Free Born Liars by Ian Leslie

jazz musicians to create something new in every moment; that allowed, for instance, his musical hero John Coltrane to improvise instant masterpieces on stage. Limb wanted to see if there was a way of tracking the neural activity of musicians as they improvised, and whether that might allow a glimpse into the processes of creativity in action. Along with his colleague Allen Braun, he designed an experiment to do just that.
    Limb and Braun recruited four jazz musicians and asked them to play specially designed keyboards while lying inside a brain scanner. The musicians began by playing a piece that required no imagination; a simple blues melody composed by Limb. Then they were asked to improvise over the top of a recording of a jazz quartet. The musicians displayed a distinctive pattern of brain activity as soon as they started their improvisations. The area of the pre-frontal cortex responsible for self-awareness and introspection – for our sense of who we are – showed high activation. At the same time, the musicians seemed to ‘turn off’ activity in those parts of the brain linked to self-control and self-monitoring – the areas that are usually damaged in confabulating patients. As Limb puts it, the improvising musician ‘shuts down his inhibitions and lets his inner voice shine through’.
    Paradoxically, artists are able to control the point at which they relinquish control. When I asked Will Self if there’s anything that marks out artists from the rest of us, he recalled a remark made by the author Flannery O’Connor to the effect that writers have to be ‘calculatedly stupid’. ‘I can think of any number of people who are more perceptive than me, who are more learned and have more know-how,’ said Self. ‘But what they aren’t is calculatedly stupid, in the sense that they are unable to preserve intact their ability to suspend disbelief. They can’t play , in the way that a child will make a den and say “This is my castle”. Writers can still do that. Creativity is just an advanced form of play, in which the normal rules of space and time are suspended.’
    Freud observed that the child’s uninhibited pleasure in play is diminished in adulthood, or marginalised as private ‘day-dreaming’ or mere ‘fancy’. Children are magical realists; aware of the difference between reality and fantasy but never less than ready to take unashamed pleasure in the latter. There is now a better understanding of why this is in terms of our neurological development: the parts of the brain responsible for pleasure and fantasy arrive early, while those responsible for self-monitoring and regulation are the last to become fully formed. As we grow older we can still hear the hiss and bubble of what William James called the ‘seething cauldron of ideas’, but it tends to recede as reality asserts itself and we address the quotidian tasks of getting jobs and filling out mortgage applications. ‘Every child is an artist,’ said Pablo Picasso. ‘The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.’
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    In a 1962 study of creativity, a group of high-school students aged between eleven and eighteen were administered a series of verbal and visual exercises, the focus of which was to tease out the difference between being intelligent and being creative; the results of the exercises were compared to scores from IQ tests which the school had already administered. In one exercise the students were shown a picture of a businessman sitting in an aeroplane, reclining in his seat. They were asked to imagine the story behind it. A high-IQ student gave this response:
    Mr Smith is on his way home from a successful business trip. He is very happy and he is thinking about his wonderful family and how glad he will be to see them again. He can picture it, about an hour from now, his plane landing at the airport and Mrs Smith and their