Brett Favre's Brain

After 17 seasons in the NFL (16 of them with the Green Bay Packers), three MVP awards and two trips to the Superbowl, Brett Favre retired from football last week.

When analysts describe his game they use terms ranging from “gunslinger” to “genius,” but no matter the description, one thing shines clear: Brett Favre was one of the most creative quarterbacks to ever play the game.

Creativity, in sports, is a peculiar term. The truth of the matter is unless you’re either an expert-level practitioner or a diehard fan, the notion of athletic ingenuity might be hard to fathom. That’s because it often refers to the way outstanding players interpret and react to the information that most causal observers don’t even notice.

Favre was a master at this. His brilliance was the ability to make something happen long after the play had broken down, finding ways to turn a morass of flying bodies and desperate players into an 80 yard touchdown completion. In strictly psychological terms, Farve was great at intuitive problem solving—what researchers call “sudden insight” and the rest of us think of as “Ah-Ha” moments.

A number of recent studies by cognitive neuroscientists Mark Jung-Beeman at Northwestern and John Kounios at Drexel University have shed some light on the differences between people who solve problems with sudden insight versus methodical plodding.

A few years ago, they discovered—using a variety of word problems and measuring neural activity with both EEG and fMRI—that there are changes in brain activity depending on which method (analysis versus Aha!) a person uses to work towards a solution and that these changes are present not just during the problem solving portion of the experiment—but prior to it beginning.

This is to say, the brains of creatives actually work differently than the brain’s of analyticals and, as it also turns out, one important component of that difference occurs in the anterior cingulate.

Wrapping the corpus callosum, the anterior cingulate is a midline and frontal portion of the brain thought to be involved in cognitive control—a system that helps direct attention to different areas of the brain and thus helps control different cognitive processes.

According to some researchers, one aspect of that control varies the degree of “task-shielding” and “task-switching.” In simple terms, task-shielding means that when one’s attention is focused on a specific problem, the brain is shielded from distraction. Task-switching means that attention is more diffuse, allowing the brain’s pattern recognition system to look for answers further afield.

“Creative people don’t suppress the things they’re supposed to suppress,” says Jung Beeman, “and when stumped, this allows their brains to seek out alternative answers that might be missed by other people.”

Backing this up further is a more recent Jung-Beeman and Kouinos discovery: that the brain wave patterns of creatives as opposed to methodical thinkers exhibited a pattern of alpha and beta waves commonly associated with diffuse rather than focused attention.

Diffuse attention may allow creatives to take in or detect a greater variety of internal or environmental cues (most likely unconsciously) that help people to make those unusual connection that lead to those tell-tale “A-HA!” moment—a fact which may help explain another Brett Favre fact: his record-setting 442 touchdown completions!