{"id":11034,"date":"2018-01-15T04:33:21","date_gmt":"2018-01-15T04:33:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=11034"},"modified":"2018-01-16T04:38:19","modified_gmt":"2018-01-16T04:38:19","slug":"new-study-reveals-why-some-people-are-more-creative-than-others","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/new-study-reveals-why-some-people-are-more-creative-than-others\/","title":{"rendered":"New study reveals why some people are more creative than others"},"content":{"rendered":"

Roger Beaty<\/a>, Harvard University<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Creativity is often defined as the ability to come up with new and useful ideas. Like intelligence, it can be considered a trait that everyone \u2013 not just creative \u201cgeniuses\u201d like Picasso and Steve Jobs \u2013 possesses in some capacity. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just your ability to draw a picture or design a product. We all need to think creatively in our daily lives, whether it\u2019s figuring out how to make dinner using leftovers or fashioning a Halloween costume out of clothes in your closet. Creative tasks range from what researchers call \u201clittle-c\u201d creativity<\/a> \u2013 making a website, crafting a birthday present or coming up with a funny joke \u2013 to \u201cBig-C\u201d creativity<\/a>: writing a speech, composing a poem or designing a scientific experiment.<\/p>\n

Psychology and neuroscience researchers have started to identify thinking processes and brain regions involved with creativity. Recent evidence suggests that creativity involves a complex interplay between spontaneous and controlled thinking<\/a> \u2013 the ability to both spontaneously brainstorm ideas and deliberately evaluate them to determine whether they\u2019ll actually work. <\/p>\n

Despite this progress, the answer to one question has remained particularly elusive: What makes some people more creative than others? <\/p>\n

In a new study<\/a>, my colleagues and I examined whether a person\u2019s creative thinking ability can be explained, in part, by a connection between three brain networks.<\/p>\n

Mapping the brain during creative thinking<\/h2>\n

In the study, we had 163 participants complete a classic test of \u201cdivergent thinking\u201d called the alternate uses task, which asks people to think of new and unusual uses for objects. As they completed the test, they underwent fMRI scans, which measures blood flow to parts of the brain.<\/p>\n

The task assesses people\u2019s ability to diverge<\/em> from the common uses of an object. For example, in the study, we showed participants different objects on a screen, such as a gum wrapper or a sock, and asked to come up with creative ways to use them. Some ideas were more creative than others. For the sock, one participant suggested using it to warm your feet \u2013 the common use for a sock \u2013 while another participant suggested using it as a water filtration system. <\/p>\n

Importantly, we found that people who did better on this task also tended to report having more creative hobbies and achievements, which is consistent with previous studies<\/a> showing that the task measures general creative thinking ability. <\/p>\n

After participants completed these creative thinking tasks in the fMRI, we measured functional connectivity between all brain regions \u2013 how much activity in one region correlated with activity in another region. <\/p>\n

We also ranked their ideas for originality: Common uses received lower scores (using a sock to warm your feet), while uncommon uses received higher scores (using a sock as a water filtration system). <\/p>\n

Then we correlated each person\u2019s creativity score with all possible brain connections (approximately 35,000), and removed connections that, according to our analysis, didn\u2019t correlate with creativity scores. The remaining connections constituted a \u201chigh-creative\u201d network, a set of connections highly relevant to generating original ideas.<\/p>\n

\n \"\"<\/a>
\n Two renderings show the lobes of the brain that are connected in the high creative network.<\/span>
\n Author provided<\/span><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Having defined the network, we wanted to see if someone with stronger connections in this high-creative network would score well on the tasks. So we measured the strength of a person\u2019s connections in this network, and then used predictive modeling to test whether we could estimate a person\u2019s creativity score. <\/p>\n

The models revealed a significant correlation between the predicted and observed creativity scores. In other words, we could estimate how creative a person\u2019s ideas would be based on the strength of their connections in this network. <\/p>\n

We further tested whether we could predict creative thinking ability in three new samples of participants whose brain data were not used in building the network model. Across all samples, we found that we could predict \u2013 albeit modestly \u2013 a person\u2019s creative ability based on the strength of their connections in this same network. <\/p>\n

Overall, people with stronger connections came up with better ideas.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s happening in a \u2018high-creative\u2019 network<\/h2>\n

We found that the brain regions within the \u201chigh-creative\u201d network belonged to three specific brain systems: the default, salience and executive networks. <\/p>\n

The default network<\/a> is a set of brain regions that activate when people are engaged in spontaneous thinking, such as mind-wandering, daydreaming and imagining. This network may play a key role in idea generation or brainstorming \u2013 thinking of several possible solutions to a problem. <\/p>\n

The executive control network<\/a> is a set of regions that activate when people need to focus or control their thought processes. This network may play a key role in idea evaluation or determining whether brainstormed ideas will actually work and modifying them to fit the creative goal. <\/p>\n

The salience network<\/a> is a set of regions that acts as a switching mechanism between the default and executive networks. This network may play a key role in alternating between idea generation and idea evaluation.<\/p>\n

An interesting feature of these three networks is that they typically don\u2019t get activated at the same time. For example, when the executive network is activated, the default network is usually deactivated<\/a>. Our results suggest that creative people are better able to co-activate brain networks that usually work separately.<\/p>\n

Our findings indicate that the creative brain is \u201cwired\u201d differently and that creative people are better able to engage brain systems that don\u2019t typically work together. Interestingly, the results are consistent with recent fMRI studies of professional artists, including jazz musicians improvising melodies<\/a>, poets writing new lines of poetry<\/a> and visual artists sketching ideas for a book cover<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Future research is needed to determine whether these networks are malleable or relatively fixed. For example, does taking drawing classes lead to greater connectivity within these brain networks? Is it possible to boost general creative thinking ability by modifying network connections? <\/p>\n

\"TheFor now, these questions remain unanswered. As researchers, we just need to engage our own creative networks to figure out how to answer them.<\/p>\n

Roger Beaty<\/a>, Postdoctoral Fellow in Cognitive Neuroscience, Harvard University<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Roger Beaty, Harvard University Creativity is often defined as the ability to come up with new and useful ideas. Like intelligence, it can be considered a trait that everyone \u2013 not just creative \u201cgeniuses\u201d like Picasso and Steve Jobs \u2013 possesses in some capacity. It\u2019s not just your ability to draw a picture or design […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":11035,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[293],"tags":[329,129,333,232,228,209],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11034"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11034"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11034\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11036,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11034\/revisions\/11036"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}