her to find a more traditional preschool program. Don't become sidetracked by studying the impact of music and arts. It's never going to get published.

Ellie says at the time, music and arts research was passé. Music and the arts have suffered from a lack of rigorous research and overblown claims about arts impact. If you listen to a single piece of classical music while your child is in utero, it's not going to make them a genius. And a single early childhood music class is not going to give your preschooler the visuospatial skills that's going to make them a leading aeronautical engineer.

But Ellie was intrigued by this program. It's at Settlement Music School in Philadelphia, and it's called Kaleidoscope. I got a tour from Terrell Davis, executive director of early childhood programming. Did you release your butterflies yesterday? Today, today. Where are they? The kids have the usual preschool-type classes where they play and learn, but every day,

Every day, they also have music, dance, and visual arts classes taught by different credentialed instructors. I walked into one of the classrooms, which looked like an art studio for little kids. The youngest kids at the preschool, the three-year-olds, were painting with stamps. Okay, so what are you going to paint? I'm going to paint a lizard. A lizard? What kind of lizards do you like? I like green ones.

So what kind of colors do you like? I like red and blue. Okay. And what happens when you mix red and blue? It turns green. Well, that happens when you mix yellow and blue. And when you mix red and blue, it turns purple.

In another classroom, slightly older kids were decorating picture frames with their art teacher. They had glued photos of themselves into the frame and were adding other decorations. This is me and under there is me and my sister. Where's your sister?

Behind the picture. Oh, you drew your sister? Yeah. And then you put yourself on top? Yeah, I put shells on. Terrell says all of the different classes and the different areas of instruction are connected.

The music teacher, the dance teacher, and the visual art teacher are all talking about the same thing at the same time because we're all different learners. So if a child doesn't grasp the concept of what a pattern is in music, they may grasp that in creative movement when they're using their whole body to hop, skip, and jump. Hop, skip, and jump. When Ellie Brown started to study the program almost two decades ago, she quickly learned some interesting things about its effectiveness.

For example, she compared the students in the kaleidoscope program to kids at a different high-quality preschool that doesn't have all of the immersive arts enrichment.

We found that children at Kaleidoscope showed three times the growth in their vocabulary over the course of the year. That was a striking finding. Three times? It's huge. It's the type of impact that makes you curious to learn more. Next, she started to investigate social-emotional growth, which is important for learning. She found that the preschoolers exhibited much more positive emotion than their peers at a comparison school. Like interest,

happiness and pride. They were also able to regulate their emotions better, both positive and negative. Clearly, the arts program was having a beneficial impact. And these findings back things Terrell Davis had observed in the classroom. She was a teacher at the program before she became the executive director.

So I knew something was happening to have a class of 20 and 10 of them having an individual education plan, an IEP. And then seeing over the course of the year the growth that they made, I mean, I felt like I was a good teacher. I was, you know, helping them. But just having that collaboration with the art and opportunities for them to also build on skill sets outside of me, of course, it's a no-brainer. Something's happening. But Ellie wanted more information.

She wanted to know what exactly was going on in the kids' bodies to facilitate this growth. We launched an investigation titled, Can the Arts Get Under the Skin? The answer was a resounding yes. They took frequent saliva samples from the kids in the program. So we measured levels of the stress hormone cortisol at morning baseline and then after musculature.

music, dance, visual arts, and early learning classes on different days of the week. We found evidence that children showed lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol after music, dance, and visual arts classes compared with their regular early learning or homeroom classes.

Preschool can be stressful all in itself. Kids are in a new situation, away from their parents, they have to navigate classrooms and peer relationships. But many of the kids in this program also experience chronic stress because of poverty or difficult family situations.

Cortisol at normal levels supports functions like the immune system or metabolism. But too much of it can interfere with the function and development of brain areas involved in learning and cognition, like the hippocampus, the prefrontal cortex, and also areas involved in emotion like the amygdala.

You've probably heard that 90% of brain growth and development happens before children enter kindergarten. So early childhood is a really important period for us to help children regulate stress so that they can focus on learning and so that their brains can grow and develop in healthy ways.

Ellie says all of the studies she's been able to do over the years have really painted a comprehensive picture of how and why creativity and the arts support learning. We know that humans learn best when our entire bodies are engaged and events are registered by several senses. And that's the case in these music and arts classes.

