The Neuroscience of Freedom and Creativity

prefrontal cortex is one of those structures, heavily implicated in the physiology of choice and liberty. On the one hand, it is profusely endowed with neural detectors of pleasure and reward. On the other, it is endowed with the neural organizers of reward-seeking behaviors (behavioral economics), including the spoken language.
    In recent years neuroeconomics has flourished, for the most part as a result of the application of certain conceptual approaches such as game theory, and a better knowledge of the role of the prefrontal cortex in reward and displeasure. Probability has entered animal neuropsychology much as it previously had entered the study of human behavior. Behavioral tests have been devised to measure how animals, especially primates, estimate the probabilities of reward or risk. Thus, neuroeconomics can make reasonably accurate predictions of simple animal decisions, and even correlate those predictions with neural activity. It does not quite come to grips, however, with complex human behavior. And neuroeconomics would fail to do so even if the mechanisms of the human brain were as perfectly understood as they can ever be. Here also, as in market economics, the interplay of variables cannot be predicted with precision. The reason is that interplay takes place in the cerebral cortex, a system of neural networks that is constantly submitted to influences from many sources, all of them different: influences and bias from past memory in the cortex itself, or from the instinctual, visceral, and emotional centers of the limbic brain and the brainstem.
    Yet, it is precisely in the crucible of probabilities and uncertainties in the human brain that freedom comes to life. The ability to choose between alternatives literally derives from the variance and degrees of freedom of innumerable variables behind prospective human action. As in evolution, both determinism and straight causality dissolve in probability and, as they do, both yield to a teleological factor: purpose or goal .
    Much as in liberal economics, the metaphor of the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith (the self-regulating behavior of the marketplace which leads to social good) emerges in the human brain in the form of imponderable neural influences leading the individual to better adaptation to his environment. Just as innumerable motives move the participants in the marketplace to determine values and prices, innumerable neural influences, some unconscious or merely intuitive, move the individual to make personal decisions. Among those influences are not only the “animal spirits” of biological drive but also the principles of natural law etched in collective evolutionary memory. There are also the principles of esthetics, altruism, and creativity, which are etched in our individual memory by tradition, family, and education – in sum by culture. It is the aggregate of collective and individual memory that allows our prefrontal cortex to invent the future and to make it possible in the present. Here we are going to deal with the functional anatomy of that “invisible neural hand,” the memory of the organism in the broadest sense, which makes rational language, prediction, and freedom possible.
    This book is primarily the product of my many years of cognitive neuroscience research at the University of California. In close second place, the book is the product of long clinical experience with the mentally ill. The phenomenology of mental illness is one of the best educators on the woeful consequences of the loss of personal freedom. This book is also the product of my earlier European education in the arts and humanities, especially music and languages, those marvelous creative tools that the human brain has bestowed on us. Finally, of course, this book is also the product of endless discussions with my academic colleagues and students at all levels of their development. I am persuaded that some young minds are better at discussing freedom and creativity than many a seasoned scholar with preconceived notions. Perhaps this is true also for other things so very natural and so very human.
    To be sure, at times I have thought that the theme of this book is too big for me – perhaps for anybody. There is, indeed, still much we do not know about the brain at the threshold of what is to happen and our freedom to make it happen, or to prevent it from happening. More than once, I have detected a smile on the face of some of my fellow scientists on