June 2025
- Pavan Soni
- Apr 29
- 3 min read
Hope the year 2025 is treating you well, notwithstanding all the chaos around us. Another reminder of the fragility of life, the futility of plans, and utility of faith. I sincerely hope that you don't lose track of your aspirations and keep at it, for this moment ain't coming back. My intent is to offer you some useful perspectives on creativity, innovation, design, technology and strategy -- bringing in more research into the play.
This edition of Inflexion Point offers insights on how artists' brains work, the effect of functional diversity in team creativity, testing ChatGPT in psychology, evaluating problem-solving skill among chess players, and role of AI in military strategy.
Hope you find this effort worthwhile.
Artists think and work differently owing to the unique distribution of grey matter (GM) and white matter (WM) in different parts of their brains. MRI scans of visual artists indicate an increased GM-WM concentration in regions associated with the Default Mode Network (DMN), Executive Control Network (ECN), and sensorimotor networks possibly related with augmented cognitive and ideational control, and increased perceptual-motor integration skills critical for creative tasks. It hints at their abilities to let go of strict control of logic and propensity of quick judgement. (Source: bioRxiv).
It's assumed that diversity enhances creativity, but is it always the case? Researchers suggest that functional diversity positively impacts uniqueness of ideas but comes at the cost of usefulness. Since a creative idea must be both novel and useful, a low score on any one dimension can dilute creativity. Using the nascent fNIRS-based hypers- canning technology and teams’ interbrain synchrony (IBS) for the r-AG and r-STG regions of the brain, the study indicates that an effective teamwork can help overcome some of the countervailing effects. (Source: Management Science).
What happens when a bunch of psychologists put ChatGPT to test? Does it produce human-like, or better still, super-human results? They adopted a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to evaluate the creative potential of ChatGPT on the basis of novelty and usefulness of ChatGPT- generated responses. Though novelty was difficult to gauge, the responses generated by ChatGPT were found to be similar in quality to those developed by human experts in certain domains. For instance, ChatGPT could produce texts by logic without directly citing previous texts, a task humanly difficult. (Source: Chatbots and Mental Healthcare in Psychology and Psychiatry).
One of the accepted theories on how chess players decide on a move is proposed by A.D. De Groot (1978). It's a two-phase decision making process. First, the player identifies the key elements or “motifs” in the chess position based on their pattern knowledge. Second, they perform a search of move sequences or “calculation of variations” to verify and realize the idea of the recognized motif. In a study of non-expert chess players, researchers offer that identifying the elements in an important skill for low-ranked players (Elo < 1800), but at higher levels it's the calculation of variations that becomes a dominant differentiator of performance. (Source: Proceedings of the MEi:CogSci Conference).
AI weapons systems are called 'the third revolution' in military affairs, after the invention of gunpowder and the creation of nuclear weapons. Ukraine is the lab where this 'mosaic warfare' is being tested and perfected. It's the first conflict where AI-based facial recognition software is being used on a significant scale, particularly for identifying Russian military personnel and to analyze unencrypted Russian radio communications. It also raises profound ethical and legal questions about the threshold for using force, responsibility for decisions, and the need for human oversight in lethal operations. (Source: West Ukrainian National University).