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.     

Creative cognition as a window on creativity

The creative cognition approach views creativity as the generation of novel and appropriate products through the application of basic cognitive processes to existing knowledge structures. It relies on converging evidence from anecdotal accounts of creativity and tightly controlled laboratory studies designed to examine the processes that are assumed to operate in those anecdotes. Specific examples of creative cognition studies are described in detail with a particular focus on research concerned with accessing conceptual information at varying levels of abstraction and combining previously separate concepts. Important aspects of the design of these studies are delineated, including the main creative tasks, properties of the materials used, characteristics of responses observed, including their originality and practicality, participant and rater attributes, and the relations among these and other study aspects. Other issues addressed are generality across materials, populations, and situations, as well as causal versus correlational connections among processes, structures and creative outcomes.     

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.     

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."     

Metacognition: computation, biology and function

Many complex systems maintain a self-referential check and balance. In animals, such reflective monitoring and control processes have been grouped under the rubric of metacognition. In this introductory article to a Theme Issue on metacognition, we review recent and rapidly progressing developments from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, computer science and philosophy of mind. While each of these areas is represented in detail by individual contributions to the volume, we take this opportunity to draw links between disciplines, and highlight areas where further integration is needed. Specifically, we cover the definition, measurement, neurobiology and possible functions of metacognition, and assess the relationship between metacognition and consciousness. We propose a framework in which level of representation, order of behaviour and access consciousness are orthogonal dimensions of the conceptual landscape.     

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.     

Interactive Social Neuroscience to Study Autism Spectrum Disorder

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate difficulty with social interactions and relationships, but the neural mechanisms underlying these difficulties remain largely unknown. While social difficulties in ASD are most apparent in the context of interactions with other people, most neuroscience research investigating ASD have provided limited insight into the complex dynamics of these interactions. The development of novel, innovative “interactive social neuroscience” methods to study the brain in contexts with two interacting humans is a necessary advance for ASD research. Studies applying an interactive neuroscience approach to study two brains engaging with one another have revealed significant differences in neural processes during interaction compared to observation in brain regions that are implicated in the neuropathology of ASD. Interactive social neuroscience methods are crucial in clarifying the mechanisms underlying the social and communication deficits that characterize ASD.     

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.     

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.     

Creative Activities in Music – A Genome-Wide Linkage Analysis

Creative activities in music represent a complex cognitive function of the human brain, whose biological basis is largely unknown. In order to elucidate the biological background of creative activities in music we performed genome-wide linkage and linkage disequilibrium (LD) scans in musically experienced individuals characterised for self-reported composing, arranging and non-music related creativity. The participants consisted of 474 individuals from 79 families, and 103 sporadic individuals. We found promising evidence for linkage at 16p12.1-q12.1 for arranging (LOD 2.75, 120 cases), 4q22.1 for composing (LOD 2.15, 103 cases) and Xp11.23 for non-music related creativity (LOD 2.50, 259 cases). Surprisingly, statistically significant evidence for linkage was found for the opposite phenotype of creative activity in music (neither composing nor arranging; NCNA) at 18q21 (LOD 3.09, 149 cases), which contains cadherin genes like CDH7 and CDH19. The locus at 4q22.1 overlaps the previously identified region of musical aptitude, music perception and performance giving further support for this region as a candidate region for broad range of music-related traits. The other regions at 18q21 and 16p12.1-q12.1 are also adjacent to the previously identified loci with musical aptitude. Pathway analysis of the genes suggestively associated with composing suggested an overrepresentation of the cerebellar long-term depression pathway (LTD), which is a cellular model for synaptic plasticity. The LTD also includes cadherins and AMPA receptors, whose component GSG1L was linked to arranging. These results suggest that molecular pathways linked to memory and learning via LTD affect music-related creative behaviour. Musical creativity is a complex phenotype where a common background with musicality and intelligence has been proposed. Here, we implicate genetic regions affecting music-related creative behaviour, which also include genes with neuropsychiatric associations. We also propose a common genetic background for music-related creative behaviour and musical abilities at chromosome 4.     

The philosophical "mind-body problem" and its relevance for the relationship between psychiatry and the neurosciences

Parallel to psychiatry, "philosophy of mind" investigates the relationship between mind (mental domain) and body/brain (physical domain). Unlike older forms of philosophy of mind, contemporary analytical philosophy is not exclusively based on introspection and conceptual analysis, but also draws upon the empirical methods and findings of the sciences. This article outlines the conceptual framework of the "mind-body problem" as formulated in contemporary analytical philosophy and argues that this philosophical debate has potentially far-reaching implications for psychiatry as a clinical-scientific discipline, especially for its own autonomy and its relationship to neurology/neuroscience. This point is illustrated by a conceptual analysis of the five principles formulated in Kandel's 1998 article "A New Intellectual Framework for Psychiatry." Kandel's position in the philosophical mind-body debate is ambiguous, ranging from reductive physicalism (psychophysical identity theory) to non-reductive physicalism (in which the mental "supervenes" on the physical) to epiphenomenalist dualism or even emergent dualism. We illustrate how these diverging interpretations result in radically different views on the identity of psychiatry and its relationship with the rapidly expanding domain of neurology/neuroscience.     

