Brain activity and connectivity during poetry composition: Toward a multidimensional model of the creative process

Abstract

Creativity, a multifaceted construct, can be studied in various ways, for example, investigating phases of the creative process, quality of the creative product, or the impact of expertise. Previous neuroimaging studies have assessed these individually. Believing that each of these interacting features must be examined simultaneously to develop a comprehensive understanding of creative behavior, we examined poetry composition, assessing process, product, and expertise in a single experiment. Distinct activation patterns were associated with generation and revision, two major phases of the creative process. Medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) was active during both phases, yet responses in dorsolateral prefrontal and parietal executive systems (DLPFC/IPS) were phase‐dependent, indicating that while motivation remains unchanged, cognitive control is attenuated during generation and re‐engaged during revision. Experts showed significantly stronger deactivation of DLPFC/IPS during generation, suggesting that they may more effectively suspend cognitive control. Importantly however, similar overall patterns were observed in both groups, indicating the same cognitive resources are available to experts and novices alike. Quality of poetry, assessed by an independent panel, was associated with divergent connectivity patterns in experts and novices, centered upon MPFC (for technical facility) and DLPFC/IPS (for innovation), suggesting a mechanism by which experts produce higher quality poetry. Crucially, each of these three key features can be understood in the context of a single neurocognitive model characterized by dynamic interactions between medial prefrontal areas regulating motivation, dorsolateral prefrontal, and parietal areas regulating cognitive control and the association of these regions with language, sensorimotor, limbic, and subcortical areas distributed throughout the brain. Hum Brain Mapp 36:3351–3372, 2015. © 2015 The Authors. Human Brain Mapping Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc..

Driving the brain towards creativity and intelligence: A network control theory analysis

“…A growing amount of research relates the creative process to dynamical interactions between these two systems (Beaty, Benedek, Kaufman, & Silvia, 2015; Beaty et al, 2016; Liu et al, 2015; Pinho, de Manzano, Fransson, Eriksson, & Ullén, 2014). For example, Beaty et al (2015) conducted a temporal functional connectivity analysis when participants either generated alternative uses or simple characteristics for common objects.…”

The Neural Correlates of Humor Creativity

“…Passive Humor Appreciation). The mPFC has been implicated in most studies of creativity (Liu et al, 2015), as well as in some studies of humor appreciation (e.g., Amir et al, 2015). It appears to be involved in humor creation as well, but is likely not the source of humorous ideas (see General Discussion).…”

“…Nevertheless, a pattern emerges suggesting that the quality of different creative tasks correlate with activity in different regions: complexity of pianists’ improvisation correlates with activity in pre-SMA cortex (Bengtsson et al, 2007), creativity of rhythm improvisation is associated with bilateral prefrontal cortex and right insula (Villarreal et al, 2013), creative writing with the left fronto-temporal network (Shah et al, 2013), free style rap performance with activity in medial temporal regions, posterior cingulate cortex and left mPFC (Liu et al, 2012), and skillful drawing with changes in prefrontal white matter connectivity and a distinct pattern of activation in temporal, motor and prefrontal cortices (Schlegel et al, 2015). Even within the same imaging study during a poetry creation task, different measures of quality, craft and the linguistic creativity evident in the poetry, were associated with different networks involving mPFC and dlPFC, respectively (Liu et al, 2015). The lack of consistency suggests that there is no one region acting as a general creativity fount so that greater activity in that region correlates with creative products that are of higher quality.…”

“…Unfortunately, the cortical regions reported by the various studies to be associated with “creativity” were as diverse as the tasks employed, save for the often observed involvement of the prefrontal cortex (Dietrich and Kanso, 2010). It has been suggested that activation of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and a deactivation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) were the hallmarks of creative processing, along with regions associated with the particular type of creative task (e.g., Limb and Braun, 2008; Liu et al, 2012, 2015). However, a one-dimensional comparison between creative and non-creative control conditions (e.g., jazz improvisation vs. playing from memory; Limb and Braun, 2008) may be inadequate for revealing the roles played by different brain regions in a creative endeavor, as it can only reveal a set of regions, typically unsurprising (e.g., visual regions for book cover design, Ellamil et al, 2012; language regions for poetry composition, Liu et al, 2015), associated with a particular creative task (as well as, commonly, the mPFC).…”

“…Generating humorous ideas, however, is a task nearly anyone can attempt, and participants with different levels of expertise/talent can be identified. Thus far, only the acts of poetry composition and creative drawing have been studied with the aim of determining the neural correlates of both quality and expertise (Liu et al, 2015; Schlegel et al, 2015). Finally, a humorous creation based on a particular stimulus—a captionless cartoon in the present study–affords a natural and tighter control than most creativity studies: the generation of a mundane statement that would be appropriate for the same cartoon drawing.…”