Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Understanding Creativity From the Perspective of Neuroscientific Studies

The imprecision of what it means ‘to be creative’ is one of the main obstacles in understanding creativity from a neuroscientific perspective. This imprecision leads to operational definitions and tests for creativity that do not capture the full scope of what we mean by the word. The best place to start will be by analyzing what we, as a culture, mean when we use the word ‘creativity’. In this blog post I will try and parse out the notion of creativity, and then show the value of two neuroscientific studies done on creativity.

When we say that a work someone did is ‘creative’, we don’t mean simply that ‘it was created’, for then the notion of creativity would apply to every pin made by a pin maker, to use Adam Smith’s famous example of rote production. The first thing to note is this: the definition of creativity is not self-evident, and so researchers who want to work on the topic are begged to engage this problem, either by providing an operational definition or by stating the limits of their work (e.g. “this paper will focus on how depression can correlate with more unique answers to a writing prompt”) Since we do not have the solid ground of a definition, the next thing we must do is make sure that we are not deluding ourselves in fantasy, and verify that there really is something distinct in our experience that the notion of creativity refers to. When we examine works that we call creative, we find that they are distinguished by a number of features that. In addition, we can remember experiences that we consider our own creative peaks, and these are also distinguished by similar features. From these two things we can feel fairly confident that we are not being led on a quixotic journey, and that there is some distinct, but general, human activity that are trying to understand and quantify in neuroscientific terms. Everything I have written in this paragraph so far seems to me to be implicitly accepted by the authors of the articles that I have read, I just wanted to outline those two points to show my own line of reasoning in approaching this problem and hopefully dispel some ambiguities.

Now we run into a problem that many researchers seem to be struggling with. We know creative works all exhibit some features, such as beauty, originality, coherence, and I would argue complexity. One problem that we encounter here is that these traits are difficult, if not impossible, to faithfully quantify, another is that it is unclear how we are to relate each of these features to creativity as a whole, yet another is that we do not know if any give list of features is exhaustive of what creativity demands. In short, it appears that many problems must be sorted out before we can accurately make neuroscientific claims about creativity itself.
The authors of the two articles I will be covering took different, but both admirable, approaches progressing towards an understanding of creativity. Ms. Zabelina’s study concerned the nature of attention in creative processes. She recognized that there are more distinctions to be made under the broad heading of “creativity”, and conducted a study that suggests that attentional perseverance is an important feature in order to accomplish creative works, but it is not important regarding another measure of creative thinking, divergent thinking tests (TTCT) (Zabelina & Beeman, 2013). This study helps point us in the following direction: creativity is not something that can be directly tested for at this stage. Creativity can also be considered an assemblage of features and experiences, with certain features, such as attentional perseverance, remaining constant throughout creative endeavors in different fields.

But it is important to note that Zabelina only studied only one, albeit significant, component of creativity. As Dr. Morrison’s in-class question suggested, is there not something missing from the conception of creativity that was used in this experiment? Zabelina used a measure of divergent thinking, the TTCT test, and a questionnaire about real-world creative accomplishments to determine the creativity of her participants, but none of these are effective measures of originality. Originality is central to the notion of being creative, an author who copied the style of Kafka or Rimbaud would not be considered creative. Indeed, many artists who are considered the most creative were so original that their works were not immediately accepted. There were those who found the works of Mallarmé, Nietzsche, or Proust too different to be even moderately good, while now they are considered some of the greatest works of art.

This is a particularly difficult feature of creativity to test for, since originality implies something that the experimenter did not imagine before seeing the original product. But Fink et al. have found a promising approach to this problem. Their study collected students into a control group with normal psychological evaluations, and formed a separate group for students who scored highly on a schizotypal personality questionnaire. The participants were given fMRI scans as they were participating in the creative activity of coming up with many original uses for banal objects like umbrellas. It was found that the right precuneus region of the brain was less deactivated during the creative processes. Similar studies repeated these results, and others have also noted that schizophrenics and their relatives exhibit similar reduced deactivation of the right precuneus. This experiment targets a population that is known for their tendency not to internalize rules, and looks in real-time at their brain images to give us an accurate picture of originality (Fink et al., 2013).

This study suggests the opposite result of Zabelina’s study, that creativity is linked to originality and the ability to form something out of very diverse resources. This study gives us an accurate picture of originality, but an incomplete picture of creativity. What is lacking is what Zabelina’s study targeted, the attentional perseverance to put together a single work. Asking participants to come up with different uses for umbrellas may engage part of the creative process, but not all of it. It should be possible to reconcile Zabelina’s and Fink’s studies by using MRI scanners to observe the brains of artists as they are engaged in their chosen art. We would then be able to observe the relative importance of the activity of the right precuneus and the activity of the brain region responsible for attentional perseverance in each artist. Measuring the artist while they are engaged in a real creative process will do away with the murkiness of the importance of testing for how many uses for an umbrella the participant can come up with. There are many other additional factors that this type of study could show us, and some that we cannot anticipate. We would pay careful attention to the ‘give and take’ of these two brain regions, during what periods of the creative process they were active and how they might interact throughout. We could also study a build-up effect of creativity, or how an artist can get into a ‘zone’ or favorable working mind-state that helps to create their art. I think that, between the study on originality and the study on attentional perseveration, a study such as this could be a study on ‘inspiration’, which could be defined as the combination of the two. As Picasso said “inspiration exists, but it must find you working”. That is to say that inspiration, or a flash of originality, can happen, but it will not be fulfilled unless you have the attentional perseverance to unlock its potential.

Creativity is a difficult subject to approach because we do not have a firm definition of the global picture of what we are looking for. But I believe that with careful consideration of what we are testing for and how these pieces fit together, we can come to a greater understanding of the neural mechanisms that compose the creative thought process.


1.       Zabelina DL and Beeman M (2013) Short-term attentional perseveration associated with real-life creative achievement. Front. Psychol. 4:191. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00191


2.       Fink, A., Weber, B., Koschutnig, K., Benedek, M., Reishofer, G., Ebner, F., Papousek, I., Weiss, E. M. (2013). Creativity and schizotypy from the neuroscience perspective. Cognitive , Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, 14, 378-387.

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