Cyndi Burnett: How do we define creativity clearly enough to study it, teach it, and protect it in the age of AI? Because creativity is often used as a catch-all word, but Adam Green reminds us that if we want to understand it more deeply, we need a shared language. In this episode, Dr. Adam Green brings together neuroscience, creativity research, the ECHO ontology project, and current questions about AI and writing.

Cyndi Burnett: We explore what the brain can teach us about creative thinking, why distinguishing creativity from imagination and innovation matters, and how AI might be reshaping the way we generate new ideas. So as you listen, think about this: If creativity is changing, how might our understanding of it need to change, too?

Matthew Worwood: Hello, everyone. My name is Dr. Matthew Worwood.

Cyndi Burnett: And my name is Dr. Cyndi Burnett.

Matthew Worwood: This is the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast.

Cyndi Burnett: On this podcast, we’ll be talking about various creativity topics and how they relate to the field of education.

Matthew Worwood: We’ll be talking with scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and exploring new perspectives of creativity.

Cyndi Burnett: All with the goal to help fuel a more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers, administrators, and emerging scholars with the information they need to infuse creativity into teaching and learning.

Matthew Worwood: So let’s begin Hello, and welcome back to another season of the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast.

Matthew Worwood: This is season 13, and we are starting the new academic year and kicking things off with welcoming Dr. Adam Green to the show. Adam is a professor of Georgetown University and director of the Laboratory for Relational Cognition. His research focuses on human creative intelligence, particularly understanding how neuroprocesses contribute to our best ideas.

Matthew Worwood: Adam’s work includes research into the neuro mechanisms and neurostimulation that support creative relational reasoning, as well as studies exploring the neuroscience of teaching and learning in real world educational contexts. Adam has recently led an expert consortium on creativity ontology, ECCO, which we think we’re gonna go with the acronym ECCO, but we’ll confirm that today.

Matthew Worwood: And that is a global collaboration involving nearly 200 scholars, which Cyndi and myself were part of, so we’re really kinda excited to, to throw that out there. And that was to establish a shared language and framework for creativity research, helping distinguish creativity from related concepts such as imagination and innovation.

Matthew Worwood: And obviously, as I alluded to, that’s gonna be a big part of our topic today. But before then, Adam, we wanna welcome you to the podcast.

Adam Green: Oh, well, thanks, guys. It’s great to be here. Thanks, Matt and Cyndi, for having me. I’ve heard great things about the podcast from our mutual friend, but then, you know, everyone’s friend, I suppose, James Kaufman.

Matthew Worwood: Yeah. And you know, referenced Cyndi’s number big five out in the background and all of the, the researchers we’ve had in the field, and it’s so valuable for us to bring on people like yourself, where we can have a conversation about the latest research, and then think about how that relates to teaching and learning environments.

Matthew Worwood: And of course, we’re gonna do that within the ECCO Project. But before we do that, I was wondering, we’re talking about neuroscience and that perspective of your work, and obviously that’s a big part of your lab. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you found yourself studying that aspect of creativity?

Adam Green: Yeah. So I was a philosophy geek as, an inappropriately young age. Like, I was into the books on philosophy that my dad had on the shelf. He ran a baseball card store. He wasn’t a philosopher by profession, but just has always been an important part of his mental life. And so I started reading, especially philosophy of mind, when I was supposed to be taking out the trash and things like that.

Adam Green: Once I found out that it was a thing, became very interested in the idea that you could study some questions of mind by actually looking at the physical brain and getting answers that, in some instances, might be more satisfying, uh, at least to those of us that, that are interested in physical explanations.

Adam Green: And so that was maybe high school-ish, and then the hook was in, and I studied neuroscience as an undergraduate and very went on to study cognitive neuroscience then as a PhD student, and then very boringly more of same as postdoc and have continued in that very boring trajectory of never changing my mind or exploring anything unfamiliar.

Adam Green: Although I will say, relevant to our conversation, that there was a brief interlude of being a middle school teacher after I graduated college

Matthew Worwood: And I’m loving this, but why creativity? I’m assuming within neuroscience and that aspect, there’s a few different avenues you could pursue, but you went down the road of creativity.

Adam Green: That’s because to me, it was always the most surprising, sort of the most difficult to reconcile with the physical substance of mind, right?

