Creative cognition: the diverse operations and the prospect of applying a cognitive neuroscience perspective

Creativity is defined quite simply as "the ability to create" in most lexicons, but, in reality, this is a complex and heterogeneous construct about which there is much to be discovered. The cognitive approach to investigating creativity recognizes and seeks to understand this complexity by investigating the component processes involved in creative thinking. The cognitive neuroscience approach, which has only limitedly been applied in the study of creativity, should ideally build on these ideas in uncovering the neural substrates of these processes. Following an introduction into the early experimental ideas and the cognitive approach to creativity, we discuss the theoretical background and behavioral methods for testing various processes of creative cognition, including conceptual expansion, the constraining influence of examples, creative imagery and insight. The complex relations between the underlying component processes of originality and relevance across these tasks are presented thereafter. We then outline how some of these conceptual distinctions can be evaluated by neuroscientific evidence and elaborate on the neuropsychological approach in the study of creativity. Given the current state of affairs, our recommendation is that despite methodological difficulties that are associated with investigating creativity, adopting the cognitive neuroscience perspective is a highly promising framework for validating and expanding on the critical issues that have been raised in this paper.     

Cognitive neuroscience of creativity: EEG based approaches

Cognitive neuroscience of creativity has been extensively studied using non-invasive electrical recordings from the scalp called electroencephalograms (EEGs) and event related potentials (ERPs). The paper discusses major aspects of performing research using EEG/ERP based experiments including the recording of the signals, removing noise, estimating ERP signals, and signal analysis for better understanding of the neural correlates of processes involved in creativity. Important factors to be kept in mind to record clean EEG signal in creativity research are discussed. The recorded EEG signal can be corrupted by various sources of noise and methodologies to handle the presence of unwanted artifacts and filtering noise are presented followed by methods to estimate ERPs from the EEG signals from multiple trials. The EEG and ERP signals are further analyzed using various techniques including spectral analysis, coherence analysis, and non-linear signal analysis. These analysis techniques provide a way to understand the spatial activations and temporal development of large scale electrical activity in the brain during creative tasks. The use of this methodology will further enhance our understanding the processes neural and cognitive processes involved in creativity.     

Dopamine and the Creative Mind: Individual Differences in Creativity Are Predicted by Interactions between Dopamine Genes DAT and COMT

The dopaminergic (DA) system may be involved in creativity, however results of past studies are mixed. We attempted to clarify this putative relation by considering the mediofrontal and the nigrostriatal DA pathways, uniquely and in combination, and their contribution to two different measures of creativity–an abbreviated version of the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, assessing divergent thinking, and a real-world creative achievement index. We found that creativity can be predicted from interactions between genetic polymorphisms related to frontal (COMT) and striatal (DAT) DA pathways. Importantly, the Torrance test and the real-world creative achievement index related to different genetic patterns, suggesting that these two measures tap into different aspects of creativity, and depend on distinct, but interacting, DA sub-systems. Specifically, we report that successful performance on the Torrance test is linked with dopaminergic polymorphisms associated with good cognitive flexibility and medium top-down control, or with weak cognitive flexibility and strong top-down control. The latter is particularly true for the originality factor of divergent thinking. High real-world creative achievement, on the other hand, as assessed by the Creative Achievement Questionnaire, is linked with dopaminergic polymorphisms associated with weak cognitive flexibility and weak top-down control. Taken altogether, our findings support the idea that human creativity relies on dopamine, and on the interaction between frontal and striatal dopaminergic pathways in particular. This interaction may help clarify some apparent inconsistencies in the prior literature, especially if the genes and/or creativity measures were analyzed separately.     

