Thursday, December 11, 2014

Creativity At Its Finest



Studies focusing on the origins of creativity have been conducted with a grain of salt attached to each one. The struggle in analyzing creativity is finding the best method by which one can allow a participant’s innate creative abilities to be studied while under strict laboratory conditions. Recently, researchers have been attempting to discover more creative ways by which they may study creativity. Liu and his fellow researchers focused on identifying the creative neural pathways associated with freestyle rap. These researchers theorized that the process of creating freestyle raps was a two-fold process; part one involves the spontaneous creation of the verses of rap, while part two serves as an editing and revision step where the lyrics are revised and then rapped out loud. The participants were split into two groups, an experimental group told to freestyle rap, as well as a control group given a rehearsed verse to perform, and were compared using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
            This study compared its results between the experimental and control group by analyzing the brain activity of each group. The researchers’ most relevant data found that the experimental group illustrated increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and decreased activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). In humans, the MPFC is associated more-so with self-perception, self-knowledge, and moral decisions, various aspects of social cognition. The DLPFC has been known to be connected with working memory, willed action, and especially executive attention. It has been generally thought that higher levels of activity in the DLPFC are positively correlated with higher levels of creativity in the actions of various individuals. However, Liu and his colleagues illustrate the opposite result here; the group shown to have higher levels of creativity simultaneously showed decreased activity in their DLPFCs. As the DLPFC is a primary control factor of executive attention, these results appear to indicate that the attention is not a necessity for higher levels of creative cognition in humans.
            Not all research studies analyzing creativity and attention come to the same conclusion as Liu and his associates did. Though attention was not the primary concern in Liu’s experiment, his results indicated that attention played a minor role in one’s ability to creatively think. However, Zabelina and Beeman’s experiment focused solely on attention and its’ relationship with creative cognition. Their study introduced two different hypotheses regarding how attention relates to creativity; one hypothesis involves the idea of attentional flexibility (being able to shift focus between two different stimuli) and divergent thinking (the ability to create a myriad of various ideas), while the second hypothesis focuses on attentional persistence (one’s ability to focus for a lengthy period of time) and its’ relationship to real-world creative achievements. Once the participants were categorized into high and low creative levels, Zabelina and Beeman ran two different experiments asking the participants to determine if a stimulus was in the shape of an S or an H in a variety of ways.
The results indicated that those of higher creative cognition levels had a greater switch cost between the different stimuli and made mistakes more often in determining the correct stimulus. Attentional persistence was shown to play significant factor in the finding of the data, while attentional flexibility was not significant. Overall, both Zabelina and Liu’s experiments showed negative correlations between creativity and attention. Again, while it was not the focus of Liu’s study, the decreased activity of the DLPFC in the experimental group illustrated that the more creative group also had lowered levels of attention than the control group with lower creativity scores. Zabelina’s results showed that those with higher creativity levels actually had poorer results in activities involving attentional persistence, while attentional flexibility simply was not relevant to the results of the experiments at all. Both studies analyzed creativity through two completely different methodologies, and yet they both found attention to play a much less significant role than is assumed by the general public. As shown through these studies, one’s ability to be creative may not be dictated through paying attention after all.     

Liu et al. (2012). Neural correlates of lyrical improvisation: an fMRI study of freestyle rap. Scientific Reports, 2. doi:10.1038/srep00834          
Zabelina, D.L. & Beeman, M. (2013). Short-term attentional perseveration associated with real-life creative achievement. Frontiers in Psychology. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.0019 

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