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It Starts With Attraction
The Surprising Connection Between Creativity and Intelligence
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In this episode we talk with Dr. Rex Jung about the differences in creativity and intelligence and how you can work your brain to be more creative!
Discover how engaging in creative activities might be the key to alleviating stress and enhancing personal growth. We explore the stages of creative cognition, demonstrating how a playful mind state can lead to innovation and a sense of flow. We'll discuss the empowering impact of creativity on mental health, relationships, and personal development. From spontaneous moments of inspiration while jogging to the communal joys of dance, these experiences not only enrich our lives but also foster deeper connections and a truer understanding of ourselves.
Today's Guest: Dr. Rex Jung
Rex Jung is an adjunct professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico, a research scientist at the Mind Research Network, and a practicing clinical neuropsychologist in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He studies both brain disease and what the brain does well—a field of research known as "positive neuroscience."
His research is designed to relate behavioral measures, including intelligence, personality, and creativity, to brain function and structure in healthy, neurological, and psychiatric subjects. He has published research articles across a wide range of disciplines, including traumatic brain injury, lupus, schizophrenia, intelligence, and creativity.
Rex was the President (2019-2021) of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR).
Visit Dr. Jung's website here: https://www.rexjung.com/
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Kimberly Beam Holmes has applied her master's degree in psychology for over ten years, acting as the CEO of Marriage Helper & CEO and Creator of PIES University, being a wife and mother herself, and researching how attraction affects relationships. Her videos, podcasts, and following reach over 500,000 people a month who are making changes and becoming the best they can be.
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Did you know that creativity and intelligence may be more alike than you think that they are? They are both ways of problem solving, believe it or not, and in today's episode I'm going to be speaking with Dr Rex Young. Dr Young is an adjunct professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico and he is a research scientist at the Mind Research Network, and he is a practicing clinical neuropsychologist in the Albuquerque area of New Mexico as well. He has studied brain disease and what the brain does well in a field of research known as positive neuroscience. He has done a lot with behavioral measures, including intelligence, personality and creativity, and he's also studied brain function and structure in healthy neurological and psychiatric subjects. So he has published articles across a wide range of topics, including traumatic brain injury, lupus, schizophrenia, intelligence and creativity.
Speaker 1:I can't wait to dive into this conversation about how you can be more creative and what is the difference in creativity and intelligence. In today's episode, let's dive in. I'm excited today to be joined by Dr Rex Young and have this conversation about creativity and intelligence and maybe get into some other neurosciency things. Welcome to the show, dr Young.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Kimberly.
Speaker 1:How did you get into the work that you have been doing with neuroscience and all of the different parts of the brain that you've been studying?
Speaker 2:It's kind of a long story Maybe it would take the whole podcast, but my undergraduate's in finance actually. So I was in the business world and was volunteering for Special Olympics and became very interested when I was working with people with intellectual disabilities autism and intellectual disabilities and the like cerebral palsy and became very fascinated in the brain in all of its capacities and working. So I wanted to do work closer to brain issues and stumbled across neuropsychology. I guess, long story short, and entered graduate school in my late 20s and retrained to be a neuropsychology. I guess, long story short, and entered graduate school in my late 20s and retrained to be a neuropsychologist and neuroscientist.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. What did you do your dissertation on?
Speaker 2:Biochemical Correlates of Intelligence in the Normal Human Brain is the title of my dissertation.
Speaker 1:Wow, and do you remember what your findings were?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean. So in the mid nineties we didn't have very sophisticated neuroimaging techniques. We were using MRI. We're using a technique you could get pictures of your brain, but they were very static pictures Like you see in the old medical shows where they put the picture up on the white screen and you can kind of see static images.