But it's also the case that children learn best when they are not overly stressed, when they can really focus their attention on learning. And we do think that the music and arts programming here helps children to be in an optimal state to learn.

Now, Ellie and the staff at the school are using these findings to make some of their lessons and their approaches available to kids and teachers at other preschools. So even if you don't have a fully credentialed music teacher or visual arts teacher, there are strategies that a regular early learning teacher can use in their classes to bring in music, movement, visual arts to support children's emotion regulation and learning.

Even small things that can reduce stress and help kids learn. Helping to ease the stress of transitions in the day by, you know, singing a cleanup song, singing a get in line song, helping children with those moments that can cause stress. They've done a soft launch at five schools, four in Philly and one in Denver. They took feedback from teachers and now they're planning to bring their approach to more schools around the country. ♪

This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking about creativity. For psychologist Keith Holyoake, creativity rests on our ability to draw analogies or to look at something and imagine something else, like in this William Blake poem, Auguries of Innocence.

To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. Why does that poem speak to you? The comparison of completely different things at different levels, the large to the small, heaven to the wildflower, that sense of wonder at this human ability that has sort of captivated me

over the years, it seems to sort of change what human experience is in a way that we probably are not sharing with the other animal species on Earth, for example.

It's something of going beyond just reacting to what we're immediately exposed to, instead of imagining how other things might be in relation to what we're experiencing. Keith explores this topic in his latest book, The Human Edge, Analogy and the Roots of Creative Intelligence.

He gave me an example from the book, a story about French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes. He invented the Cartesian coordinate system, you know, the x-y axes we use to plot points on a graph. Apparently, he had a habit of lying in bed late into the morning and was lying in bed thinking and looking at his ceiling, which happened to be marked out in square tiles.

And he saw a fly just walking along into the ceiling in a kind of randomish way. And being René Descartes, he raised in his own mind the question of how could I possibly describe the path of this fly? And then he noticed, well, these are squares. We can think of it as horizontal and vertical lines.

And that becomes x, y coordinates when suitably abstracted. And then again, being Rene Descartes, he goes beyond what he's seeing and he imagines these lines going to infinity in all directions. So we can define an origin and then negative and positive numbers about it. And that gives him the basic idea for the x, y coordinates and Cartesian geometry and ultimately kind of

the interrelationships between geometry and algebra, all from this kind of simple observation of everyday experience for him. How important is it to pay attention? Because you don't see these things unless you actually pause and look.

Oh, that's a very good point. It's really critical. You know, there's a famous saying, chance favors the prepared mind. When you're in the throes of obsession about some difficult problem that you've set for yourself,

That kind of person is likely to notice when something which the relevance is not directly conveyed, someone else might have simply missed it. It's just no connection to exactly what they're working on. But to sort of be attentive to like all of life, to your own thoughts, your memories, events that happen, and sort of being ready to sort of trigger a useful connection when it's possible.

That is kind of the mark of the creative mind. So how does the ability to do analogies, how does that give us an edge? Well, it's in this way that allows us to kind of like break out of the exact domain where we're working and where a problem arises.

Sometimes, you know, you work on a hard problem and you feel kind of trapped because no solution is working and you don't know what to do. And algae allows you to sort of jump to a whole other area and potentially find something that breaks through that barrier that you've got. In terms of just how the brain works, we have a...

multiple brain systems. One involves the frontal and parietal network, and it's hard at work when you're thinking hard, when you're reasoning, and that's certainly very relevant to working out what an analogy means. But we also have another brain area network called the default network because it sort of comes on when you're not thinking hard, and that's associated with what we think of as mind-wandering, where your mind is sort of just drifting from one thing to another. And it seems like

Creative individuals kind of harness that mind wandering. So it isn't really random, but it's kind of loosely guided by their current concerns, the problems they're working on. Yet at the same time, it allows them to think of things differently.

that go well beyond the exact realm of where the problem lies. And that gives a chance to come up with a whole new way of looking at the problem that otherwise might have sort of never been available. Keith and one of his colleagues did a research study where they asked participants to solve what's known as the radiation problem. It was first popularized by psychologist Carl Dunker.