The Creative Stereotype Effect

Because of its fundamental relevance to scientific innovation, artistic expression, and human ingenuity, creativity has long been the subject of systematic psychological investigation. Concomitantly, the far-reaching effects of stereotypes on various cognitive and social processes have been widely researched. Bridging these two literatures, we show in a series of two studies that stereotypes related to creativity can both enhance and diminish individuals’ performance on a divergent thinking task. Specifically, Study 1 demonstrated that participants asked to take on a stereotypically uninhibited perspective performed significantly better on a divergent thinking task than those participants who took on a stereotypically inhibited perspective, and a control group. Relatedly, Study 2 showed that the same effect is found within-subjects, with divergent thinking significantly improving when participants invoke an uninhibited stereotype. Moreover, we demonstrate the efficacy of Latent Semantic Analysis as an objective measure of the originality of ideas, and discuss implications of our findings for the nature of creativity. Namely, that creativity may not be best described as a stable individual trait, but as a malleable product of context and perspective.     

社会认知神经科学的取向与研究进展

社会认知神经科学是社会心理学和认知神经科学相结合的新兴多学科研究领域,其强调在社会、认知与脑神经等三个层面的交互作用上去理解心理现象。前几年主要是对刻板印象、态度与态度改变、他人知觉、自我认知以及情绪与认知交互作用等方面进行了深入研究,其主要范式是应用认知神经科学的方法来验证社会心理学在这些范围内上的各种不同的理论观点,当前的研究主要集中在知觉和再认的社会标记、社会判断和归因、评价调节知觉和经验以及社会交互作用等传统的社会心理学方面,并取得了突破性进展。展望未来的研究,其将在系统准则研究发展的基础上,把当今的社会认知研究与认知神经科学在理论和方法论上整合起来,为揭示人类高级社会心理现象的神经基础,开辟一条崭新的研究道路。     

When the brain plays music: auditory-motor interactions in music perception and production

Music performance is both a natural human activity, present in all societies, and one of the most complex and demanding cognitive challenges that the human mind can undertake. Unlike most other sensory-motor activities, music performance requires precise timing of several hierarchically organized actions, as well as precise control over pitch interval production, implemented through diverse effectors according to the instrument involved. We review the cognitive neuroscience literature of both motor and auditory domains, highlighting the value of studying interactions between these systems in a musical context, and propose some ideas concerning the role of the premotor cortex in integration of higher order features of music with appropriately timed and organized actions.     

Education Influences Creativity in Dyslexic and Non-Dyslexic Children and Teenagers

Background and Study Hypothesis

Are dyslexic children and teenagers more creative than non-dyslexic children and teenagers? Whether creativity is higher in dyslexia, and whether this could be related to neurological development specific to the dyslexic disorder, or to compensatory strategies acquired later in life, remains unclear. Here, we suggest an additional role of differential educational approaches taken in each school that could either enhance or suppress an already higher baseline creativity of dyslexic children and teenagers.

Results

Creativity in dyslexic and non-dyslexic children and teenagers from different schools in France and in Belgium, as well as in students from different universities, was evaluated with the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT). Children and teenagers with dyslexia and/or with other similar dysfunctions showed higher creativity scores than non-dyslexic participants. Moreover, the educational approach could further enhance the creative scores in dyslexia, which could be as high as those measured in students from art universities.

Conclusions

We conclude that dyslexic children and teenagers can be highly creative. Yet, expression of creativity can be modulated by educational approach, indicating a probable advantage for personal follow-up compared to normalizing education strategies.     

Fusing EEG and fMRI based on a bottom-up model: inferring activation and effective connectivity in neural masses

The elucidation of the complex machinery used by the human brain to segregate and integrate information while performing high cognitive functions is a subject of imminent future consequences. The most significant contributions to date in this field, known as cognitive neuroscience, have been achieved by using innovative neuroimaging techniques, such as electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measure variations in both the time and the space of some interpretable physical magnitudes. Extraordinary maps of cerebral activation involving function-restricted brain areas, as well as graphs of the functional connectivity between them, have been obtained from EEG and fMRI data by solving some spatio-temporal inverse problems, which constitutes a top-down approach. However, in many cases, a natural bridge between these maps/graphs and the causal physiological processes is lacking, leading to some misunderstandings in their interpretation. Recent advances in the comprehension of the underlying physiological mechanisms associated with different cerebral scales have provided researchers with an excellent scenario to develop sophisticated biophysical models that permit an integration of these neuroimage modalities, which must share a common aetiology. This paper proposes a bottom-up approach, involving physiological parameters in a specific mesoscopic dynamic equations system. Further observation equations encapsulating the relationship between the mesostates and the EEG/fMRI data are obtained on the basis of the physical foundations of these techniques. A methodology for the estimation of parameters from fused EEG/fMRI data is also presented. In this context, the concepts of activation and effective connectivity are carefully revised. This new approach permits us to examine and discuss some future prospects for the integration of multimodal neuroimages.     

Grist and mills: on the cultural origins of cultural learning

Cumulative cultural evolution is what 'makes us odd'; our capacity to learn facts and techniques from others, and to refine them over generations, plays a major role in making human minds and lives radically different from those of other animals. In this article, I discuss cognitive processes that are known collectively as 'cultural learning' because they enable cumulative cultural evolution. These cognitive processes include reading, social learning, imitation, teaching, social motivation and theory of mind. Taking the first of these three types of cultural learning as examples, I ask whether and to what extent these cognitive processes have been adapted genetically or culturally to enable cumulative cultural evolution. I find that recent empirical work in comparative psychology, developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience provides surprisingly little evidence of genetic adaptation, and ample evidence of cultural adaptation. This raises the possibility that it is not only 'grist' but also 'mills' that are culturally inherited; through social interaction in the course of development, we not only acquire facts about the world and how to deal with it (grist), we also build the cognitive processes that make 'fact inheritance' possible (mills).     

A holistic approach to study the temporal variability in gait

Movement variability has become an important field of research and has been studied to gain a better understanding of the neuro-muscular control of human movements. In addition to studies investigating "amplitude variability" there are a growing number of studies assessing the "temporal variability" in movements by applying non-linear analysis techniques. One limitation of the studies available to date is that they quantify variability features in specific, pre-selected biomechanical or physiological variables. In many cases it remains unclear if and to what degree these pre-selected variables quantify characteristics of the whole body movement. This technical note proposes to combine two analysis techniques that have already been applied for gait analysis in order to quantify variability features in walking with variables whose significance for the whole movements are known. Gait patterns were recorded using a full-body marker set on the subjects whose movements were captured with a standard motion tracing system. For each time frame the coordinates of all markers were interpreted as a high-dimensional "posture vector". A principal component analysis (PCA) conducted on these posture vectors identified the main one-dimensional movement components of walking. Temporal variability of gait was then quantified by calculating the maximum Lyapunov Exponent (LyE) of these main movement components. The effectiveness of this approach was demonstrated by determining differences in temporal variability between walking in unstable shoes and walking in a normal athletic-type control shoe. Several additional conceptual and practical advantages of this combination of analysis methods were discussed.     

New thinking: the evolution of human cognition

Humans are animals that specialize in thinking and knowing, and our extraordinary cognitive abilities have transformed every aspect of our lives. In contrast to our chimpanzee cousins and Stone Age ancestors, we are complex political, economic, scientific and artistic creatures, living in a vast range of habitats, many of which are our own creation. Research on the evolution of human cognition asks what types of thinking make us such peculiar animals, and how they have been generated by evolutionary processes. New research in this field looks deeper into the evolutionary history of human cognition, and adopts a more multi-disciplinary approach than earlier 'Evolutionary Psychology'. It is informed by comparisons between humans and a range of primate and non-primate species, and integrates findings from anthropology, archaeology, economics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, philosophy and psychology. Using these methods, recent research reveals profound commonalities, as well striking differences, between human and non-human minds, and suggests that the evolution of human cognition has been much more gradual and incremental than previously assumed. It accords crucial roles to cultural evolution, techno-social co-evolution and gene-culture co-evolution. These have produced domain-general developmental processes with extraordinary power-power that makes human cognition, and human lives, unique.     

A cognitive neuroscience framework for understanding causal reasoning and the law

Over the past couple of decades, there have been great developments in the fields of psychology and cognitive neuroscience that have allowed the advancement of our understanding of how people make judgements about causality in several domains. We provide a review of some of the contemporary psychological models of causal thinking that are directly relevant to legal reasoning. In addition, we cover some exciting new research using advanced neuroimaging techniques that have helped to uncover the underlying neural signatures of complex causal reasoning. Through the use of functional imaging, we provide a first-hand look at how the brain responds to evidence that is either consistent or inconsistent with one's beliefs and expectations. Based on the data covered in this review, we propose some ideas for how the effectiveness of causal reasoning, especially as it pertains to legal decision-making, may be facilitated.