Speaker 2:We were using a technique called spectroscopy which allows you to look at brain biochemistry. So we were seeing that certain chemicals of the brain that we could measure that were sensitive to neurons and neuronal health were lower in patients with brain injuries, specifically traumatic brain injury, and they were correlated with neuropsychological performance, memory, attention, language functioning. So I wanted to see if those same chemicals would be correlated with normal cognitive functioning in college students. Our sample that we have convenient sample, and in fact they were Intellectual functioning was positively correlated with these markers of neuronal fidelity, neuronal health, even in normal populations. So it was kind of a fascinating start to my career to see how you could match normal brain structure, function and biochemistry to different brain capacities like intelligence, creativity, personality, like intelligence creativity personality?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. Well, you've done a lot of work since then, especially in the line of intelligence and creativity, as you were just saying. What is the difference between intelligence and creativity?
Speaker 2:Well. So if you talk to three or four or five different scientists, they'll give you three or four or five different answers, but I have tried to simplify it as seeing these as two sides of the same coin. They're fundamentally problem-solving abilities, and intelligence is problem-solving in the world around us that is more common, that is adaptive, that allows us to survive in the world, in problems that we face in our everyday life. Creativity is reasoning or problem solving capacity that allows us to address problems that are less common, that we have to think to use a cliche, outside of the box, that we have to come up with a new solution to a problem. So, as far as definitions are concerned, I've defined intelligence as rapid and accurate problem solving and creativity as novel and useful problem solving, which are subtle differences but important, as I said, sides to the same coin in terms of adaptive problem solving in both human participants and probably non-human species as well.
Speaker 1:So when? Well, let me ask this next question first. So if you're highly creative, does that mean you're also highly intelligent, or highly intelligent? You say they're kind of both sides to the same coin and I've never felt like I'm a creative person. I say that, but I guess it also depends on how you define creativity. Like, I'm not going to be the one to go and paint a beautiful picture of something period, much less if I'm looking at it like looking at a mountainscape or something like that. But I do think that I can solve problems in creative ways. So tell us more about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and creativity comes in many flavors. And so, again, the cliche of having to be creative by playing a musical instrument or painting or something like that is not necessarily true. That's a very niche way of solving a problem, I guess. But we have a creative achievement questionnaire which goes through scientific creativity, musical creativity, poetry, written culinary arts and humor. So there are different ways in which we can express our creativity. That perhaps gets at that other side of the coin that you are able to express yourself.
Speaker 2:Being creative creative in your relationships, being creative in that type of problem solving, I think, is something, a capacity that we all have to more or less of a degree. And to get back to your first question, intelligence and creativity are correlated with each other, but it's not a one-to-one or a hundred percent correlation. The correlation between measures of creativity that we have, measures of divergent thinking, for example, are only about 30% correlated between divergent thinking and intelligence, as we measure it between intelligence and creativity. So you can have someone that performs very well on a standard measure of intelligence who doesn't perform well at all on a standard measure of creativity, for example. So we're still trying to understand the exact relationship, but everyone has some level of intelligence that is manifested in their ability to solve rapid and accurate problems in the world, and everyone has some capacity to be creative, to solve novel and useful problems out in the world. It's a matter of degree and it's also a matter of selection and types of problems that are presented to that person and need to be solved on a day-to-day basis.
Speaker 1:Can you give some examples of what creativity would look like in a novel and useful problem solving definition versus what intelligence looks like from a rapid and accurate problem solving definition?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, if you think about evolutionary psychology, they talk about us living on the savanna, and the classic example of that is you know, you hear a rumble or a growl and you have to decide very rapidly if that's your stomach or if that's a lion, and whether to climb the tree or to escape a lion or to find an apple escape a lion or to find an apple. So that rapid and accurate problem solving is quite adaptive and could lead very well to your survival, either in the short term, if it's a lion, or the long term if it has something to do with foraging for food. So that's kind of the day-to-day adaptability of intelligence. Creativity is more novel type of problem solving figure out how to escape from and you're caught in a ravine and you have to invent a ladder to get out of this ravine, for example, or you'll be swept away by this flood that you haven't seen in your valley heretofore. So these types of problem solving can be very adaptive, but some are more day-to-day and some are more novel and incredibly useful.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So what is the role of genetics in creativity and in intelligence? And I guess this can go back to the classic nature versus nurture. Are we born with a certain set of this, or can we become more creative and more intelligent in time?
