Creativity Flourishes Away From Beaten Pathways in the Mind

"The universe is wider than our views of it. Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find a thousand regions in your mind yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be expert in home-cosmography." —Henry David Thoreau, Walden (published 1854)

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A new fMRI study (Anderson et al., 2022) by researchers at UCLA sheds light on Thoreau's 19th-century notion that sticking to commonly traveled "pathways in the mind" leads to rut-like thinking and stifles creativity. These recent neuroscience findings were published online ahead of print on March 28 in the peer-reviewed journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.

The fMRI neuroimages from this study suggest that "Big-C" creativity in artists and scientists is associated with eccentric functional connectivity capacities that allow highly creative individuals to make random connections between distant brain regions using a vast global network of rarely used neural pathways.

"Our results showed that highly creative people had unique brain connectivity that tended to stay off the beaten path. While non-creatives tended to follow the same routes across the brain, the highly creative people made their own roads," first author Ariana Anderson of UCLA's Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior said in a news release.

These UCLA findings dovetail with another fMRI-based study published earlier this year (Ovando-Tellez et al., 2022). It found that having less segregated neural networks allows highly creative individuals to access ideas from distant corners of their minds and promotes creativity. (See, "Fluid Whole-Brain Thinking Supports Creative Thinking.")

Long Before fMRIs, Thoreau Speculated That Well-Worn Pathways in the Mind Could Turn Into Ruts

"As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives." —Henry David Thoreau

In a July 7, 1851 journal entry, Thoreau imagines that every redundant thought passing through his mind "helps to deepen ruts," which, like walkways through the ancient city of Pompeii, might show how much a particular pathway in the mind has been used.

Title page from first edition of Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854).

Source: Public domain

Soon after moving into a solitary one-room cabin on Walden pond in 1845, Thoreau noticed that his footsteps along a frequently traveled route from his front door to the water's edge had carved a path through the woods. Other footpaths he traversed on daily walks around Walden pond also cut deep ruts into the earth.

These footpaths through the woods became a metaphor for "paths through the mind" that Thoreau later used to differentiate between being a non-conformist and divergent thinker as opposed to someone who clings to the status quo and is a convergent thinker. As he writes in Walden:

"The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!"

Exploring Unfamiliar Territory on Foot Stimulated Thoreau's Creativity

To get his creative juices going and prevent writer's block, Thoreau went on long walks. Accumulating neuroscience-based evidence suggests that bipedal aerobic activity (e.g., walking) promotes superfluid brain connectivity and cultivates creativity. (See "The Neuroscience of Superfluid Thinking.")

Thoreau's Walden pond neighbor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote in an August 1862 tribute published in The Atlantic, "The length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing. If shut up in the house, he did not write at all."

Thoreau left Walden pond exactly two years, two months, and two days after he arrived. Once he realized that sticking to the well-worn local paths around Walden pond was stifling his mind, Thoreau decided to explore "the highways of the world" in search of fresh ideas. As he explains in the conclusion of Walden, "I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there...It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route and make a beaten track for ourselves."

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Avoiding Well-Worn Pathways in the Mind Promotes Creativity That Can Be Seen in fMRI Neuroimages

Through the lens of the latest (2022) neuroimaging research by Anderson et al., it appears that creativity blossoms when people get off the beaten path inside their brains. As the authors sum up in their paper's abstract, "[Our] findings suggest that Big-C creativity is associated with more 'random' rather than more 'efficient' global network functional architecture, with condition-dependent variations in local clustering and efficiency."

This fMRI-based research into Big-C creativity among artists and scientists suggests that randomly accessing alternative routes through the mind is associated with better performance on an Alternative Uses Test (AUT) that measures varying degrees of divergent vs. convergent thinking.

"Exceptional creativity was associated with more random connectivity at the global scale—a pattern that is less 'efficient' but would appear helpful in linking distant brain nodes to each other," senior author Robert Bilder said in a news release.

Thoreau equated rut-like thinking with always walking on the same well-worn path. Similarly, the latest research by Anderson et al. suggests that highly creative individuals are better at connecting seemingly unrelated ideas in new and useful ways if distant regions within their brains are randomly connected via "roads less traveled" in the mind.