Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2013 Jun 5:7:246.
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00246. eCollection 2013.

The promises and perils of the neuroscience of creativity

Anna Abraham  1
Affiliations

The promises and perils of the neuroscience of creativity

Anna Abraham. Front Hum Neurosci. .

Abstract

Our ability to think creatively is one of the factors that generates excitement in our lives as it introduces novelty and opens up new possibilities to our awareness which in turn lead to developments in a variety of fields from science and technology to art and culture. While research on the influence of biologically-based variables on creativity has a long history, the advent of modern techniques for investigating brain structure and function in the past two decades have resulted in an exponential increase in the number of neuroscientific studies that have explored creativity. The field of creative neurocognition is a rapidly growing area of research that can appear chaotic and inaccessible because of the heterogeneity associated with the creativity construct and the many approaches through which it can be examined. There are also significant methodological and conceptual problems that are specific to the neuroscientific study of creativity that pose considerable limitations on our capacity to make true advances in understanding the brain basis of creativity. This article explores three key issues that need to be addressed so that barriers in the way of relevant progress being made within the field can be avoided. Are creativity neuroimaging paradigms optimal enough?What makes creative cognition different from normative cognition?Do we need to distinguish between types of creativity?

Keywords: approaches; cognitive neuroscience; conceptual limitations; creative cognition; creative neurocognition; definitions; normative cognition; technical limitations.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Three conceptualizations of the relationship between creative and normative cognition: (A) mutually exclusive, (B) partially overlapping, (C) undifferentiated.
Figure 2
Figure 2
A preliminary framework to distinguish between branches of creativity: problem solving domain and the expression domain. There are subdomains (within oval forms) within each domain and strategies (within rectangular forms) common to both domains.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Abraham A. (2012). The neuroscience of creativity: a promising or perilous enterprise? in Creativity and Cognitive Neuroscience, eds Alejandre D. A. P., Garrido M. M.-L. (Madrid: Fundación Tomás Pascual y Pilar Gómez-Cuétara; ), 15–24
    1. Abraham A., Beudt S., Ott D. V. M., von Cramon D. Y. (2012a). Creative cognition and the brain: dissociations between frontal, parietal-temporal and basal ganglia groups. Brain Res. 1482, 55–70 10.1016/j.brainres.2012.09.007 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Abraham A., Pieritz K., Thybusch K., Rutter B., Kröger S., Schweckendiek J., Stark R., et al. (2012b). Creativity and the brain: uncovering the neural signature of conceptual expansion. Neuropsychologia 50, 1906–1917 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2012.04.015 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Abraham A., Schubotz R. I., von Cramon D. Y. (2008). Thinking about the future versus the past in personal and non-personal contexts. Brain Res. 1233, 106–119 10.1016/j.brainres.2008.07.084 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Abraham A., von Cramon D. Y. (2009). Reality = Relevance? Insights from spontaneous modulations of the brain's default network when telling apart reality from fiction. PLoS ONE 4:e4741 10.1371/journal.pone.0004741 - DOI - PMC - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources