Enhancing creativity by means of cognitive stimulation: Evidence from an fMRI study

By Andreas Fink, Roland H. Grabner, D. Gebauer, Gernot Reishofer, Karl Koschutnig, Franz Ebner. NeuroImage, 2010

321 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cognitive stimulation via the exposure to ideas of other people is an effective tool in stimulating creativity in group-based creativity techniques. In this fMRI study, we investigate whether creative cognition can be enhanced through idea sharing and how performance improvements are reflected in brain activity. Thirty-one participants had to generate alternative uses of everyday objects during fMRI recording. Additionally, participants performed this task after a time period in which they had to reflect on their ideas or in which they were confronted with stimulus-related ideas of others. Cognitive stimulation was effective in improving originality, and this performance improvement was associated with activation increases in a neural network including right-hemispheric temporo-parietal, medial frontal, and posterior cingulate cortices, bilaterally. Given the involvement of these brain areas in semantic integration, memory retrieval, and attentional processes, cognitive stimulation could have resulted in a modulation of bottom-up attention enabling participants to produce more original ideas.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9dd53f2788e520f2be00bd4bdd91356188a5a3d1

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Citations in the corpus

The Neuroscience of Intelligence (2016, background): “Increased creativity has been reported in a few studies that manipulate the brain without drugs (Fink et al., 2010) and there is a small tDCS study (Mayseless & Shamay-Tsoory, 2015), but so far there is no weight of evidence to support these preliminary reports.”
Building creative thinking in the classroom: From research to practice (2013, background): “In a study by Fink et al. (2010), participants were asked to generate either alternative uses of objects or characteristics of objects while either reflecting on their own ideas or considering the ideas of others.”
The Impact of Type of Examples on Originality: Explaining Fixation and Stimulation Effects. (2014, unknown): “[3]reported that creative performance increases after the exposure toexamples of solutions.”
Default and Executive Network Coupling Supports Creative Idea Production (2015, background): “another core hub of the DMN (28), has also been reported in several neuroimaging studies of creativity (29-32).”