Creative Cognition and Brain Network Dynamics

By Roger E. Beaty, Mathias Benedek, Paul J Silvia, Daniel L. Schacter. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2015

911 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Creative thinking is central to the arts, sciences, and everyday life. How does the brain produce creative thought? A series of recently published papers has begun to provide insight into this question, reporting a strikingly similar pattern of brain activity and connectivity across a range of creative tasks and domains, from divergent thinking to poetry composition to musical improvisation. This research suggests that creative thought involves dynamic interactions of large-scale brain systems, with the most compelling finding being that the default and executive control networks, which can show an antagonistic relationship, actually cooperate during creative cognition and artistic performance. These findings have implications for understanding how brain networks interact to support complex cognitive processes, particularly those involving goal-directed, self-generated thought.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ae0dd8666d18f1d43590f110c0b104714d304f02

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Citations in the corpus

Robust prediction of individual creative ability from brain functional connectivity (2018, background): “Nevertheless, the high-creative network showed stable prediction of creative ability across datasets, and the neuroanatomy of this network mirrors previous fMRI studies of creative cognition reporting functional interactions among default, executive, and salience networks (1), suggesting that it may”
Exploring the Link Between Mind Wandering, Mindfulness, and Creativity: A Multidimensional Approach (2018, positive): “Creative thinking is indeed characterized by a complex process involving both implicit associative processes and explicit control processes (Beaty, Benedek, Silvia, & Schachter, 2016), and MW might inversely influence these different processes.”
Structure and flexibility: Investigating the relation between the structure of the mental lexicon, fluid intelligence, and creative achievement. (2016, background): “The top-down account of creativity proposes that creative thought is a top-down process that taps individual differences in the ability to control attention and cognition (Beaty et al., 2016, 2014).”
Directional prefrontal-thalamic information flow is selectively required during spatial working memory retrieval (2022, background): “Recently, brain networks have attracted increasing attention due to the potential to better characterize brain dynamics in cognition (Park and Friston, 2013; Beaty et al., 2016; Gilson et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2020; Fogel et al., 2021).”
Time course of EEG power during creative problem‐solving with insight or remote thinking (2021, methodology): “Consistent with this interpretation, the central contribution of executive and memory processes in creativity is now well established (Beaty et al., 2016; Benedek & Fink, 2019; Benedek & Jauk, 2018; Cassotti et al., 2016; Volle, 2017).”