The evolutionary roots of creativity: mechanisms and motivations

We consider the evolution of cognition and the emergence of creative behaviour, in relation to vocal communication. We address two key questions: (i) what cognitive and/or social mechanisms have evolved that afford aspects of creativity?; (ii) has natural and/or sexual selection favoured human behaviours considered ‘creative’? This entails analysis of ‘creativity’, an imprecise construct: comparable properties in non-humans differ in magnitude and teleology from generally agreed human creativity. We then address two apparent problems: (i) the difference between merely novel productions and ‘creative’ ones; (ii) the emergence of creative behaviour in spite of high cost: does it fit the idea that females choose a male who succeeds in spite of a handicap (costly ornament); or that creative males capable of producing a large and complex song repertoire grew up under favourable conditions; or a demonstration of generally beneficial heightened reasoning capacity; or an opportunity to continually reinforce social bonding through changing communication tropes; or something else? We illustrate and support our argument by reference to whale and bird song; these independently evolved biological signal mechanisms objectively share surface properties with human behaviours generally called ‘creative’. Studying them may elucidate mechanisms underlying human creativity; we outline a research programme to do so.     

Innovativeness as an emergent property: a new alignment of comparative and experimental research on animal innovation

Innovation and creativity are key defining features of human societies. As we face the global challenges of the twenty-first century, they are also facets upon which we must become increasingly reliant. But what makes Homo sapiens so innovative and where does our high innovation propensity come from? Comparative research on innovativeness in non-human animals allows us to peer back through evolutionary time and investigate the ecological factors that drove the evolution of innovativeness, whereas experimental research identifies and manipulates underpinning creative processes. In commenting on the present theme issue, I highlight the controversies that have typified this research field and show how a paradigmatic shift in our thinking about innovativeness will contribute to resolving these tensions. In the past decade, innovativeness has been considered by many as a trait, a direct product of cognition, and a direct target of selection. The evidence I review here suggests that innovativeness will be hereon viewed as one component, or even an emergent property of a larger array of traits, which have evolved to deal with environmental variation. I illustrate how research should capitalize on taxonomic diversity to unravel the full range of psychological processes that underpin innovativeness in non-human animals.     

Within and Beyond the Bounds of Creative Methods Is Creative Thinking Enough?

This article discusses creation and creative methods starting with the cognitive component of creation and ending with its ontological aspects. The main focus is on limitations of generally accepted approaches to the study of the creative act. It considers the role of the person performing an act of creation and disputes whether this concept is identical to that of the creative individual. It proposes methodological approaches to the further study of creativity as the integration of the "process of creation and the creative event."     

Relating Inter-Individual Differences in Verbal Creative Thinking to Cerebral Structures: An Optimal Voxel-Based Morphometry Study

Creativity can be defined the capacity of an individual to produce something original and useful. An important measurable component of creativity is divergent thinking. Despite existing studies on creativity-related cerebral structural basis, no study has used a large sample to investigate the relationship between individual verbal creativity and regional gray matter volumes (GMVs) and white matter volumes (WMVs). In the present work, optimal voxel-based morphometry (VBM) was employed to identify the structure that correlates verbal creativity (measured by the verbal form of Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking) across the brain in young healthy subjects. Verbal creativity was found to be significantly positively correlated with regional GMV in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), which is believed to be responsible for language production and comprehension, new semantic representation, and memory retrieval, and in the right IFG, which may involve inhibitory control and attention switching. A relationship between verbal creativity and regional WMV in the left and right IFG was also observed. Overall, a highly verbal creative individual with superior verbal skills may demonstrate a greater computational efficiency in the brain areas involved in high-level cognitive processes including language production, semantic representation and cognitive control.     

Creativity in the Wild: Improving Creative Reasoning through Immersion in Natural Settings

