This story aired in the December 8, 2025 episode of Crosscurrents.
From making mud pies to finger painting: adults constantly comment on the uninhibited imaginations of kids.
A lot of adults feel they’ve lost touch with the ability to get messy… and also just mess up. Scientists call that childlike, everyday experimentation, “prosaic creativity.” It’s not fully responsible for someone writing The Great American Novel or composing a soaring operetta… but it does help us tell a good story off-the-cuff, or tap out a tune on the piano to pass the time.
And what feels true to many of us —that creativity can create more creativity—is now backed by science.
A study out of UCSF explores kids’ expressiveness. And this story starts from inside an MRI machine.
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Story Transcript:
MALE VOICE: Now we will play the different sounds of a structural MRI scan. The scan gives us a very good picture of your brain.
KAREN BARRETT: Close your eyes. Pretend you're an astronaut blasting off into space. You're in your space pod.
KAREN BARRETT: I am Karen Barrett. I am an assistant professor at UCSF, the University of California, San Francisco. Many of us who are parents kind of think that our kids are really creative. They combine things in weird ways, or they just gravitate towards drawing, or doodling, or making up songs, right? There's actually relatively little research into kids' creativity. So to me, it's something that I really wanted: a study using neuro-imaging, fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging, to study what happens in the brains of kids as they're being creative.
KAREN BARRETT: Most people think, how on earth can you do creativity in an fMri machine? I took a little MIDI keyboard and I just hooked it onto my laptop and I said, “Okay, here's how you hold your hand. Curve your fingers like this, rest your wrist…” you know? Almost like the first piano lesson, like: “Put your hands on these five black note keys. “KAREN BARRETT: And they can all do the scale relatively easily. It's one, two, three, four, five, five four, three two one. And I said, okay, now do whatever order you want. And they did it, and I'm like, great! You're improvising! Let's go, you know?
KAREN BARRETT: It's very complex if you think about it. You have to do all of these simultaneous processes: move your finger, think about what sound you wanna do, what order am I gonna do? And you have to do it all at once, and you don't get to redo it again. If you think about it: these kids had little-to-no training, and that we can see certain brain structures associated with creativity…maybe that means that there’s something innate to being creative.
CHILD’S VOICE: “Want to listen to the music? Want to come over and… [indecipherable]”
KAREN BARRETT: Kids are creative in multiple domains—including what we call “prosaic” ones, so…bringing their creativity to something that seems a little more everyday. So they may be really creative in how they garden…or how they bake…or how they construct a house with blocks, right? Things that are not artistic creativity, but what we call “prosaic creativity.”
CHILD’S VOICE: “I’m making a sun. I’m going to make a whole sunset…”
KAREN BARRETT: What we’re really measuring in this study is: what is the brain activity when you’re trying to generatively create something. Basically we found that improvisation engages reward structures. Specifically, we found that it engaged the nucleus accumbens, the caudate, and the amygdala.
KAREN BARRETT: The amygdala is part of your flight or fight response. When the amygdala deactivates, that's a good thing. When you are performing and you’re improvising: you don’t have time to sit there and judge. If you take a moment to judge, like “that one sucked,” well: you have to keep going. Like: “that one sucked. Ok, can I use that? Or: can I change that to make it better, right?” If you can keep that raw, playful, unfiltered creativity as long as possible—that’s amazing.
KAREN BARRETT: I've been playing piano since I was five, I think I was very rigid about my music. And then I met Charles in my post-doc, and he's a jazz saxophonist. So he is so much more loose about it. He's like: Karen, it's not always about technique. Just play something. Just try it. And so because he's so encouraging, you're just like: “Try it, it doesn't have to be good. You just have to do it.” It has totally changed how I play.
KAREN BARRETT: Even if there is a mistake—something I’ve learned from Charles: there’s no mistake. You did a mistake? Do it again, do it again, do it, do it again, do it again… and it's not a mistake anymore, you know? So that's a really healthy way of living, I think. It's a very resilient way.
KAREN BARRETT: If kids can be creative—like in this study: kids were improvising melodies with no training whatsoever— then adults can do it. One of the hallmarks of their creativity is that they’re not sitting there judging themselves. If kids can do it, then we can do it. We shouldn’t be scared to engage in the arts.
