To create or to recall? Neural mechanisms underlying the generation of creative new ideas

By Mathias Benedek, Emanuel Jauk, Andreas Fink, Karl Koschutnig, Gernot Reishofer, Franz Ebner, Aljoscha C. Neubauer. NeuroImage, 2014

388 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This fMRI study investigated brain activation during creative idea generation using a novel approach allowing spontaneous self-paced generation and expression of ideas. Specifically, we addressed the fundamental question of what brain processes are relevant for the generation of genuinely new creative ideas, in contrast to the mere recollection of old ideas from memory. In general, creative idea generation (i.e., divergent thinking) was associated with extended activations in the left prefrontal cortex and the right medial temporal lobe, and with deactivation of the right temporoparietal junction. The generation of new ideas, as opposed to the retrieval of old ideas, was associated with stronger activation in the left inferior parietal cortex which is known to be involved in mental simulation, imagining, and future thought. Moreover, brain activation in the orbital part of the inferior frontal gyrus was found to increase as a function of the creativity (i.e., originality and appropriateness) of ideas pointing to the role of executive processes for overcoming dominant but uncreative responses. We conclude that the process of idea generation can be generally understood as a state of focused internally-directed attention involving controlled semantic retrieval. Moreover, left inferior parietal cortex and left prefrontal regions may subserve the flexible integration of previous knowledge for the construction of new and creative ideas.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8fb152fa9ca28367f69add38add6e09e65ddf1db

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Citations in the corpus

Creative Cognition and Brain Network Dynamics (2015, background): “Recent research points to an important role of the default network and episodic memory in creative cognition [50,51] (Box 1).”
Default and Executive Network Coupling Supports Creative Idea Production (2015, background): “For example, Benedek and colleagues (30) found that generating new ideas during a divergent thinking task (responses participants identified as novel during functional imaging) was related to increased involvement of the left IPL, providing further support for a role of default mode regions in creat”
Robust prediction of individual creative ability from brain functional connectivity (2018, methodology): “In the AUT, participants were asked to use the thinking period to imagine creative uses for the object and then speak their most creative response into the microphone during the response period (29, 33); in the OCT, participants were asked to think of the most common physical characteristic of the o”