Adam Green: Memory, computers kind of do that, right? Like even when I was young, computers did… Like, you could build memory. Math, you could build math, right? You can build a calculator or computer. Creativity always seemed w- what, what a radical idea that might be physically instantiated. And

Adam Green: The reason that I’ve kept this boring course for so long is I think it’s renewably radical. I think every time I think about it, I have to sort of force myself to believe that this is something that physical brains do, that somehow creativity is built. And I get to have this incredibly great job where my job i- is to ask how is it built?

Adam Green: And how can we maybe even help it work better as a sort of physical mechanism? So that’s very exciting to me still, but it’s the furthest reach, right? Like, so let’s say you’re interested in how minds are brains. Well, now let’s take that to its extreme, right? To its furthest extreme, which perhaps the most, to me, impressive and most difficult to imagine as a physical system kind of implementation of a mind.

Cyndi Burnett: So Adam, you know that our audience are educators. So in terms of things that you’ve learned, and I don’t think you should call it boring, I think it’s just a specialty that you love to geek out about, and we talk about- Yeah.

Adam Green: That’s my wife and my sister and everybody else who knows me. I don’t have to say that for ourselves.

Adam Green: There are plenty of other people to say that about us.

Cyndi Burnett: All right. Well, let’s look at neuroscience and creativity from a really exciting perspective of what can it teach us about what happens in creativity, and how can that help make the lives of our students even better? So I’m curious from your perspective, because you’ve been in this neuroscience field for, and I know you’re the lab director, right, at Georgetown.

Cyndi Burnett: So for several decades now, you’ve been working on this. What is the thing that has most surprised you in neuroscience and creativity, and how might we take that learning and bring it into the classroom?

Adam Green: It’s a good question. So , I would refer to this sort of just general surprise that keeps me sort of fueled, fueling creativity, I suppose, that we can poke this thing and watch it move, right?

Adam Green: And so a lot of what we do in my lab is intervention-based, and that can take many forms, right? So the fork that we poke this thing with can be lots of… Is multi-pronged, if I’m just gonna just murder this metaphor. But we can talk about educational interventions, and we do. We can talk about simple, just sort of moment-to-moment instructional interventions, like, “Please think creatively.”

Adam Green: As simple as that, that’s actually one of the most effective things you can do. Talk about boring. Or-

Cyndi Burnett: It’s just the word please.

Adam Green: Please don’t– Right. It can’t be about, “Everybody’s watching you, and you’re gonna be evaluated, and somebody else might be more creative than you.” That’s not gonna… Yeah, that won’t help.

Adam Green: But if it’s an encouragement and an invitation, and it puts you in that creative mindset, I think almost any way you do that works. But it’s just that being explicit about it is the surest way to know that people will actually take your point. We’ve done a fair bit of that, actually. Some of my grad school work and into postdoc and even my time as a PI, this very simple intervention of, “Please think creatively as you try this task again,” or, “As you formulate analogies,” or, “As you generate new ideas.”

Adam Green: And we see both at the behavioral level, but also at the neural level, we see very clear changes when you go into, when you sort of transition into a more creative state. And then what we’ve done with that information, with that learning, is to say, “Okay, well, if this is how the brain changes when it shifts into a more creative state, maybe we can help it do that,” right?

Adam Green: Maybe we can introduce zaps of different sorts, so we can use transcranial electrical stimulation. We can use TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation. These days in the lab, we’re ramping up a project where we’re even using focused ultrasound to do some of this zapping. But it’s all the same concept that you look at what happens when a brain goes from thinking less creatively to more creatively, and you try to enhance that.

Adam Green: You try to boost that, try to help the brain do that. Mapping that to education, what we’ve basically tried to do with another prong of our fork is to say, “Okay-” From what we’ve learned in the lab, here’s what should change if we want brains to think more creatively. Let’s look at different kinds of instructional interventions and see which ones may be moving the brain in that direction, even if the short-term behavioral changes , are harder to find.

Adam Green: And this is something that’s actually really interesting to me and some work that we’re doing now in, in classrooms with a portable form of neuroimaging called functional near-infrared spectroscopy or fNIRS. Stuff that can go on your head, you can move around, you can… You don’t have to be, like, locked up in a noisy room.