Adults and children are spending more time interacting with media and technology and less time participating in activities in nature. This life-style change clearly has ramifications for our physical well-being, but what impact does this change have on cognition? Higher order cognitive functions including selective attention, problem solving, inhibition, and multi-tasking are all heavily utilized in our modern technology-rich society. Attention Restoration Theory (ART) suggests that exposure to nature can restore prefrontal cortex-mediated executive processes such as these. Consistent with ART, research indicates that exposure to natural settings seems to replenish some, lower-level modules of the executive attentional system. However, the impact of nature on higher-level tasks such as creative problem solving has not been explored. Here we show that four days of immersion in nature, and the corresponding disconnection from multi-media and technology, increases performance on a creativity, problem-solving task by a full 50% in a group of naive hikers. Our results demonstrate that there is a cognitive advantage to be realized if we spend time immersed in a natural setting. We anticipate that this advantage comes from an increase in exposure to natural stimuli that are both emotionally positive and low-arousing and a corresponding decrease in exposure to attention demanding technology, which regularly requires that we attend to sudden events, switch amongst tasks, maintain task goals, and inhibit irrelevant actions or cognitions. A limitation of the current research is the inability to determine if the effects are due to an increased exposure to nature, a decreased exposure to technology, or to other factors associated with spending three days immersed in nature.     

Who's afraid of a cognitive neuroscience of creativity?

This article has two goals. First, the ideas outlined here can be seen as a sustained and disciplined demolition project aimed at sanitizing our bad habits of thinking about creativity. Apart from the enormous amount of fluff out there, the study of creativity is, quite unfortunately, still dominated by a number of rather dated ideas that are either so simplistic that nothing good can possibly come out of them or, given what we know about the brain, factually mistaken. As cognitive neuroscience is making more serious contact with the knowledge base of creativity, we must, from the outset, clear the ground of these pernicious fossil traces from a bygone era. The best neuroimaging techniques help little if we don't know what to look for. Second, as an antidote to these theoretical duds, the article offers fresh ideas on possible mechanisms of creativity. Given that they are grounded in current understanding of cognitive and neural processes, it is hoped that these ideas represent steps broadly pointing in the right direction. In the end, the fundamental question we must ask ourselves is what, exactly, are the mental processes--or their critical elements--that yield creative thoughts.     

EEG correlates for efficiency of the nonverbal creative performance (drawing)

This work was aimed at a search for EEG corellates of efficiency of nonverbal creative performance. Standardized Torrens technique which makes it possible to quantitatively assess creativity was used. The EEG records were performed before and during test performance, EEG parameters were compared to Torrens scores on three scales: flexibility, originality and efficiency. Absolute values of spatial synchronization, coherence and spectral power both in the baseline and during the performance were calculated. Changes in these parameters were traced during the transition from the state of quiet wakefulness to creative performance. The narrow-band analysis of coherence and spectral power allowed the number and orientation of processes associated with creativity scales to be assessed. The absence of substantial EEG changes during the test performance is indicative of the steady, nondynamical functional state of the brain.     

Approaches to the study of higher cognitive functions related to creativity in nonhuman animals

Fundamental to creativity is prior knowledge and learning capability. One can be creative only to the extent that one's prior knowledge and learning abilities enable. Many of the mental functions of humans that are affected by neuropathology involve levels of learning ability that supercede those used by most animal researchers. Yet there is literature showing that there are similarities in structure and function in the cerebrum within class Mammalia and that nonhuman animals are capable of higher levels of learning than those typically studied by neuroscientists. Reviews of abstracts from the 2005 meeting of the Society for Neuroscience reveal that most neurobehavioral research with animals has involved relatively low levels of learning ability. Thomas's [R.K. Thomas, Brain, Behav. Evol. 17 (1980) 452-474.] hierarchy of learning abilities has been revised here to better include Learning Set Formation which is fundamental to most forms of higher learning. This paper summarizes both the rationale and the methodologies that might be used to assess the roles of neuroanatomical structures involved in the psychological processes that serve as the bases of creativity.     

Meeting of minds: the medial frontal cortex and social cognition

Social interaction is a cornerstone of human life, yet the neural mechanisms underlying social cognition are poorly understood. Recently, research that integrates approaches from neuroscience and social psychology has begun to shed light on these processes, and converging evidence from neuroimaging studies suggests a unique role for the medial frontal cortex. We review the emerging literature that relates social cognition to the medial frontal cortex and, on the basis of anatomical and functional characteristics of this brain region, propose a theoretical model of medial frontal cortical function relevant to different aspects of social cognitive processing.     

