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Welcome to Brain Science Live Episode three. If you're new to the podcast, you can find full episodes and show notes@brainsciencepodcast.com today our discussion is going to be based on episode 143, which was an interview with the neuropsychologist Dr. Elkanan Goldberg about his latest book, Creativity and the Human Brain in the Age of Innovation. I featured a couple of Dr. Goldberg's earlier books during the first season of this show way back in 2007. So anyway, we're talking about episode 143 tonight. The goal of these Facebook Live sessions is to create a new way for listeners to share their feedback and questions. This episode was released in March of 2018, and this was the first time that I announced my email intention to begin these monthly Facebook Live sessions. Besides hoping to get listeners to get more involved, my other goal was to create extra content for my Premium and Patreon supporters. I'm going to explain how that works at the end of our conversation. First, I want to take just a minute to explain the format of today's conversation. First, you can submit comments or questions at any time, but I might not respond to them immediately. I see my favorite niece Heather is on there. Hi Heather. Please hang on. You'll learn something anyway. If you're watching, but you don't want to comment, just at least say hi like Heather did so that I know that you're out there. I'm going to start out with a brief review of the key ideas that we explored in episode 143. This is going to be a review for some of you, but it's going to allow anyone who's new to the show to have a sense of what the episode was about and hopefully to understand any questions or comments that are submitted by listeners. Then, after that brief review, I'm going to explore listener feedback from two sources. One things sent to me by email, and two, those comments or questions submitted tonight as live comments. Then I'll close by telling you how you can share this content with others. Dr. Goldberg's new book, Creativity the Human Brain in the Age of Innovation, certainly stands alone, and it's appropriate for readers of all backgrounds. I'm going to just touch on a few key ideas. First, we talked about the role of the prefrontal cortex without actually specifying what it is. The prefrontal cortex refers to the parts of the frontal cortex actually in front of or anterior to the motor part of the frontal cortex, and the reason why its functions were not appreciated early on is that if you stimulate either the sensory or motor cortex, then you're going to see movement of a particular body part or create a sensation in that same region. But this doesn't happen when the freefrontal cortex is simulated because its functions are much more complex. We talked a little bit about the importance of the prefrontal cortex in executive function and working memory, but in previous episodes I've talked a lot about the importance of the prefrontal cortex as relates to the fact that it has two way communication with almost every other part of the brain. This appears to be essential to its function, and it's One reason why Dr. Goldberg compares the prefrontal cortex to conducting an orchestra. There also appear to be difference between the right and left prefrontal cortex, but we didn't get into those. We did talk about the overall difference between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Goldberg argues that while the left hemisphere focuses on well learned or routine tasks, the right hemisphere is involved in dealing with novelty. Now, we didn't get too much into the evidence for this, but I will mention that much of the evidence has come from functional imaging, including FMRI and PET scans that show a gradual shift in the activity from the right to the left with when a new task is learned. This brings up another topic that I've mentioned often, which is the importance of experimental design and how it is influenced by theoretical expectations. The only way one could uncover this shift of activity from right to left is to do functional imaging at different times during the learning of a new task. You would miss this if you were imaging an already well learned task such as language, or if you were to measure at different times but then averaged everything together, which is a common thing that gets done. Let's consider the example of language. It's well established that the left hemisphere is essential for language tasks involving both semantics and syntax or grammar. And while the right hemisphere is essential for processing prosody or the sound of speech. This actually fits Goldberg's paradigm perfectly because semantics and grammar are skills that have become automatic. What about prosody, which I don't even know that I pronounced correctly, but at any rate, think about it. Isn't this the thing that is most likely to contain novel information such as that carried by the tone of a voice? We explore these ideas in more detail in episode 144, which is actually about language in the brain. Another topic that's very important in Goldberg's new book is his discussion of networks. And although he seemed to downplay the importance of networks during our conversation, this has been a consistent theme for many of my guests over the years. If these ideas, I.e. network ideas, are new to you, I encourage you to go back and listen to the interviews of Dr. Olaf Sporns. And you might also enjoy episode 124, which is where I talked with Dr. Michael Anderson about his neural reuse hypothesis. One of the key themes there was the idea that neurons can actually participate in multiple neurons networks. Three of the networks that are currently receiving a lot of interest are the central executive network, the default mode network, and the salience network. The central executive network is also sometimes called the cognitive control network because it's very active during outward directed activities. This is in contrast to the default mode network, which seems to be most active when the brain's at rest relative to the outside world. For example, when you're just laying there daydreaming. In his book, Goldberg explores the evidence that these networks appear to have complementary roles when it comes to creativity. Now, we didn't talk much about salience, but there are some points in his book that I want to mention. One is that salience is generated, can be generated either internally or externally. That's really important when you're designing an experiment because it can affect the results. And when you hear about salience, oftentimes dopamine is the neuromodulator that gets all the press. But there are a couple of ideas that are often ignored. One is that there are multiple dopaminergic pathways, and the other is that the effect of dopamine depends on which dopamine receptor it encounters. This is one reason why you might read apparently contradictory statements about