Adam Green: And we’re looking at some instructional intervention, some curricular modules that we have stolen. Actually, we’re collaborating. But it were not developed by us. It were developed by Kurt Hamen and Wolfgang, who are in– I don’t know if you know those guys, but they’re in– Oh, you, you might wanna chat with those guys ’cause they’re into creativity and education as much as anyone.

Adam Green: But they’re in Austria, and they’ve developed this FLEX or SCIP, is what they now call it, curriculum that sort of just integrates into existing classes, especially science classes. And they’ve shown for ten years that this is working, that it’s helping students think more creatively. What we’re doing now is trying out two things.

Adam Green: Firstly, what of the pieces that work in Austria could actually work in this country? Because a classroom in Austria is not the same as a public classroom here. And we partner with public schools in the DC area and Northern Virginia on some of our other projects, including some projects related to spatial thinking and learning.

Adam Green: But that’s given us sort of an avenue then to explore this creativity work. So how can we translate from what works in Austria to what works in classrooms around here? But also, can we look at neural changes and identify whether certain ways of introducing these modules, certain approaches, certain teaching or learning experiences are associated with the sorts of neural change that we know is associated with building this creative capacity?

Adam Green: And then the really cool thing for me is to look at whether those neural changes end up predicting longer term changes down the road that are not immediately evident at a behavioral level.

Matthew Worwood: Wow.

Adam Green: Because I think- A big question for educators with neuroscience is why, right? Like, what is the neuroscience actually adding?

Adam Green: And I think it’s a fair question and an important question, and I think it, it’s expensive or can be. It’s certainly inconvenient. What– The future that I see for the integration of neuroscience into education research in a meaningful way is not that we’re supposed to scan every kid’s brain. It’s not that we’re supposed to replace traditional ways of assessing kids with neuroscience.

Adam Green: But if we add neuroscience in small scale settings, what we can do is help to get insights into ways of teaching that build underlying resources. So those could be spatial, and we’ve shown some of that, but they could also be creative. And if you can make that sort of curriculum development process faster and more precise with those neural indicators of change that then predict longer term things, and especially if the prediction that you get is better than what you would’ve had without looking at the brain, which we’ve shown with our spatial education work, and that’s where we’re headed with our creativity in the classroom work, then you’ve gotten some real value out of the neuroscience.

Adam Green: But I think your question is framed the right way because you don’t know what to look for until you do all the work in the lab to figure out how brains change when they’re thinking more creatively. And then you can, once you know that or have some sense of it, you can start to apply it in this sort of curriculum development way

Matthew Worwood: And if I was to process everything that you just said, and I will tell you right now that I’m envisioning, I’m thinking about Ghostbusters when they’ve got the big kind of like thing on the head, or we’ve got Dr.

Matthew Worwood: Emmett Brown in Back to the Future. But we’ve got… We’re not necessarily looking at behavioral, we’re not observing behaviors here. We are observing what we’re seeing happening in the brain, and we then are identifying or mapping what parts of the brain, in essence, are becoming active when engaged in some type of creative task.

Matthew Worwood: And you’re using the word zaps, which is an awesome word, which I think you’re like literally saying, “Can we zap this brain, this part of the brain to activate it, to confirm?” Yeah, you know what? It’s, it’s doing something here. And then it’s the same concept of with those interventions in the classroom, rather than just looking completely at the behavioral changes, are we seeing through those interventions, those parts of the brains becoming active as a consequence of that intervention?

Matthew Worwood: Is that a kind of fair summary?

Adam Green: Active and more connected. I think, so both, right? So sometimes what matters is, okay, this one area is waking up more, it’s more active. But a lot of what matters for complicated things in the brain is how different networks talk to each other. And we can look at both of those things and how both of those things change.

Adam Green: I think the overall description is quite right, other than we are also looking at behavior. We’re looking at both brain and behavior, and what we ultimately want to know is can we learn something from th- these brain changes? That we couldn’t have learned just by looking at behavior. And if the answer to that is yes, that doesn’t mean we throw out the behavior.

Adam Green: That means we add the brain, right? And, and then our ability to predict what’s gonna work in a classroom gets more precise.

