Brain flexibility associated with need for cognition contributes to creative achievement

Abstract

Advances in graph‐theoretic models of networks have made it possible to investigate the topological properties of the human brain across time and space. Brain flexibility is defined as the frequency with which brain regions switch between different functional modules over time and has been shown to correlate with higher‐order cognitive functions. Need for cognition (NFC) refers to a personality trait to engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive endeavors and usually has a positive effect on diverse cognitive activities (e.g., creativity), which may also be closely related to brain flexibility. Here, we tested whether the flexibility of a large‐scale brain network associated with NFC facilitated creative achievement. Robust correlation analyses showed that NFC correlates with the flexibility of the insula, the medial prefrontal cortex, and the putamen at the node level. Several large‐scale brain networks whose flexibility also correlated with NFC, including the default mode network, salience network, subcortical network, ventral attention network, and control network, imply that higher NFC individuals may exhibit better cognitive abilities, such as executive control, salient detection, spontaneous thought, and motivation function. Interestingly, only global flexibility acted as a mediator in the relationship between NFC and creative achievement, suggesting that the mediating mechanism may involve an interaction between distinct regions or large‐scale networks across the entire brain instead of the functional characteristic of local regions. Together, we demonstrate that the higher NFC is, the more flexible the brain, which may provide a potential insight into the acquisition of creative achievement.

Conspiracist beliefs, intuitive thinking, and schizotypal facets: A further evaluation

“…Recent academic work supports the supposition that Need for Cognition indirectly indexes cognitive abilities, which indirectly influence decision‐making processes. For example, He et al (2019) observed that brain networks associated with Need for Cognition were also involved with higher‐order cognitive functions (i.e., executive control, salience detection, spontaneous thought, and motivation function). Collectively, this evidence indicates that the supposition that Need for Cognition indexes rational thought and in turn, belief in conspiracies is grossly oversimplified.…”

Psychological resilience negatively correlates with resting-state brain network flexibility in young healthy adults: a dynamic functional magnetic resonance imaging study

“…After preprocessing, the brain network flexibility of each subject was calculated following some previous publications (21)(22)(23)(24)(25)29), which was summarized as follows (and also see Figure 1):…”

“…One of these novel features, for example, is the brain network flexibility which is defined by all brain regions' average rate of switching between different modules in the framework of dynamic network model (19,20). Such flexibility of dynamic brain network has been suggested to be an important fundamental feature of brain function (21), and has been reported to be associated with learning (20), cognition (22,23), emotion (24), as well as multiple mental diseases such as the major depressive disorder (25) and schizophrenia (26). Importantly, in a most recent study, a lower flexibility of EEG source-space brain network was found to be related with a higher psychological resilience in healthy adults, while no significant relationships were found between the psychological resilience and conventional static brain network metrics (12).…”

“…For the above concerns, the present study aimed to investigate the possible relationship between psychological resilience and brain network flexibility, which is a novel and important dynamic feature of the brain functional organization, using the resting-state fMRI approaches for the first time. To reach this goal, a group of healthy adults were recruited and their psychological resilience was quantified by a widely-used and validated scale (28); restingstate fMRI data were scanned from each subject and the brain network flexibility was calculated following previous publications (21)(22)(23)(24)(25)29); the psychological resilience score was then correlated with brain network flexibility at both global and regional levels. In addition, the association between psychological resilience and the modularity of conventional static brain network was also tested for comparison.…”

On the importance of being flexible: dynamic brain networks and their potential functional significances

“…These more flexible areas were also characterized by relatively weak (but more variable) connection strengths, which was suggested to "enable the system to function within many difficult-to-reach states, reflecting a capacity to adapt to novel situations." Notably, flexibility in these areas has also been found to correlate with intelligence-related phenomena such as "need for cognition" and creative achievement (He et al, 2019). These flexible areas appear to constitute a combination of hubs from default mode networks involved in creative and imaginative cognition (Hassabis & Maguire, 2009), 'modeling' of self and other (Davey & Harrison, 2018;Saxe et al, 2006), frontoparietal control/attention networks (Huang et al, 2020), as well as salience-determining networks for high-level action selection (Rueter et al, 2018;Toschi et al, 2018).…”