Brain research is merciless: ‘Creativity is already decreasing at the age of 35’

How does creativity arise?
Henry Jokeit: We can locate creativity in the frontal lobe of the brain. It arises from a combination of disinhibition and inhibition. When the brain shuts down control and becomes uninhibited, breaking the rules becomes possible. We then make previously unseen associative connections or we manage to look at things from a completely different perspective. The brain then notices: There is something new, I like that. For something useful to come out of this flash of inspiration, however, the brain must be put back on the brakes and regain control. Discipline is required.

At what age are we most creative?
The frontal lobe is the last brain region to mature, usually just after age 20. But it is also the region that loses efficiency sooner than other functions. This can be measured from about age 60.

So we have 40 years?
The most radical creative processes are possible in the brain from about the age of 20 to 35 years. This is where new perspectives are formed that shape us later. This can also be proven sociologically. Most people’s taste in music hardly changes after their thirties. Most Nobel laureates receive their prizes for discoveries or inventions made in the fourth, rarely fifth, decade of their lives.

But there are also artists who are only successful after 60 years.
Usually they were only discovered in old age. But they developed their stylistic peculiarities, breaking rules that characterize them, much earlier.

Martin Suter and Pascal Mercier, two of Switzerland’s most successful writers, did not publish their first books until they were fifty.
But that doesn’t mean they weren’t creative before. They were just in a different field. They changed terrain as they got older. This is a good strategy to stay creative for a long time. Pascal Mercier was an outstanding analytic philosopher under his real name Peter Bieri. He has succeeded in transferring his philosophical wisdom to a new domain.

In the same way you do that by transferring your knowledge from brain research to photography. How does that help you in your creative process as an artist?
Art requires perception, attention, memory, emotion. These are brain functions that we understand better today than thirty years ago. And this knowledge can and should be incorporated into artistic practice to create something new in terms of form and content, because good art is art that advances art.

Doesn’t the acclaimed wisdom of old age aid creativity?
Of course, the more a person has experienced, the more knowledge he has acquired, the more material he has with which to interact creatively. But that does not mean that you can also initiate new creative processes.

That doesn’t bode well for old artists.
Reinventing yourself in old age is difficult, at least from a neurobiological point of view. If you want that, you have to switch genres. So no longer writing, but for example painting or photographing. This gives you the best chance to be creative in a new way. Impressing the world with it is quite another matter. (aargauerzeitung.ch)