Matthew Worwood: Well, I’m thinking even just something as simple as there’s lots of conversations around ADHD- Yeah … and hyperfocus, for example. And my understanding is that these are things that we observe in that population.

Matthew Worwood: But you’re saying with the brain, there’s an opportunity to actually map that out and see what’s activating that hyperfocus. And then when we have a better understanding of what’s activating, and to your point, the connections within the brain of what’s contributing to that hyperfocus, we’re in a much– We got more information ultimately to conduct the interventions to activate that parts of the brain that then hopefully will then replicate that type of hyperfocus if we wanted to replicate it.

Adam Green: That’s right. And yeah, that more information part is, I think, the key thing there because I, I think hopefully the goal is always to teach better, right? So if you can understand more precisely which ways of teaching are gonna lead to better short-term and long-term outcomes, right? You have a way of predicting those longer term outcomes, right?

Adam Green: Then as new curricular sort of variations come out, as you design new ways of teaching, you can test them out using these indicators. And so it gives you that more powerful way to design new learning experiences that should work best for students. And then come back and see what works better than that.

Cyndi Burnett: So Adam, the Echo Project, we wanna talk a little bit about that. This project attempted to bring 198 scholars together around the world to uncover what creativity is and the different language that we use around creativity. We’d love to hear from you, what were some of the biggest disagreements or challenges the group encountered when trying to define something as broad and culturally loaded as creativity?

Adam Green: So I like that question, and we were– So James, again, who we’ll feature prominently, this arose out of a conversation we had a couple years ago. And when we first sort of embarked on this, we thought we would mostly be dealing with disagreement because we know creativity researchers, and there’s maybe nothing that creativity researchers enjoy more than disagreeing with each other, especially about these definitional questions.

Cyndi Burnett: Hmm.

Adam Green: What was funny is the way that the project proceeded Deliberately kept everybody independent during the first phases, so everybody could independently generate their own ideas, right? And also, at all phases, they weren’t aware of what other people were sort of voting for or what people were rating as essential to creativity.

Adam Green: It was structured in a way where the feedback was largely you were blind to what other people were doing. Ultimately, at a couple of points in the project, as you guys know, we sent around the whole thing. We said, “Hey, what do you think? Tell us where there’s something important that we’ve missed or some important point of disagreement.”

Adam Green: So it was both, but largely the sort of genesis of what we ended up with as our ontology was done in this kind of blinded way. And what’s fascinating to me about that is in that highly independent, sort of blinded to what everybody else is doing way, we found a lot of agreement. Which was encouraging, I think, for the field because it’s a field as, I don’t have to tell you guys, often derided for being a mess and being too sort of hard to pin down to make it even worth studying, right?

Adam Green: I thought the answer was somewhere in between, but I’ve actually been surprised to see how much agreement we have found. And in fact, for every point of every definition of every construct, we had at least 75% agreement among the group. And in most cases, the agreement was in the mid to high 90%.

Matthew Worwood: Wow.

Adam Green: Uh, that was just like, which was a bit shocking.

Adam Green: That doesn’t mean everybody thinks everything is equally important. But at the broadest level, where we just said, is this, term a component of the definition of something like imagination, problem-solving, creativity?” At that level, the agreement is really quite high. And really even when it comes to rating how essential things are, the agreement is strong.

Adam Green: What’s now happened is it’s been commissioned as a consensus statement by Nature Reviews Psychology. And what we like about it, although it may be somewhat misleading, but I think it at least gives The healthy impression that our field has some coherence and that it’s tractable, that it can be studied, and that we as a field are willing to put our names behind some shared ontology.

Adam Green: So I think that is healthy for the field. I don’t think it somehow ends all debate or should end all debate. I don’t think it’s necessary or maybe even best for the field for everybody to agree on every point. But I think identifying those points of strongest agreement is very healthy for a field that would benefit from greater shared understanding and greater consistency, especially in how things are described and measured in order to make progress.

Adam Green: Because that way I’m not doing the same study this year that you did 12 years ago, and I’m calling it brand new just because I used a different term when you already did the thing, or you already proved why I’m wrong, and I’m spending two years of my life doing a study because the terms didn’t map, right?