So let's say a patient has a malignant tumor that needs to be treated with radiation. But the radiation will also damage the healthy tissue. How can they destroy the tumor without causing all of this damage? Before Keith would ask study participants to think about the radiation problem, he would present a few other stories to them. One of the stories was about a general who was trying to capture a centrally located fortress.

He couldn't use his entire army because he couldn't get his entire army down a single route. So instead, he divided the army up into small groups and then had them converge at the fortress and collectively managed to capture it. After that, Keith would ask people to come up with solutions for the radiation problem. People were often reminded of the story about the general

and came up with the general idea of converging weaker rays to solve the convergence problem. So you basically split up the power of the rays and attack from different angles. Right. That's the key insight, which people have a lot of time, a hard time seeing all by itself. But once they see the solution, the general story, you can develop the parallel solution that works with the rays.

Roughly speaking, about a third of the people would spontaneously recognize the connection and use it. If you then simply say, "Well, think back to that previous story and see if that helps," then probably another third of the people succeed in using the analogy.

When do you feel most creative? Ah, that's a good question. From time to time, some connection comes out that I wouldn't have thought about.

Keith told me about a recent creative moment that came out of personal tragedy. His Los Angeles home burned down earlier this year in the California wildfires. So, of course, that was terrible and tremendously stressful and difficult for us as a family and having to move and etc.

So it turned out the house burned down completely, but we had a little garden statue of a Buddha that was on one of the walls. And in the end, that was essentially the only thing standing and sort of surveying now the destruction of our life.

And a few weeks later, I started to think of, you know, the implications of, at sort of a symbolic level, you have the Buddha and its association with the Eastern philosophies of Buddhism.

giving up material things, for example, ironically still intact, whereas all our material things have been lost. But I'm certainly not at all happy and relaxed about losing all my material things. Anyhow, I ended up thinking of it as the fire Buddha and wrote a poem sort of about the fire, my emotional reactions, and how it relates to kind of threads of Eastern philosophy.

Which I guess, among other things, kind of made me feel better because whatever was lost, one little poem came about as a result of this tragic event for us. Do you have any thoughts on creativity as we age or through the years of our lives? Are we more creative at some points or not?

Hard to say. There has been some interesting work just sort of biographically, sort of looking at actual creators and how old were they when they did various things. There's huge differences across disciplines. So if you want to be a really creative frontier mathematician...

You better do it in your teens or early 20s. It's kind of really a young person's forte, probably because it depends so much on what's called working memory, which is kind of the first thing we start to lose as we get into even middle age.

On the other hand, Tolstoy and other great novelists were writing into deep old age. So one general tendency is as you get older, what's called fluid intelligence, which is kind of working on novel things with your working memory is declining. But what's called crystallized intelligence, which is kind of the sum of everything you've learned over your life is going up.

In fact, our group did some experimental work showing that the ability to understand novel metaphors is actually better in healthy older adults, 60s, 70s, than it was in the 20 and 30 year olds. So there is some, you know, benefits of age as well.

But of course, there's huge individual differences in whether you sort of got bored of life early and stopped thinking or whether you're kind of continually engaged and open to experience throughout your entire lifespan. How do you hope your creativity will sustain you as you get older? Ah, well, I already am older, I would say. I'm 75 now. Oh, I did not know that.

Well, right. So I have firsthand experience. I guess I'm still kicking as best I can. As you get older and you've done a lot of things, it's easy to feel like, well, things aren't new anymore. I no longer get that kick, a rush of excitement of encountering something brand new because I've done it all already.

But there's more in the world than any one of us is going to encounter. And even if we live to be multiple hundreds of years, you can still keep looking broadly at the world, no matter how old you are. And I think as long as you keep doing that, you have a perfectly good chance of continuing to be creative.

Keith Holyoak is a poet and a distinguished professor of psychology at UCLA. His latest book is called The Human Edge, Analogy and the Roots of Creative Intelligence. Coming up, what's the role of creativity in redesigning our healthcare system? What would it be like to go in a hospital where there were no waiting rooms? If we improve the efficiencies of hospitals, so you would never have to wait in a waiting room.

That's next on The Pulse. This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking about creativity. Emergency room physician Ban Ku wants us to expand our definition of creativity. For me, creativity means enabling my imagination. I hate this myth of creativity being siloed into creative people who are like artists and musicians. I believe that skill is...

is present and can be developed and honed in any individual. Creativity helps me to problem solve. It helps me to look upon different disciplines and see the intersectionality of them. - Bon is also a researcher who is trying to find ways to make healthcare more accessible and more convenient for people.

