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The Neuroscience of Creativity, Perception, and Confirmation Bias | Beau Lotto | Big Think

Big Think | August 30, 2025



The Neuroscience of Creativity, Perception, and Confirmation Bias
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To ensure your survival, your brain evolved to avoid one thing: uncertainty. As neuroscientist Beau Lotto points out, if your ancestors wondered for too long whether that noise was a predator or not, you wouldn’t be here right now. Our brains are geared to make fast assumptions, and questioning them in many cases quite literally equates to death. No wonder we’re so hardwired for confirmation bias. No wonder we’d rather stick to the status quo than risk the uncertainty of a better political model, a fairer financial system, or a healthier relationship pattern. But here’s the catch: as our brains evolved toward certainty, we simultaneously evolved away from creativity—that’s no coincidence; creativity starts with a question, with uncertainty, not with a cut and dried answer. To be creative, we have to unlearn millions of years of evolution. Creativity asks us to do that which is hardest: to question our assumptions, to doubt what we believe to be true. That is the only way to see differently. And if you think creativity is a chaotic and wild force, think again, says Beau Lotto. It just looks that way from the outside. The brain cannot make great leaps, it can only move linearly through mental possibilities. When a creative person forges a connection between two things that are, to your mind, so far apart, that’s a case of high-level logic. They have moved through steps that are invisible to you, perhaps because they are more open-minded and well-practiced in questioning their assumptions. Creativity, it seems, is another (highly sophisticated) form of logic. Beau Lotto is the author of Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently.
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BEAU LOTTO:

Beau Lotto is a professor of neuroscience, previously at University College London and now at the University of London, and a Visiting Scholar at New York University.

His work focuses on the biological, computational and psychological mechanisms of perception. He has conducted and presented research on human and bumblebee perception and behavior for more than 25 years, and his interest in education, business and the arts has led him into entrepreneurship and engaging the public with science.

In 2001, Beau founded the Lab of Misfits, a neuro-design studio that was resident for two years at London’s Science Museum and most recently at Viacom in New York. The lab’s experimental studio approach aims to deepen our understanding of human nature, advance personal and social well-being through research that places the public at the centre of the process of discovery, and create unique programmes of engagement that span the boundaries between people, disciplines and institutions. Originally from Seattle, with degrees from UC Berkeley and Edinburgh Medical School, he now lives in Oxford and New York.

www.labofmisfits.com
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TRANSCRIPTION:

Beau Lotto: Every behavior that we do, we do to reduce uncertainty. We do it to increase certainty. When you go down below in a boat and your eyes are moving and registering the boat, and your eyes are saying, “Oh, we’re standing still,” but your inner ears are saying, “No, no, we’re moving.” And your brain cannot deal with that conflict so it gets ill.

The stress resulting from uncertainty is tremendous in our society. It increases brain cell death. It decreases plasticity. It makes you a more extreme version of yourself. We do almost everything to avoid uncertainty. And yet the irony is that that’s the only place we can go if we’re ever going to see differently. And that’s why creativity, seeing differently, always begins in the same way: it begins with a question. It begins with not knowing. It begins with a ‘why?’. It begins with a ‘what if?’.

And I should also say that these assumptions are essential for your survival. Every time you take a step your brain has hundreds of assumptions: that the floor is not going to give way, that your legs aren’t going to give way, that that’s not a hole, it’s a surface. So these assumptions keep us alive. But they can also get in the way, because what was once useful may no longer be useful. So your brain evolved to evolve. It’s adapted to adapt. So a deep question is: how is it possible to ever see differently if everything you see is a reflex grounded in your history of assumptions?

Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/beau-lotto-creativity-is-another-form-of-logic

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Comments

This post currently has 31 comments.

  1. @bukococonut

    August 30, 2025 at 11:19 pm

    One of the tools to be creative is to do things differently everyday. Doing things differently forces you to see things differently. If you see things differently you will come up with different solutions. And because you are contiously shifting your point of view you will be continously generation more choises.
    The second tool is to put two different ideas together. The colition of those ideas make an explotion of new ideas. Humor uses placing contracditing idea together to create laughter. Placing ideas that are far apart together makes many creative ideas. One of the games that creative people use to generated new ideas is playing “what if?” What if this, then this.
    Creativity can be taking the next logical step, but inorder to create giant leaps you use your intuition and then fill in the steps to where your intuition has taken you. We call it intuition but it is really your mind being able to see beyond the logical steps to the solution. However you need to be able to fill in the steps so that other people can see the evolution of your idea.

  2. @harrypearle9781

    August 30, 2025 at 11:19 pm

    TRUMP 2.0?
    TRUMPSTERS cling to Trump with all their might.
    DEMOCRATS cling to the believe that Trump will just fade away, in time
    ========== I hope Democrats wake up, now and find what works ==========

  3. @ssehe2007

    August 30, 2025 at 11:19 pm

    This has to be false. He’s saying that all creativity is essentially expertise masquerading as creativity because of differences in perspective. In essence all creative solutions are sighted solutions. But creativity is blind. They’re just not sighted by everyone. Counterfactual reasoning allows us to take big leaps. This has been an ongoing debate in the history science and technology. What this definition leaves out is the surprise factor. Creative innovations, discoveries, insights are surprising to their originators. Edison was surprised that the phonograph worked.