Creativity meets neuroscience: experimental tasks for the neuroscientific study of creative thinking

The psychometric assessment of different facets of creative abilities as well as the availability of experimental tasks for the neuroscientific study of creative thinking has replaced the view of creativity as an unsearchable trait. In this article we provide a brief overview of contemporary methodologies used for the operationalization of creative thinking in a neuroscientific context. Empirical studies are reported which measured brain activity (by means of EEG, fMRI, NIRS or PET) during the performance of different experimental tasks. These tasks, along with creative idea generation tasks used in our laboratory, constitute useful tools in uncovering possible brain correlates of creative thinking. Nevertheless, much more work is needed in order to establish reliable and valid measures of creative thinking, in particular measures of novelty or originality of creative insights.     

Resolving Discontinuity: A Minimalist Distinction between Human and Non-human Minds

Our genotype is so similar to those of the African apes, andour last common ancestor with them so recent, that it seemsimpossible that human and non-human cognition should differqualitatively. But the outputs of human cognition are uniquein their limitless creativity and adaptability. Exaption resolvesthe apparent paradox. Assume that the power to create symbolsemerges from stimulus-stimulus linkages and is latent in manyanimals, and that the structural side of language emerges fromthe argument structures inherent in the social calculus associatedwith reciprocal altruism. These adaptations confer the potentialfor language. However, creating complex messages requires uniquelylong-lasting coherence of neural signals, which depends in turnon the large quantities of neurons unique to Homo. The onlydifference between human and non-human minds is that we cansustain longer and more complex trains of thought. All else(emotions, rational processes, even consciousness) could beexactly the same.     

The structural basis of inter-individual differences in human behaviour and cognition

Inter-individual variability in perception, thought and action is frequently treated as a source of 'noise' in scientific investigations of the neural mechanisms that underlie these processes, and discarded by averaging data from a group of participants. However, recent MRI studies in the human brain show that inter-individual variability in a wide range of basic and higher cognitive functions - including perception, motor control, memory, aspects of consciousness and the ability to introspect - can be predicted from the local structure of grey and white matter as assessed by voxel-based morphometry or diffusion tensor imaging. We propose that inter-individual differences can be used as a source of information to link human behaviour and cognition to brain anatomy.     

Conscious Augmentation of Creative State Enhances “Real” Creativity in Open-Ended Analogical Reasoning

Humans have an impressive ability to augment their creative state (i.e., to consciously try and succeed at thinking more creatively). Though this “thinking cap” phenomenon is commonly experienced, the range of its potential has not been fully explored by creativity research, which has often focused instead on creativity as a trait. A key question concerns the extent to which conscious augmentation of state creativity can improve creative reasoning. Although artistic creativity is also of great interest, it is creative reasoning that frequently leads to innovative advances in science and industry. Here, we studied state creativity in analogical reasoning, a form of relational reasoning that spans the conceptual divide between intelligence and creativity and is a core mechanism for creative innovation. Participants performed a novel Analogy Finding Task paradigm in which they sought valid analogical connections in a matrix of word-pairs. An explicit creativity cue elicited formation of substantially more creative analogical connections (measured via latent semantic analysis). Critically, the increase in creative analogy formation was not due to a generally more liberal criterion for analogy formation (that is, it appeared to reflect “real” creativity rather than divergence at the expense of appropriateness). The use of an online sample provided evidence that state creativity augmentation can be successfully elicited by remote cuing in an online environment. Analysis of an intelligence measure provided preliminary indication that the influential “threshold hypothesis,” which has been proposed to characterize the relationship between intelligence and trait creativity, may be extensible to the new domain of state creativity.     

