Introduction
Yet the suns that light the corridors of the universe,
shine dim before the blazing of a single thought.
So proclaims the intrepid Dr. Duval in the 1966 sci-fi film Fantastic Voyage, in which a group of scientists miniaturize themselves and enter the brain of a dying patient in search of a cure. What they find is a magical world of unanticipated complexity in an organ that continues to astound its master and servant—animals and man. Of course, modern science’s continued effort to understand the neurobiological bases of creativity is its own fantastic voyage, and although we cannot yet insert ourselves into the brains of creative people, technical advances in the neurosciences have begun to reveal the workings of the brain in tremendous detail. With new tools and theories, researchers have generated a body of neuroscientific research and theorizing to complement the nearly one hundred years of sociocultural, cognitive, developmental, educational, and historiometric perspectives on creative processes.
The purpose of this book is to bring together leading researchers from around the world to provide an up-to-date review of empirical and theoretical approaches to the neurobiological bases of creativity. Our hope is that active creativity researchers will find this volume to be a valuable summation of current theoretic and empirical approaches, from which new ideas will be born to inform interdisciplinary perspectives. Our hope is also to inspire advanced students and researchers in adjacent fields for whom creativity is a potential area of focus, and to consider contributing to the advances in creativity research. Indeed, we purposely sought contributions from several scientists who would not call themselves “creativity researchers” per se, but whose research we felt was highly relevant to understanding the neural bases of creativity. The chapters should certainly be engaging for the intelligent and curious lay reader as well.
It would appear that a book on the neuroscience of creativity requires a definition of creativity. However, enforcing a single definition of creativity on the chapters would reflect a rather unnatural representation of the state of affairs in this field, represented as it is by a multitude of context-dependent and domain-specific definitions of what constitutes creativity. Of course, there are some general definitions of creativity that almost everyone in the field agrees on, such as viewing creativity as the generation of novel and useful products within a specific context (e.g., Kaufman, 2009; Plucker, Beghetto, & Dow, 2004; Simonton, 2012). We have opted to congregate around this general definition, thereby letting individual researchers define what creativity means in the context of their specific chapters. We believe that this approach more accurately reflects the context- and domain-specific nature of creativity and its neural correlates (Vartanian, 2012).
The book is organized into six sections, which roughly correspond to a progression of theoretical, genetic, structural, clinical, functional, and applied approaches. Admittedly, this is a rather unsatisfactory description of the book’s organization as many of the chapters span multiple levels of analysis, which is a testament to the authors and to the demands of addressing the complexities of creativity from a neurobiological perspective. But in general, the chapters progress from the more fundamental levels of genetics and neurophysiology to systems neuroscience and neuroimaging, with important “book ends” that provide theoretical frameworks and synthesis.
The first section of the book, entitled “Theories and Constraints,” contains three chapters that provide a context for later discussions. The book begins with a contribution from Margaret A. Boden, who outlines the possibilities and limitations of a neuroscientific approach to the study of creativity. Critically, she notes the distinction between exploratory creativity, transformational creativity, and combinatorial creativity, and highlights the fact that experimental analyses to date have largely concerned themselves with the latter. Her contention is that an understanding of the neurocognitive basis of semantic hierarchies and of knowledge relevance remains elusive, yet is central to creative processes. In chapter 2, Liane Gabora and Apara Ranjan describe a neurally inspired model of creativity that hinges on aspects of memory encoding and retrieval, specifically the reconstructive nature of memory and the novel by-products resulting from contingent activation of subsets of cell assemblies they call “neurds.” Finally, W. David Stahlman, Kenneth J. Leising, Dennis Garlick, and Aaron P. Blaisdell, animal behavior experts, draw on fundamental principles of conditioning and associative learning to provide a stimulating overview of what could be viewed as rudimentary creativity in the form of novel and unexplained behavior of animals. Indeed, it appears that there is much to learn about the production of novel behavior from examining nonhuman animals.
