Neuroscience of Creativity

Overview

• Dr. Jane Conway presents a lecture on the neuroscience of creativity as part of Sci Arts Week 6.
• The lecture defines and discusses operationalizing creativity, its neural basis, individual differences, interventions, and cultural evolution.

Defining Creativity

• Creativity explains a set of covarying observed behaviors.
• Creativity is defined as the process of bringing something new and useful into being per Ritter et al. 2012.

Temporal Dynamics of Creative Process

• Preparation involves acquiring knowledge for a specific task.
• Incubation is the process where conscious attention diverts away from the task.
• Illumination occurs when a creative idea flashes into sight.
• Verification subjects the creative idea to evaluation, distinguishing between the creative process and the final product.

Operationalizing Creativity

• The Alternative Uses Task created by Guilford in 1967 involves generating alternative uses for a common object like a brick.
• Participants generally get 2 minutes to respond.
• Measures used include a coding scheme for human raters.
• Cognitive Flexibility is assessed by counting the number of different categories that a participant’s ideas fall into.
• Average Uniqueness Score is calculated by dividing how often a specific idea is mentioned among all participants by the total number of named ideas.
• Average Creativity Score involves two raters scoring each idea on a five-point scale, from "not at all creative" (1) to "extremely creative" (5).

Neural Basis of Creativity

• The idea of a left and right brain divide concerning creativity is a myth.
• Creative tasks activate many regions of the brain in both hemispheres.
• Meta-analytic evidence indicates that incubation has positive effects on creativity.
• Mind-wandering occurs spontaneously and autonomously when an awake individual is not engaged in a cognitively demanding task.
• Sleep, especially REM sleep, can facilitate creativity.

Brain Networks and Creativity

• The Default Mode Network (DMN) includes the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), and lateral/medial temporal lobes.
• The Cognitive Control Network (CCN) includes the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), inferior frontal junction (IFJ), anterior insular cortex (AIC), dorsal pre-motor cortex (dPMC), and posterior parietal cortex (PPC).
• Regions associated with the task-negative DMN include the medial prefrontal cortex (MPF), the posterior cingulate/precuneus (PCC), and the lateral parietal cortex (LP).
• Regions associated with the task-positive CCN include the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), the frontal eye field region of the precentral sulcus (FEF), and the middle temporal region (MT).
• Key findings include mixed evidence identified by Dietrich & Kanso in 2010 and Sawyer in 2011.
• Creativity involves a particular application of everyday cognitive processes as per Beaty et al. 2018.
• Episodic memory, imagination, and creative thinking all activate the bilateral hippocampus.
• The same brain region supports the ability to remember, imagine, and create.

Individual Differences in Creativity

• Individual difference factors include IQ and personality.
• Explanatory power accounts for 32.6% of the variance.

Interventions

• A double-blind placebo-controlled study with microdosing psilocybin mushrooms had 34 participants.
• Subjective experience, behavior, creativity, perception, cognition, and brain activity were measured.
• Expectation effects showed that participants reported acute effects when they correctly identified that they had an active dose greater than the placebo.
• There was no evidence to support enhanced well-being, creativity, or cognitive function; cognitive function saw a downward trend with active dose.
• Psilocybin's effect on the Default Mode Network saw mixed data.

The REBUS Model (anarchic brain)

• The Rebus Model sees psilocybin effects decreasing BOLD activity and functional connectivity, while increasing gamma power.

Cultural Evolution

• Focus lies in cognitive niche versus cultural niche that is intelligence vs the gradual accretion of knowledge.
• Causal understanding is unnecessary for improving culturally evolving technology.
• Participants who did not inherit any theory generated a greater range of wheels.
• Inheriting one theory increased the understanding of it but reduced the understanding of the other.
• The result was performance-neutral for a 2-D problem.
• In problems with more dimensions, better understanding of one dimension may not compensate for worse understanding of others.