Modern approaches to human cognitive activity enhancement

Recent literature on human cognitive activity enhancement is reviewed and summarized. Two classes of pharmacological approaches are picked out, i.e. modern aspects of traditional substance utilization and application of specially developed drugs. Among non-pharmacological approaches a number of psychological, physiological, behavioral and biophysical methods to improve human cognition, memory and learning are analyzed. The most attention is paid to non-drug approaches that utilize bioelectric processes of the individual including characteristics of its brain electrical activity--electroencephalogram (EEG) to enhance different aspects of cognitive functioning. Some promising lines of these investigations are delineated.     

Terror Warfare and the Medicine of Peace

Terror warfare's goal is to defeat political opposition by controlling populations through the fear of brutality. Mozambique's 1976–92 war stands as a prime example of this military strategy: over one million people, the vast majority of whom were civilians, were killed. Half of these casualties were children. Fully one-half of the population was directly affected by the war, and one-quarter had to flee their homes. As devastating as terror warfare is, it is destined to fail. People ultimately resist, and they do so in complex and creative ways. Rebuilding war-destroyed worlds, healing the wounds of violence, and crafting concepts of self-identity based on resistance to aggression become powerful conflict-resolution strategies among the average citizenry. The creative resources that Mozambicans developed to survive and end a very brutal war are among the most sophisticated I have seen anywhere in the world. Their war was against violence itself. [War, healing, creativity, conflict resolution, Mozambique]     

Testing Someone Else’s Intelligence: From Regimentation to Freedom1

This article discusses the trend in the development of testing from maximum regimentation of the test-takers’ activity (where they solve problems clearly formulated by the creator with a single correct answer) to diagnostic problematic situations that are very new and indefinite with an open beginning and an open end. With increasing frequency, the open beginning used in testing presupposes a freedom of independent formulation of one’s own research questions of the reality being studied and a search for answers while interacting with that reality. The emergence of mass testing of exploratory behavior is a reflection of the conviction that one of the key abilities that will be required in the very near future is the ability to cope with uncertainty and novelty, including by actively investigating them.

The discussion deals with the problems of testing intelligence and creativity in conditions of novelty and uncertainty, including the “judging problem.” It is pointed out that any thinking test, especially a test of creative thinking, is also an implicit (albeit perhaps not conscious) claim by its developers that their wisdom is virtually unsurpassed. After all, it is assumed that any person’s intelligence and creativity that unfold in a new situation may be described in the context of the model produced by the creative intellect of the test’s developer and, hence, by a more powerful “superintellect.” The errors that are practically inevitable with such an approach can be corrected in a dialog among various groups of researchers or, to the contrary, may be deepened if criticism is shut off.

The article analyzes a fundamental methodological error of creativity testing—the “standard list of creative answers” drawn up by the test-maker in advance, against which the participants’ solutions are checked. This error is explored in the case of an invention-oriented task in the international scholastic test PISA 2012, based on which the education ratings of countries are constructed.

An optimistic thesis is offered: no matter how successful testing is, humankind will never be fully prepared to determine its creative potential, due to its forward development. Without diagnostic tools, however, it will be far less prepared; they are a new and important part of that potential.     

If neuroimaging is the answer,what is the question?

It is unclear that we will come to a better understanding of mental processes simply by observing which neural loci are activated while subjects perform a task. Rather, I suggest here that it is better to come armed with a question that directs one to design tasks in ways that take advantage of the strengths of neuroimaging techniques (particularly positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging). Here I develop a taxonomy of types of questions that can be easily addressed by such techniques. The first class of questions focuses on how information processing is implemented in the brain; these questions can be posed at a very coarse scale, focusing on the entire system that confers a particular ability, or at increasingly more specific scales, ultimately focusing on individual structures or processes. The second class of questions focuses on specifying when particular processes and structures are invoked; these questions focus on how one can use patterns of activation to infer that specific processes and structures were invoked, and on how processing changes in different circumstances. The use of neuroimaging to address these questions is illustrated with results from experiments on visual cognition, and caveats regarding the logic of inference in each case are noted. Finally, the necessary interplay between neuroimaging and behavioural studies is stressed.