The second and third sections of the book, “Genetics” and “Neuropsychology,” respectively, contain chapters that explore these areas from multiple perspectives. Chapter 4, by Baptiste Barbot, Mei Tan, and Elena L. Grigorenko, updates the reader on the issue of heritability of creativity and the interaction of genes and environment in shaping creative processes, with a specific focus on the genetic bases underlying the reception of creative products. In chapter 5, Marleen H. M. de Moor, Mark Patrick Roeling, and Dorret I. Boomsma use data from the well-known Netherlands Twin Registry to examine the pattern and degree of talent among parents and their children across multiple artistic and technical domains. Chapter 6, by Indre V. Viskontas and Bruce L. Miller, and chapter 7, by Dahlia W. Zaidel, describe fascinating windows into the brain basis of creativity: neurological findings of altered or, in some cases, emergent artistic talent in brain-damaged patients and patients afflicted with neurodegenerative conditions. Both chapters emphasize the importance of triangulating across multiple approaches for understanding the emergence and alteration of artistic (and aesthetic) abilities.
Next, the book moves to a section entitled “Pharmacology and Psychopathology,” discussing areas that have benefited from the continued development of new tools and techniques for interrogating the brain. David Q. Beversdorf reviews work from his lab and others in chapter 8, providing insights into the involvement of multiple neurotransmitter systems in cognition and creative processes. In chapter 9, Shelley Carson provides a review of the association between creativity and mental health, digging deeper into the specific traits and neural mechanisms to account for their shared vulnerabilities and nuanced relationship. Both chapters provide integral information for clinical interventions for creativity.
Neuroimaging, the topic of the book’s fifth section, has afforded researchers an extraordinary view into the workings of the human brain in health and disease, and creativity researchers have taken advantage of such tools. In chapter 10, Andreas Fink and Mathias Benedek examine EEG and functional MRI studies of intelligence and creativity, asking to what extent they and their associated neural networks are modifiable by training or influenced by individual differences. In chapter 11, Rex E. Jung and Richard J. Haier provide an integration of many neuroimaging and neuroanatomical studies to propose a new model of neural network functioning across brain regions in which creative processes are dissociable from general intelligence. Both chapters reinforce the importance of continued research into understanding the dissociable and shared neural pathways for intelligence and creativity.
A final section entitled “Aesthetic and Creative Products” focuses on a critical but often overlooked applied aspect of the neurobiological bases of creativity. Chapter 12, by Oshin Vartanian, discusses the use of neuroscientific data as part of the toolkit to enhance creativity within a componential approach. Finally, chapter 13, by Pablo P. L. Tinio and Helmut Leder, steps outside the brain to focus on the nature of art, primarily visual art, and the unique information processing challenges that it poses to the viewer. A thorough examination of this domain, they argue, is a prerequisite to a meaningful exploration of “neuroaesthetics”—a field wherein the generation and appreciation of creative products come full circle.
As we began to receive contributions and the book’s contents materialized, we recognized familiar concepts, but also clear illustrations of how the field is progressing. In the end, the book contained not even one reference to the well-trodden Helmholtz model of creative thinking (Helmholtz, 1896, as cited in Wallas, 1926), a depiction of creativity that has inspired hundreds, if not thousands, of spirited discussions and research projects. If the final volume has the impact we anticipate, many new ideas and experiments will be generated from new data and new models of creative processes inspired by it. We hope that creativity researchers, neuroscientists, and scholars in general will find much to ponder in the pages to come.
We would like to thank all of the contributing authors for their thoughtful and timely contributions. We hope you enjoy the book.
ASB, OV, and JCK
September 2012
References
Helmholtz, H. von (1896). Vortage und Reden. Brunswick: Friedrich Viewig.
Kaufman, J. C. (2009). Creativity 101. New York: Springer.
Plucker, J., Beghetto, R. A., & Dow, G. (2004). Why isn’t creativity more important to educational psychologists? Potential, pitfalls, and future directions in creativity research. Educational Psychologist, 39, 83–96.
Simonton, D. K. (2012). Taking the U.S. patent office criteria seriously: A quantitative three-criterion creativity definition and its implications. Creativity Research Journal, 24, 97–106.
Vartanian, O. (2012). Dissociable neural systems for analogy and metaphor: Implications for the neuroscience of creativity. British Journal of Psychology, 103, 302–316.
Wallas, G. (1926). The art of thought. New York: Harcourt Brace.