Adam Green: So all of those things have been happening in the field of creativity, and my hope is that a shared reference, a resource that’s helpful for creativity scholars can help get us around that. But the bigger hope with this project is that it gives people who aren’t creativity scholars, especially practitioners, especially people who want to figure out, how do I encourage or teach or foster or develop imagination or problem-solving or creativity, and understanding what are the differences?

Adam Green: How are those things similar, but how are they different? If they’re all the same thing, they become meaningless, right? But if they have distinct meanings, then they can be tractable targets, right? You can actually aim for those things, and if you know what their components are, you can make sure that however you’re aiming for those things emphasizes those components.

Adam Green: So that’s been the big goal. And yeah, maybe the biggest surprise was that there wasn’t more disagreement. Although full transparency, in the early stages, we sort of mapped out… We got a sense of where people might disagree a lot, and we decided to wait for the next ontology project on those. The goal here was to show where do we agree.

Matthew Worwood: I mean, just participating in it, I couldn’t help but detach myself about the of some of the questions and ratings were within, obviously, the advent of AI. And, and so I felt like the project was particularly timely. Cyndi, is, was that something that you felt in terms of going through those questions?

Cyndi Burnett: Yes, I did. I thought it was really interesting because I have spent a lot of time thinking about the different words and what they mean and how I describe them to people. And I think it would be really useful for our listeners, Adam, I know you just, you said not really one definition, but there are sort of the three definitions around the process, the product, and the person, which when I was talking with, with Matt, I said, “Isn’t it interesting that we sort of all converged on the four Ps minus the press from Mel Rhodes’ model?”

Cyndi Burnett: Have we moved in, in any significant direction, or is it just we’re all actually in agreement to what that looks like? What do you think?

Adam Green: I think it’s a tough question because we’re all also very familiar with that framework, right? Yeah. And so I, I think it’s always hard to separate what you’ve been trained to think from what you might natively think.

Adam Green: But I think we’re probably all in agreement that it’s a useful framework, whether it’s the precise framework we would’ve chosen or not. And so that, at the very earliest stages of the ontology project, there was a group of about 14 of us that sort of set some basic parameters. So it’s worth saying that decision to break it up into person, product, and process, and especially to focus on then distinguishing different constructs on the process side, like imagination, like problem-solving, like innovation, that happened relatively early, right?

Adam Green: So it wasn’t all of us speaking with one voice that said, “Let’s divide it into these three.” But then it was all of us that said, “Once we get down to process constructs, what should those be?” And it was all of us that said, “Okay, we’re gonna divide it into these three Ps, but what do they mean, and how are they similar, and how are they different?”

Adam Green: A bit of top-down, but a lot more bottom-up. And what we didn’t get was anyone saying loudly, “This, these three Ps are nonsense.”

Matthew Worwood: And just, you know, I’m aware we’re having a conversation right now, and just for some of our listeners who maybe are new to the study of creativity, and as you reference, it’s a, a messy field in lots of different ways.

Matthew Worwood: Is it about how you create something that’s surprising, or interesting, or original, novelty? We use different vocabulary. Sometimes we’re saying the same things. As an outcome of this project, how would you summarize for teachers that say they wanna teach creativity, but they’re also kind of like using the shared language of, “We need imagination, and we need students to problem solve.”

Matthew Worwood: How would you respond to those teachers that are still seeing everything lumped together as one thing?

Adam Green: I think this paper, the goal of this paper, is to have a sort of- readable, accessible table that you can look at. It’s got lots of colors, there are lots of things you can pull out of it, but at the simplest level, here’s what the people who have spent all their time thinking about creativity for years and years, whether you think that’s a good or a bad thing to do with your life, right?

Adam Green: Here’s what the people who’ve made that terrible decision, that terrible life decision. Here’s what they think these different things mean and how they’re similar, but also how they’re different, and the specific nameable things that they have in common, the specific nameable things that make them different.

Adam Green: So then if I’m actual– But then I can think about, well, let me look at this. Is it actually creativity? Do I mean problem-solving? Do I mean innovation? Do I mean imagination? And then if I do, I’ll focus on those things, and I’ll be able to use that terminology more clearly and more consistently.

Cyndi Burnett: All right, Adam, we’re running out of time, but I do wanna talk about a New York Times article that just came out yesterday that mentioned your research around AI and creativity and what you’ve been looking at in terms of students’ college application essays.

