More creative ideas are associated with increased right posterior power and frontal-parietal/occipital coupling in the upper alpha band: A within-subjects study

Abstract

The neurophysiological investigation of creative idea generation is a growing research area. EEG studies congruently reported the sensitivity of upper alpha power (10-12 Hz) for the creative ideation process and its outcome. However, the majority of studies were between-subject design studies and research directly comparing the neurophysiological activation pattern when generating more and less creative ideas within a person are rare. Therefore, the present study was specifically focused on investigating brain activation patterns associated with the generation of more vs. less creative ideas. We applied an alternate uses task (AU-task; i.e., finding original uses for everyday objects such as a brick) in a sample of 74 participants and recorded the brain activation during the AU-task and reference period. A portable EEG system with 21 dry electrodes arranged in the international 10-20 system and linked ear as reference was used. We found a higher increase of upper alpha power during creative ideation (relative to reference period, i.e., task-related power, TRP) over right posterior sites when people generated more compared to less creative ideas. This was accompanied by an increase of functional coupling (i.e., task-related coherence increase) between frontal and parietal/occipital sites, which suggests higher internal attention and more control over sensory processes. Taken together, these findings complement the existing creativity research literature and indicate the importance of alpha power for the creative ideation process also within people.

Keywords: Creative ideation; Originality; Portable EEG; Upper alpha power.