what dopamine does. So we hear about dopamine as the reward chemical, but besides salience, it's also involved in arousal in the prefrontal cortex. It appears that dopamine helps to signal that a stimulus is important or salient, While the neurotransmitter norepinephrine signals novelty. And just as a side, both of these substances, norepinephrine and dopamine are, are used in medicine to help raise people's blood pressure. Just to give you a feel for the fact that they can have very different activities depending upon where they are. And those activities aren't just in the brain. Anyway, returning to the idea of the different dopamine receptors, Goldberg suggests that dopamine may play a role in what he calls maintaining the adaptive balance between stability and flexibility. Finally, he alludes to the fact that dealing with novelty is not unique to humans. So it's not Surprising that the so called laterality, which is to say the difference between right and left hemispheres, not limited to humans, not even limited to primates or mammals, they found similar differences in birds and they don't even have the cortical layers that distinguish the mammalian brain. So we really haven't addressed creativity directly, but because what Goldberg was trying to do was argue that we now have the ability to study the important building blocks. But I did come away with the sense that while the prefrontal webs are essential for focusing and for creative goals, true creativity involves allowing the default mode network to create novel connections between the facts we already know. Because the right hemisphere appears to be important to processing novelty, it obviously becomes an essential component in this process. However, the more we appreciate the network properties of the brain, the more we appreciate that the entire brain is involved in the process. And it's a vast oversimplification to just say that the right hemisphere is the source of creativity. Because Dr. Goldberg focuses on the actual neuroscience, I think his book makes a unique and valuable contribution to the growing literature on creativity. He doesn't claim to have all the answers, but he gives us a good overview of the current evidence and he's very clear when he is speculating beyond the evidence. Okay, so now it is time to open things up for listener questions and feedback. So if anybody in the audience, I think there's about five people watching, which is better than last month. If you want to ask a question or make a comment, please go ahead and submit it. I'm going to start by talking about some listener feedback that I got from email. Now, as I mentioned earlier, this episode was released in March 2018 and it was the first time I announced my plan for Facebook Live. And it was new to me too. So I don't think I did a very good job of explaining my expectations for feedback. So I could only find one email that specifically addressed this episode. I'm happy to say that as we go forward, I think I've got more and more material, but we're still in the early stages of this experiment. So jan wrote number 143. The key idea for me was that the large scale brain networks could be dynamic and perhaps overlapping. And I'm a bit proud of the fact that I authored the first version of the Wikipedia article about large scale brain networks. Goldberg seemed to collapse the idea of neural networks and brain networks and that doesn't jive for me. The neural networks are more like what's going on in the columns. Pre Hillock question Hopkins mental model on intelligence is standing up well. So my reaction to this is first, networks do have a major role in Goldberg's book, but we really didn't talk about them too much during the interview. Therefore, I think this impression that he is conflating neural nets and brain networks is really not a fair representation of Goldberg's ideas. I also assume that Jan is mentioning Hawkins ideas from his book on intelligence, which was actually Featured in Episode 2 of Brain Science, because in that book Hawkins gives a very succinct explanation of the failure of classic neural nets, including the fact that they have very little resemblance to networks of real neurons. Okay, I'm going to go by and just I've got a listener. This is going to be recorded. So I'm going to just tell the people that are going to be listening in the future that I'm happy that we have listener from Palo Alto, Italy, Costa Rica, South Carolina, my niece Heather, who's in Mississippi, and my friend David McDivitt, who I think is here in Alabama. So thanks for tuning in. Tuning in everybody. See, nobody has really submitted a question. I know it's not easy to just come up with a question on one of these things just out of the clear blue sky. So that's the reason why I'm trying to get people to submit their questions via email. Also. It will allow me to give better answers. Okay, so if you think of another comment before I close, just go ahead and type it in and I'll pop over to it. Otherwise, I'm just going to make a few last minute announcements before we close. One is that I want to remind you that if you're interested in joining me on my trip to Australia in May of 2000. Oh, and Darrell's in the High Sierras and somebody else from Florida. Great. Okay, David, you're in Illinois. My bad. So if you want to go to Australia In May of 2019, I'm getting a group together. There's only room for 16 people. The way you learn about this is to go to BrainScience Podcast Australia2019. There's only room for 16 people, so please let me know as soon as possible if you want to come. If you live in Australia, I'm hoping to have some listener meetups in both Melbourne and Sydney. I'm also interested in doing any kind of speaking engagements in those locations. Now, one reason I decided to start doing these Facebook Live sessions is to create extra content for the listeners who support my work via premium subscriptions and Patreon. If you're interested in how to do that. Just go to BrainScience podcast donations and all the options are there. I really appreciate everyone who has listened tonight and tuned in to let me know where you are. That's really cool. I think this is going to get to be more and more fun as I realize that I'm actually talking to real live people. I hope you will consider subscribing to Brain Science and Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or your favorite podcast app if you aren't already subscribed. And please do let me know what you think of this Facebook Live effort by posting comments here on Facebook or by sending me email@brainsciencepodcastmail.com okay, if there's not any more comments I am going to sign off, but I really appreciate you taking the time to listen to what I had to say. Bye. Brain Science with Dr. Ginger Campbell is copyright 2018 to Virginia Campbell, MD. You can copy this show to share it with others, but for any other uses or derivatives please contact me@brainsciencepodcastmail.com.