Sam Clark

A type of non-invasive brain stimulation will be used called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to examine underpinning neural sites, structures, and mechanisms of the insight process. This project will include testing parts of the brain known to be active during the insight mechanism called the right anterior temporal lobe (which is on the right side of the head, in front of and around the ear area) and the left and right dorsal lateral pre frontal cortex (the front sides forehead areas). There will be an investigation into whether individual difference affect traits modulate the expected beneficial neuro-enhanced performance and whether mood mediates the stimulation effect.

During Sam's MSc course, they became very interested in the topic of creativity. As a musician of 20 years writing and performing experience, Sam has frequently wondered where ideas come from and how new concepts become available to us. Some can often arrive without effort and apparently out of nowhere, where sometimes they are as a result of determined effort and laborious trial and error: Sam wanted to learn more. As a teacher with experience of teaching boys who have endured significant trauma or abuse (that may sometimes display emotional reactivity) the barriers to efficient and cohesive thought or creative cognition have been apparent, and sometimes brought acutely to Sam's attention by challenging classroom behaviour or aggression.

To Sam, the role of mood (and one’s experience and regulation of it) fits hand in hand with the study of creativity; but it also has far reaching implications for our understanding of the role of cortisol, its link to individuals’ and their mothers’ experience of birth and subsequent adaption, and the subsequent establishing of how we construct our emotions and our day to day intraindividual variance of moods. This construction of both emotion and mood (as a generalised object independent expression) would re-enforce and habituate the categorisation and short hand second to second simulation that consciousness provides as our lens and translator of the world and people around us. Sam wants to study how feelings and emotions mediate and interact our creativity and cognition.