Speaker 2:It's always it's it's it's never an either or dichotomy, it's always both. I mean we, we, we have uh, our, our set of genetic predispositions that uh give us strengths in certain areas and weaknesses, if you will, in others. Um, that uh, uh accounts as a baseline for about 50% of the variance in any ability, is a good starting point in any complex ability. Environment accounts for the rest, and intelligence and creativity, that kind of 50-50 split between nature and nurture, is a good starting point and that's held up pretty well for intelligence and probably will hold up for a complex construct like creativity. And again, these things aren't set in stone. Genes only work through their interaction with the environment, so they can be turned on or off by interacting with the environment. So that genetic determinism we're finding out is much more complex by virtue of its interaction with certain environments.
Speaker 2:And you can see that with twins, identical twins. I have twin granddaughters, identical twin granddaughters, very different from each other. Their genes are exactly the same, but their personalities, they're what? Six years old now, and their personalities are really starting to diverge by virtue of subtle differences in their environment that they encounter on a day-to-day basis, and physically and emotionally and mentally, they are quite different from one another. They look very similar. Their genes have set that path for them, but there's quite a bit of subtle differences that you can see through those genes. Interaction with the environment.
Speaker 1:So if I wanted to become more creative or if I wanted to become more intelligent, what are some things that I could do to work on both of those? I don't know if you would. Would you call them skills? What do you call them could?
Speaker 2:do to work on both of those? I don't know if you would. Would you call them skills? What do you call them?
Speaker 2:Intelligence is a trait and creativity is probably a trait, but it has some what we call state representation as well. You can, I think, manipulate or moderate creativity more readily than intelligence. Intelligence appears to be much more fixed in humans At a very early age. You can measure intelligence, you know, by the age of six and it will correlate very highly with measures of intelligence at the age of 16 and 60. And and so on. It's it's very not set in stone, but it's very narrow variance, if you will, of that ability to solve problems in a rapid and accurate way.
Speaker 2:Creativity I think there is much more of a chance, and I became interested in creativity because there appears to be much more chance to modulate that through interaction with the environment. One way to do that is to really pick something, choose something that you might have a skill at, and really start to put in the work to acquire the raw materials necessary to create with necessary uh, to uh create with uh. If you, if you really feel like I mean, this wouldn't work for you, uh, but if you really feel like you. You have the skill to be a painter, you know, really start practicing at that. Or a guitarist or something. Musician uh, really start practicing at that and getting the work in necessary to acquire the raw materials and skills to produce something novel within that, within that particular domain. So that would be a way to actually leverage your creative ability is by really focusing on one particular capacity and really preparing yourself for that creative endeavor.
Speaker 1:So is it really the behaviors that we typically think of as creative that can give people a starting place here? So, you know, painting, any type of art, the music, theater, things like that or are there some that you have found that maybe people don't think of as creative, but actually they are creative things that people could do?
Speaker 2:but actually they are creative things that people could do Well. Yeah, I mean, science is really. I'm biased as a scientist, but it's one of the areas in which you know you can be highly creative, both for good and for bad. I mean, the people are somewhat worried about nuclear warfare now, given the news and and the nuclear bomb is. Nuclear power is quite wonderful and abundant and renewable Nuclear bombs are quite scary and potentially horrific. So that creative power of science that was unleashed in the 50s and well, in the 40s and 50s in this state, in this very state at Los Alamos, is something that I think about. A lot in scientific creativity and the creativity of engineers and people that build bridges and buildings and things like that I think is quite overlooked in comparison to the arts writing and movies and painting and dance and things of that nature. So I think, looking for creativity, the harder you look for the expression of novelty and utility, the more likely you are to find it.
Speaker 1:How about creativity and mental health? Is there any kind of impact that focusing on some of these creative traits and even the state of creativity, so focusing more on just having more time to be creative in these outlets in the daily life does that have an impact on mental health?
