The Molecule of More

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
—proverb
Models are powerful tools, but they have disadvantages. They can 
lock us in to a particular way of thinking, causing us to miss out on 
opportunities to improve our world. For instance, most people know 

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CREATIVITY AND MADNESS
that computers require instructions to work. Programmers type these 
instructions on a keyboard. This suggests a simple model: typing instruc-
tions on a keyboard is the way to operate a computer. The scientists at Xerox 
PARC had to free themselves from that model before they could invent 
the computer mouse and the graphical user interface. It’s dopamine 
that builds models, and dopamine that breaks them apart. Both require 
us to think about things that don’t currently exist, but might in the 
future.
Model breaking can be seen in certain kinds of riddles, called 
insight problems. Preexisting models have to be taken apart in order to 
see the problem in a fresh way. Here’s an example:
I’m in years but not months. I’m in weeks but not days. What 
am I?
This riddle is difficult, and unless you’ve heard it before or have low 
latent inhibition, it’s unlikely you’ll figure out that the answer is the let-
ter e. The riddle draws you into a calendar-based model, leading you to 
inhibit apparently irrelevant information, such as the letters that make 
up the words.
Here’s another example. What one word does the sequence 
“HIJKLMNO” represent? A man who was puzzling over this problem 
experienced a series of dreams that were all about water. He wasn’t 
able to make the connection, but it becomes obvious when we look at 
the answer: H
2
O. We’ll look more closely at the dopaminergic power of
dreams later in the chapter.
Here’s a riddle that a few decades ago required significant model 
breaking to find the solution. Today, it’s much easier.
A father and his son are in a car accident. The father dies 
instantly, and the son is taken to the nearest hospital. The 
surgeon comes in and exclaims, “I can’t operate on this boy. 
He’s my son!” How is this possible?

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THE MOLECULE OF MORE
DISCOVERING THE SOURCE OF CREATIVITY . . .
Oshin Vartanian, a researcher at York University in Toronto, wanted to 
figure out what part of the brain was most active when people discov-
ered novel solutions to problems, so he scanned people’s brains while 
they were solving a problem that required creativity. He found that 
when they discovered the solution to the problem, the front of their 
brains on the right side was activated. He wondered if this part of the 
brain was also involved in model breaking.
In a second experiment he asked participants not to solve a prob-
lem but simply to use their imagination. First he asked them to imagine 
real things, such as “a flower that is a rose.” Then he asked them to 
imagine things that don’t exist, things that don’t fit the conventional 
model of reality, such as “a living thing that is a helicopter.” With the 
volunteers in the scanner, he found that the same part of the brain lit up 
as before, but only when participants thought about objects that did not 
exist in life. When they imagined reality itself, the region stayed dark.
Brain scans of people with schizophrenia show changes in that 
same area, the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. Maybe it’s because 
when we are being creative, we behave a little bit like a person with 
schizophrenia. We stop inhibiting aspects of reality that we had previ-
ously written off as unimportant, and we attach salience to things we 
once thought were irrelevant.
. . . AND SHOCKING IT TO LIFE
Finding the neural basis of creativity has enormous potential, because 
creativity is the most valuable resource in the world. New ways of grow-
ing crops feed millions of people. From candles to light bulbs, innova-
tions in turning fuel into light have decreased its cost by a factor of a 
thousand. Might there be a way to boost this priceless treasure? Would 
it be possible for someone to become more creative if a scientist stim-
ulated the parts of the brain that are active during creative thinking?

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CREATIVITY AND MADNESS
Researchers funded by the National Science Foundation decided to 
try. They used a technique called transcranial direct current stimulation 
(tDCS). As the name suggests, specific regions of the brain are stimu-
lated using direct current (DC)—that’s the kind of current you get from 
a battery, as opposed to alternating current (AC), which comes from a 
wall socket. DC is safer than AC and the amount of electricity used is 
small. Some devices are powered by a simple 9-volt battery, the boxy 
kind you put in your smoke detectors. tDCS machines can be very sim-
ple. Although commercial ones used for research cost over a thousand 
dollars, some brave individuals have cobbled together primitive ones 
using $15 worth of parts from their local electronics store. (Consumer 
tip: Don’t do it.)
In small studies these devices have been shown to accelerate learn-
ing, enhance concentration, and even treat clinical depression. To 
attempt to enhance creativity, electrodes were attached to the foreheads 
of thirty-one volunteers, and the part of the brain that lies just behind 
the eyes was stimulated. Creativity was measured by testing the partici-
pants’ ability to make analogies.
Analogies represent a very dopaminergic way of thinking about 
the world. Here’s an example: light can sometimes act like individual 
bullets being fired from a gun, and at other times like ripples traveling 
across a pond. An analogy pulls out the abstract, unseen essence of a 
concept, and matches it with a similar essence of an apparently unre-
lated concept. The body’s senses perceive two different things, but rea-
son understands how they are the same. Pairing a brand-new idea with 
an old familiar one makes the new idea easier to understand. 
The ability to draw a connection between two things that had pre-
viously appeared to be unrelated is an important part of creativity, and 
it appears that it can be enhanced by electrical stimulation. Compared 
to participants who were given fake tDCS, those who got electricity 
created more unusual analogies—that is, analogies between things that 
seemed very unlike one another. Nevertheless, these highly creative 
analogies were just as accurate as the more obvious ones created by the