Cyndi Burnett: Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Adam Green: Yeah. Well, the overall takeaway is that AI, which isn’t just one thing and isn’t used in just one way, so let’s be really mindful of that. But- At the simplest level, using AI seems to give a lot of surface indicators that it’s making us more creative, but under the surface, it’s doing some things that actually are almost certainly bad for creativity.

Adam Green: And one of those big things is that it seems to make our ideas more similar to each other, right? And a variety of ideas, a diversity of human ideas is quite important for actual creative advances. An idea that sounds good versus an idea that’s actually new is what we’re heading toward, it seems, with greater use of AI.

Adam Green: So just as an example from the research that you mentioned, we tracked the diversity of ideas in personal statements that students write when they apply to colleges. And what we saw is that somehow magically, right when GPT was released in 2022, everybody’s life story became considerably more similar.

Adam Green: That was happening at the same time that the diversity of the words that they were using, the greater variety of vocabulary, that we saw an increase in that variety of vocabulary. So this sort of disjunction between these two semantic levels seems to be one of the ways that AI is hiding its illusion of our creativity, but making us feel really good about the product we have in front of us.

Adam Green: And the one other piece I’ll add, which I think is just important for anybody who, whether you’re a teacher or a student or just a person using AI, is the– coming back to this question of the different Ps, right? What AI is essentially offering us is a way to trade process for product, right?

Matthew Worwood: Right.

Adam Green: And if we think about what’s really valuable, what’s healthy about creativity.

Adam Green: It’s got very little to do with the product. It’s got almost everything to do with the process of creating, struggling, it should be difficult, learning, ownership, pride, all of those things that make us feel good. The reason that your grandmother takes up painting when she retires is not to exhibit her work in The Met, it’s because that process of creative expression is truly healthy for us, and the difficulty there in doing it is desirable difficulty.

Adam Green: And if we give that up because we get a shinier product, I think we’re losing a lot of what’s healthy about creativity. And the story is not just that simple. There are healthier ways to use AI. It doesn’t have to be only a villain, but in the extreme, and I think in many real-world instances, there seems to be a lot of trading of process for product, and it worries me.

Matthew Worwood: Well, this is definitely something that we have covered a lot on the show, including a little bit with our episode with James, and I think this conversation’s gonna continue to progress as we see more research that’s indicating this. I always struggle s- to saying the word, but the homo genui. Can someone say the word for me?

Matthew Worwood: I really struggle with

Adam Green: it. Mo? Ho- homogeneity.

Matthew Worwood: That’s the one. And we are seeing more of this, and I think this is something that all of us educators need to be thinking about. As you said, Adam, there’s probably very productive ways of using AI, and that’s why we have to be a little bit careful when using it to try and facilitate creative thinking in the classroom.

Cyndi Burnett: So Adam, right before you go, and we know our time is over, but if you could tell us what was your most creative educational experience and why, and what impact did it have on you?

Adam Green: My parents started a camp in North Carolina in the ’80s. It’s a camp for kids with chronic illnesses, and it’s been a big part of my life.

Adam Green: And, I still am part of camp. I actually coordinate a weekend there for campers who have aged out but still are cognitively ready to go to camp and be with their friends. The time that I’ve spent there has been incredibly instructive to me because of all the ways that you have to adapt the usual camp activities and the usual camp fun to different groups, and the fun is just as big, and you just have to figure out how to get to it.

Adam Green: There were some counselors when I was growing up who worked at this camp who were just incredibly inventive in the ways that they worked with these kids from all different populations with different physical and cognitive needs to get to this same point of big fun, and that was truly formative for me and something I’ve tried– I steal all their tricks now these days when I’m at camp.

Adam Green: And just in general, the idea of connecting creativity with joy as well.

Matthew Worwood: Adam, thank you so much for participating in today’s interview. We’re certainly excited to beginning our season and have you back on the show, but we are still recording some episodes for this season. So if you know yourself or anyone else who’s got something to share about creativity and wanna be on the show, please reach out to us at questions@fuelingcreativitypodcast.com.

Matthew Worwood: My name is Dr. Matthew Worwood.

Cyndi Burnett: And my name is Dr. Cyndi Burnett. This episode was produced by Matthew Worwood and Cyndi Burnett. Our production assistant is Anne Fernando.