Speaker 2:So there's a cliche that you have to be, you know, half crazy to to be highly creative. And there's any number of examples of of highly creative people, from Van Gogh who cut off his ear, who was the woman who walked into the ocean, virginia Woolf who walked into the ocean with stones in her pockets, I believe. I mean Hemingway who committed suicide, a lot of different creative types who were mentally ill. But for each of those examples of high levels of creativity you have, you know, da Vinci's and Mozart's and well, mozart's not a good example Vivaldi's who do not have a whiff of mental illness. So there's no particular link, and a lot of work has been done in this area. There's no particular link between madness and creativity. That's a cliche, but there is an interesting neurological correlate between that loosened associations and the ability to produce novelty. And I think you have a higher expression of, for example, high creativity and bipolar disease disorder, and some work has gone into that area where you have some frontal lobe disorders and diseases that are associated with increased novelty production.
Speaker 1:Hmm, Interesting. So I was actually asking the question with the opposite thought in mind of does being creative actually help mental health? Like can it help alleviate anxiety or depression. I mean, I think the other way is a good way to view it too.
Speaker 2:Well, we confront that cliche, a lot between mental illness and creativity, so I thought you were going in that direction.
Speaker 1:No, it's good. Yeah, I think it's a really good point.
Speaker 2:The expression of creativity can be very satisfying, very rewarding, very gratifying and good for your mental health. Certainly so being able to find what you can create successfully and to be recognized by others as creative, because creativity always is a thing that is judged by people on the outside looking in as being either creative or not Right. It has to be accepted by others as useful in the end so that that can be very satisfying and very good for mental health in the long run.
Speaker 1:You talk about there being four stages to creative cognition. Can you tell us what that means and what those four stages are?
Speaker 2:Well, it's not me. Various people have talked about these four stages of creativity and they're helpful to think about different aspects that we might want to study, and we've touched upon some of them already. Poincaré, a famous mathematician from France, talked about his own creative process first, and then Graham Wallace wrote about these four stages later. They consist of preparation, incubation, illumination and validation, I believe. But we talked about preparation. You have to have the raw materials necessary to create with. So putting those materials in your brain, putting in the 10,000 hours or 10 years or whatever it takes to really excel at a particular task, is important in preparing your mind to do that work.
Speaker 2:Incubation is mulling over various iterations of an idea so you can, in your mind's eye, see different scenarios or time travel, or look at a conversation and see where it might go in different directions and try things out in your mind's eye before really committing to it in the world.
Speaker 2:And that incubation period is incredibly important to just let things stew in your head for a while and see what new ideas spring to life, that novelty might emerge. Illumination is kind of a cliche, but that aha moment that is described by some people, where that great new idea emerges out of the murk of your brain and you decide that you've got it and you can push something forward. And then verification or validation is seeing if it will work, If you can push that idea out in the world, if people accept it, if it is new and useful and people will like it. So those are the four main stages of creativity, and neuroscientists, psychologists, educators are working in all of these different domains in various aspects. Some are looking at all four stages, some are looking at just one stage and making a career of that.
Speaker 1:I've heard other people say this is true for them and I know it's true for me, and I want to ask you about it. When I'm thinking about a problem that needs to be solved, it's typically not when I am writing the head in my laptop, like working on it, that the solution or a really great idea comes to me. It's typically when I'm doing something completely different, when I'm in the shower, or when I wake up in the middle of the night or when I'm out on a run. Is this consistent among people and if so, why is it that it's when we're not focused on it that solutions typically come to us?
Speaker 2:of broad attentional dispersal, that we tend to tickle neurons that otherwise wouldn't be tickled and have those connections made.
Speaker 2:And it tends to happen, like you say, when people are on runs or in the shower or sleeping or emerging from sleep. Emerging from sleep, but these kind of defocused attention type of states that these kind of random connections tend to be made in the brain that emerge. That can't be made when you're really focused on a task whether you're reading or working on a computer or something like that, you really the pathways in your brain to solve that task or to pay attention to that task are really engaged and can't meander off into the brambles. So it's, I think, important for people to set aside time. Whatever works for them, running works for you. I always joke that mowing the lawn is kind of my time to let my mind wander. I have a large lawn to mow and um, it really is a time you're doing something repetitive, going back and forth, and um, I can just kind of let my mind wander while I'm doing something physical and um, some interesting ideas can emerge out of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really fascinating. So what is the benefit in? You know, we're thinking about, or we're talking about intelligence, we're talking about creativity, but what about downtime? What about rest? What about unplugging from distractions laptops, phones? How does that benefit not just creativity and intelligence, but humans?
