3 experts explain your brain’s creativity formula

What is it that's special about the

human brain that allows [music]

creativity to happen?

What humans do that's special is we

absorb all of these ideas, all these

inputs, and [music] we smoosh them up in

various ways and come up with new

things. We during the evolution of the

cortex [music] got a lot more space in

between input and output. Other animals

have these much closer together. So when

they get some stimulus, they make a

essentially reflexive response. In

humans, inputs can come in and sort of

percolate around and get stored and get

thought about and then maybe you make an

output or maybe you don't. And there's

one other thing that happened with the

[music] expansion of the cortex, which

is that we got a much bigger prefrontal

cortex and that is what allows us to

simulate whatifs to separate ourselves

from our location in space and time and

think about possibilities.

Now there are almost 8 billion brains

running around the planet and as a

result the creativity [music] of our

species has gone up in this mad amazing

way because there's so much raw material

to draw on.

It's useful to distinguish between

intelligence and imagination.

I like to view intelligence as all the

things, all the thought processes,

behaviors that allow us to learn what

is, learn the way the world is.

Imagination are all the processes that

allow us to imagine what could be. A lot

of creativity [music] requires to learn

what is so that we can go beyond it. But

if we're just at the stage of learning

what is so we just have the knowledge, I

don't think knowledge necessarily equals

creativity. So creativity requires both

intelligence and imagination.

We are trying to run complex modern

lives. Take in and make sense of more

information than ever on brains that

haven't [music] changed biologically in

200,000 years. My message to you is that

you need a second [music] brain. A

second brain is a personal system for

knowledge management. [music] It's not

taking. It's saving little bits of

material and information, [music] your

environment, and also your own thoughts

to cultivate and retrieve [music] and

review it over time. By saving all of

these observations in one single

centralized place, your second brain,

[music]

you drastically increase the odds that

you're going to notice how things

connect and relate. And this is

innovation. This is creativity. Is not

inventing something from nothing. It is

just applying a tool or a technique or

an insight from one domain and then

translating it to another [music] one.

That is the very essence of creativity.