  6. @sasukekun1416325

    August 30, 2025 at 11:19 pm

    I’m struggling to focus on anything but the short sleeved hoody with shorter sleeves than his t-shirt? This is what he chose to wear to be on camera? Evolution is failing

  7. @gracefierceacademy

    August 30, 2025 at 11:19 pm

    Neuroscience poetry. He's doing in this video clip EXACTLY what he's describing by inking everything we know about creativity to everything we know about modern neuroscience (annndd epigentics, evolutionary biology, social pyschology,, etc) . In under 7 minutes!!! Beau clearly took a lot more tiny curiousity-steps than the vast majority of us today ever can or will. And that's what makes every word of this pure genius. If we understood this concept at a macro level, our entire world could and would HEAL from the fear-based assumptions fueling all of our systems and harming most people, without their conscious awareness of any of it🔥

  11. @TheSacredTempleofLight

    August 30, 2025 at 11:19 pm

    The mind is always active and needs to understand because it's reality is knowledge, being ultimately the mind of the Creator. The Mind that created the whole cosmos in perfect harmony, including ourselves. No one truly believes they created themselves for they don't even understand their own body.
    When the mind has lost knowledge it searches for meanings. A mind confined into a belief it is a body has lost knowledge because we are not bodies.
    The mind is highly inventive as it looks outside through our eyes. Yet creation is not the lack of knowledge but complete knowledge. Uncertainty is fearful to the mind because without knowledge it is foundationless.
    The problem with your assumption is that you assume you are a body and the brain is your mind. And so your limitations are already set before you have even begun.
    Making things is not creation. Making things from fear is doing something to avoid the fear. It's simply doing something. It's not creating.

  12. @scottsteele1908

    August 30, 2025 at 11:19 pm

    My creativity is always best when I am very tired. The reason for that is, my fatigue has interrupted my assumptions. So I try and work on creative ideas (I write novels) when I am tired.

  13. @thetruthrenegade

    August 30, 2025 at 11:19 pm

    How did the greats of the past do great things without Science? Hmm, to quote Einstein, Imagination is more powerful than Knowledge/Information…… What did they all have in common back then? they had free time to think and imagine and create… Social Media destroys this process, because you are using an external source to produce the images and imaginations your head instead of doing it internally with your own imagination. be a kid, play, imagine, spend little time on this BS, Social Media now is Social Conditioning and Mind Virus spreading..

  14. @35Daniel

    August 30, 2025 at 11:19 pm

    This guy is very intelligent and makes some good points, AND, he is coming from a Western paradigm, which is strongly focused on "knowing". The assumptions underline that form a worldview.

    He might have an even wider perspective that includes elements that he cannot even articulate if he would visit the East and spend time there. Not knowing and being in a place of deep awareness and moving in that is different than stepping mentally from one assumption to the next, or even just questioning assumptions.

  19. @HellYesLetsDoItNow

    August 30, 2025 at 11:19 pm

    What about Quantum Leaps, Sudden Paradigm Shifts, Psychadelic experiences, the Numinous, Spriritual breakthroughs and being Awestruck – none of those are small logical steps. They are often profound spontaneous and inexplicable processes which neuroscience cannot explain

  22. @Levandetag

    August 30, 2025 at 11:19 pm

    Good knowledge
    …………………………………until we have done huge jumps, and know we can teleport our selves 😉
    or at least until, we really, have found out, and felt: We are more than just brains!

  26. @shadowmoon1990

    August 30, 2025 at 11:19 pm

    Creativity does not come out of fear or pressure.

    The right upbringing shows and tells it all 😅 Thus understanding 'the self' is essential concept for evolution in the entirety.

  27. @darlenewaldron3621

    August 30, 2025 at 11:19 pm

    5:50 – What?? So when Einstein discovered general relativity it happened outside of him?? What nonsense is this. The brain may do things in small steps but it takes lots of steps and lot of time to make great leaps and sometimes the brain do makes big steps in short times.

  29. @lifecloud2

    August 30, 2025 at 11:19 pm

    And, to me, this involves expectations, which could be an aspect of assumptions .. of assuming. I assume the floor beneath my feet is solid therefore I expect that outcome. It the floor gives way, then my brain goes through some extreme recalculations to shift my assumptions/my expectations. Reality then is the experience created through my beliefs about the world based on my history, my perception of what is going on in the moment, and my choices that are associated with assumptions and expectations. And it all comes about at lightning speed!

    But to me, this is all in motion. There will never be a time when I can stop and think, "OK, now I feel as if I no longer have assumptions," or "I no longer have conflict or doubt." It's all organic and very human … and, to me, an aspect of being alive in this dimensional world.

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