Speaker 2:I think it's enormously important. When I talk to educators, I tell them, I mean, this is my opinion. I don't have any research to back this up, but, anecdotally, I think the most important class is recess in some regards, because you really need that time. You've got all the ideas, the preparation has been put in place and you need to go play and you need to take those ideas and have some unstructured time to let them run into each other, literally and figuratively, in a manner that might produce some novelty. And when we are engaged with our iPhones or engaged with our computers, it's usually in service of knowledge acquisition or looking at Facebook or Twitter, you know, seeking out some sort of information about a relationship or information about some news thing. And it it it is very, again, focused attention and focused pattern of of brain activity that doesn't leave room for that defocused and playful brain state that appears to be is so important for creativity to emerge.
Speaker 1:Is there any kind of ideal time, like rest? You know, one day a week. A lot of you know religious and faith-based people. The Sabbath is the idea or rest, you know from 5pm on by not thinking about work. What are your thoughts?
Speaker 2:What I tell people. I mean. So you know, I tried to write a book on creativity and they really want you to write a chapter on things people can do. And you're asking me that chapter on things people can do and what I, what I tell people, and I failed in writing that book because I really couldn't get to that point.
Speaker 2:It's like there's no one size fits all. I mean, you like to run to do your thing, I like to mow the lawn, some people will take a shower or a bath, and it's kind of really discovering that place or that thing that really works for you. And there is a thing that works for you but getting into that space, whether it's Shabbat or Sabbath, that you can take a full day and really relax, whether it is that moment after you wake up in the morning but before you get out of bed, you know half an hour that you're just lying there and kind of thinking about your dreams and and kind of thinking about, perhaps, what you're going to do in your day, whether it's, you know, taking that run or going to the gym, and getting into that mental space. That is some call flow. I think discovering that for yourself is very important in cultivating your creativity, and I don't think it's one size fits all.
Speaker 1:Well, that may be the answer to the next question I was going to ask, which is what are good activities to jumpstart your own creativity, knowing you love to tell people exactly the right things that work, and prescribing to them.
Speaker 2:What to do harkens back to an earlier, an earlier answer, but that preparation part is really is super important. I mean, you know I'm getting closer to retirement you can see the gray in my beard that's hastening me to retirement and you know, while I love seeing my patients, you know picking up a hobby is really important. I haven't developed hobbies while I've been working so hard. But you know what? What do I want to do? Do I want to do woodworking? Do I want to you know pick up horse riding? Do I want to do something else I need to do? I want to play a musical instrument. I mean getting started with something that I can start practicing now, because it's going to take a while for me to become adept at.
Speaker 2:I've enjoyed being creative in my scientific career and to just kind of end that and have no creative outlet or fewer creative outlets there's never no creative outlet, creative outlets, there's never no creative outlet. But having fewer creative outlets, I think will make my retirement emptier than it otherwise would have been. So I think I need to be able to transfer that creative outlet to something new. So I think finding that and preparing for that is the most important thing. I already know how to incubate quite well, but preparing for the next stage of my creative life, I think, is important and that would be the best advice I could give anyone who wants to be more creative is what do you want to do, what do you want to be good at, what do you want to create in what space? And start, get started, and start, get started.
Speaker 1:I love that you brought that up. I was going to ask you is it you know? Are people ever too old to try to be creative in something new? Do you ever kind of grow out of it? Or do you know, by a certain time in life? And based on what you've said, it's no, you can always try to do something new and creative.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and my mom was a really good example. She took up quilting in her sixties and became a master quilter beautiful award-winning quilts they're hanging in my house and in my office and and just a beautiful artistic outlet that she didn't know she had until she picked that up in her when she was older than me, and so really inspirational to see her prepare for and cultivate this creative outlet in her mid to late 60s and be able to share that with the world into her 70s and 80s with the world into her 70s and 80s.
