Neural Foundations of Creativity: A Systematic Review

Synchronised neural signature of creative mental imagery in reality and augmented reality

Creativity, transforming imaginative thinking into reality, is a mental imagery simulation in essence. It can be incorporeal, concerns sophisticated and/or substantial thinking, and involves objects. In the present study, a mental imagery task consisting of creating a scene using familiar (FA) or abstract (AB) physical or virtual objects in real (RMI) and augmented reality (VMI) environments, and an execution task involving effectively creating a scene in augmented reality (VE), were utilised. The beta and gamma neural oscillations of healthy participants were recorded via a 32 channel wireless 10/20 international EGG system. In real and augmented environments and for both the mental imagery and execution tasks, the participants displayed a similar cortico-cortical neural signature essentially based on synchronous vs asynchronous beta and gamma oscillatory activities between anterior (i.e. frontal) and posterior (i.e. parietal, occipito-parietal and occipito-temporal) areas bilaterally. The findings revealed a transient synchronised neural architecture that appears to be consistent with the hypothesis according to which, creativity, because of its inherent complexity, cannot be confined to a single brain area but engages various interconnected networks.

Structural properties of corpus callosum are associated differently with verbal creativity and visual creativity

Recent neuroimaging studies demonstrate that creativity is related to brain regions across both hemispheres, and the corpus callosum forms the structural basis of inter-hemispheric information exchange. However, the findings regarding the relationship between inter-hemispheric interaction and creativity remain inconsistent, which may be caused by different types of creativity and neural features being adopted. To clarify the inconsistency, and understand how inter-hemispheric interactions are related to different kinds of creativity, we explored the correlation between eight structural measures of the corpus callosum (CC) and two different domains of creativity [verbal creativity (VerC) and visual creativity (VisC)] using a large healthy-adult sample (n = 446). The results showed that VerC was positively correlated with fractional anisotropy (FA) and negatively correlated with the radial diffusivity (RD) of CC; whereas there was no significant association between VisC and CC measures. These results persisted after regressing VisC from VerC, regressing VerC from VisC, and regress out general intelligence from both creativity measures. In summary, we showed that the structural properties of corpus collosum are associated in different ways with two domains of creativity, i.e., verbal creativity and visual creativity, which enriches our understanding of the underlying neural mechanism in different types of creativity.