How do you bring creativity to your work in medicine and improving health overall? One, I...

explore other disciplines outside of medicine, see what I can learn from them and apply them to healthcare, to taking care of patients, to my research. He's worked with architects and collaborated with chefs and designers. One time he was reading a book by graphic designer Ellen Lupton about human-centered design. I was like, this is so great. It was like,

targeted for a design audience. But I was like, we need to apply these principles to healthcare. He ended up meeting Ellen and he told her how much he liked her work. And they wrote a book together. It's called Health Design Thinking, Creating Products and Services for Better Health.

And their ideas went beyond that. What we did was start a design thinking program at our medical school and having medical students training them to think like designers and coupling that with a scientific method for problem solving. So that led to a medical device curriculum where we...

We looked at problems in the healthcare space. You know, one of them was the IV poles that you get in the hospital. And, you know, those IV poles have not been redesigned for a hundred years. And so we had a project where we're like, how can we make the IV pole more user-friendly? You know, thinking like designer helps us to tap into, or helps me to tap into my creativity and to help me to problem solve better. And I guess, yeah,

It empowers people to think of bringing their own expertise to a situation at hand. Because if you're a doctor and, yes, you know this IV pole is really awful and people have to drag it around and it's not ideal. But then to think, maybe I could help design something better, that's a pretty big leap for people. Yeah, totally. And to be able to co-design with other people, to co-design with our patients, to co-design with doctors,

the manufacturers, if you're a researcher, to bring the clinicians and the scientists together. And there's a power in that, that cross-fertilization of ideas from different disciplines. How do you make sure you have time for creativity or you keep that part of your brain engaged? It's very boring. I schedule it. Okay.

I think there's this myth that you need a week to go to a cabin to be creative or you need to take a sabbatical for a year to be creative.

99% of us don't have the time to take a week off from our jobs or from our families. So you can be creative like in 15-minute chunks or 30-minute chunks. So I make sure I build that into my daily schedule of having this unstructured time where I can let my imagination just flow freely. How could you see more creativity coming into the curriculum of a med school?

And to really encourage people, you know, you need to engage all sides, all aspects of your brain in this work. I think now is a time for that because historically how we made a doctor is if you were a good memorizer and you did well on your pre-medical studies, you did well on your entrance exams, a ton of memorizations happened.

But now with the advances in AI and large language models, like we don't necessarily need to memorize as much as we do because we have a supercomputer in our hands. So I think the skill of creativity is going to become more and more vital in the skill set of a doctor. So-

What we can teach doctors and trainees is how to creatively problem solve. We can introduce design principles into a curriculum and go, hey, how do we improve the delivery of services to make it more convenient for our patients? How can we improve outcomes in complex cases? Because a lot of these solutions aren't black and white. We can apply scientific principles to

But it requires more than that to be able to get to the right solution. And to envision, I guess, something new. Because a lot of times we are doing the same thing because that's what we've done. And then to really think, we don't have to do this. It's a huge leap. Yeah. And it's really hard to have the permission to be a dreamer in this space because you

The problems are real. They're emergent. They're urgent. I'm an emergency room doctor, and we need to take care of the problem at hand. But I also believe that we need to spend time thinking about how can we change the future of health care in 10, 15, 20 years from now and to open our imagination up.

Like, what would it be like to go in a hospital where there were no waiting rooms if we improve the efficiencies of hospitals so you would never have to wait in a waiting room again? Like, that seems almost unbelievable, but we should be thinking about those future states to be speculative. Otherwise, we're never going to get there. Ban Ku is a professor at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. He is a researcher and an emergency room physician. They've got to use...

imagination good reason

That's our show for this week. The Pulse is a production of WHYY in Philadelphia, made possible with support from our founding sponsor, the Sutherland Family, and the Commonwealth Fund. You can follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Our health and science reporters are Alan Yu and Liz Tang. Charlie Kyer is our engineer. And this week we had additional engineering from Diana Martinez.

Our producers are Nicole Curry and Lindsay Lazarski. I'm Maiken Scott. Thank you for listening.