Speaker 1:That's really awesome. So I have a final question for you, and I don't even know I'm going to ask it. I hope you have an answer to it. This was not one that you were prepped with. Of all the research you have done on creativity, what have you found to be the most?
Speaker 2:fascinating thing that you've learned about it Intelligence and creativity. The most fascinating thing was that I've learned is that intelligence and creativity really work. Different parts of the human brain that novelty generator is really different. It's on the interior part, the medial or mesial parts of the brain that are internally directed, and it really fits with that kind of novelty thinking inward thinking, problem solving, mental simulation world and then the intelligence parts tend to be on the outside parts of the brain where you're directing your attention and cognitive resources outward. But the most surprising and gratifying things were that we could create different theories about different parts of the brain that are engaged with creativity and intelligence, and it was just fascinating that they weren't the same parts of the brain but they appeared to be discrete or different parts of the brain. So there's so much more to learn about how they interact with each other.
Speaker 1:So here are my key takeaways from today's episode with Dr Young. Problem solving can be done in two ways. There's creativity, which is novel and useful problem solving, and then there's intelligence, which is rapid and accurate problem solving. I find it so fascinating that both of these things, creativity and intelligence, have the same end goal they are there for us to use to solve problems. It's just how we pull from them and how we use them that can help us solve the problems. So what does this mean for you? What does this mean when it comes to being your best self physically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually?
Speaker 1:There is a need for us to be more creative, and some of the things that we talked about today was to pick something that you may have a skill at and put in the work to do more of it. So I mentioned I'm not going to be the person to put a blank canvas in front of me with a bunch of oil paint and paint a mountain scheme. No part of that sounds exciting to me. The closest I'm going to get to that is going to one of those events that you go to with your girlfriends and you drink some wine and events that you go to with your girlfriends and you drink some wine and they teach you how to paint some things. Right, that sounds like fun and that's a great way to get started in it. But the things that do interest me, and that I even did a lot when I was in high school, was more of theater, more drama, singing, all of those different types of things, even teaching myself to play the piano not like an amazing pianist, but just learning to play some chords and playing one of my favorite songs that is on the radio or whatever. Those are things that I used to do when I was in high school and in college and would just get lost in the time. I would definitely get in that flow state and it was such a kind of pressure valve release for the stress that was in my life and I loved it and I've gotten away from that.
Speaker 1:So even in this conversation with Dr Young, I'm thinking, okay, maybe I should go and buy a keyboard, bring it into my office and let that be something that I do at nighttime, in the evenings, to just focus on doing something that is really more of a creative outlet for me, and just for me. It's not going to be something that I do on the podcast or make a YouTube video about, but it's something I enjoy doing. What is that for you? It could be building something, it could be crocheting, it could be quilting, like he was talking about there's no end of options. Gardening, it could be painting.
Speaker 1:There's so many different types of things that you can do to be creative Interior design. I could keep going on, but I think you get the idea. But find one of those things and maybe use the questions that he asked to help guide you. What is it that you want to do? What is an aspect you would like to have added to your life? What is the kind of space that you want to be creative in?
Speaker 1:And I think all of us kind of know we have an idea in our gut of something that we want to do, something we liked doing from our past or something that we would like to at least try. And those are great places to start. Maybe it's even starting by going dancing getting some friends, getting your husband, getting your wife trying a dance class, going to swing dancing lessons. We used to have those here in Nashville, up at a place called Centennial Park. There would be swing dancing in the park on Saturday nights, and that was such a fun thing to do Place to go with friends. Rob and I went a couple of times when we dated and to just get creative.
Speaker 1:And I heard elsewhere years ago that it's another great opportunity for bonding in your relationship. When you and your significant other go and do new things together, when you have new experiences together, it actually helps create intimacy and it actually helps to bond both of you closer together, which can deepen commitment. So this hits on all kinds of levels. It can help get you focused on some different things. Physically, of course. Intellectually, it's helping you to grow your skillset, your hobbies, your mind. Emotionally, this can help to really help your relationships, especially if you do this with other people. Those are some key takeaways from today's episode. Until next week, stay strong.
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