Creativity comes in waves: an EEG-focused exploration of the creative brain

Abstract

Electroencephalographic (EEG) methodology in creativity research has been remarkably fruitful, establishing the potential of EEG to illuminate complex and transient creativity-related neural processes. Here we synthesize recent advances in the field, highlighting empirical work on creativity as divergent thinking, remote associations, musical creativity, and visual imagery. There is a general consensus that alpha-band activity plays a key role in the creative process, though other frequency bands, such as theta and gamma also serve critical functions. We further discuss evidence for electrical stimulation (tDCS and tACS) as a tool for improvements in creative thinking. EEG's high temporal resolution is supremely suitable for studying creative cognition, and studies continuing to yield new and exciting evidence regarding the local and global neural processes underlying creativity.

Music Improvisation Is Characterized by Increase EEG Spectral Power in Prefrontal and Perceptual Motor Cortical Sources and Can be Reliably Classified From Non-improvisatory Performance

“…This, however, is not always the case. The alpha frequency range has been reported to be involved with cortical excitation in the MFC in tasks involving creative processing and improvisation consistent with the conclusions of our study (Fink and Neubauer, 2008;Jauk et al, 2012;Benedek et al, 2014;Schwab et al, 2014;Lopata et al, 2017;Camarda et al, 2018;Lopata et al, 2017;Stevens and Zabelina, 2019). Furthermore, studies using fMRI and EEG have shown increased alpha synchronization in frontal and parietotemporal brain regions associated with brain activation during creative processing (Fink and Neubauer, 2008).…”

“…Consistent with many fMRI studies, electroencephalography (EEG) and MEG research has found improvisation related activity in MFC and DLPFC regions in the alpha (8)(9)(10)(11)(12) and Beta (13-30 Hz) frequency range (Dolan et al, 2013;Boasen et al, 2018;Stevens and Zabelina, 2019). Although there are a large number of studies investigating music improvisation using EEG many of them only employ sensor level analyses, making it difficult to make mechanistic inferences (Müller et al, 2013;Wan et al, 2014;Dikaya and Skirtach, 2015;Sanyal et al, 2016;Lopata et al, 2017;Dolan et al, 2018).…”

“…The results confirmed that Theta and Gamma frequency bands were in general weighted more highly than many of the other frequency bands (see ''Results'' section). Gamma band activity is thought in part to be involved with bottom-up and top-down information matching, which may be important for improvisation (Stevens and Zabelina, 2019). These results are interesting in that they are different than what one would expect given the results of the sLORETA analysis (Figure 1, Table 2), which showed no significant differential activity in the Gamma range (However a significant differential activity was shown in the theta range).…”

“…It is thought that increased activity in the MFC may denote internally directed attention involved with creativity tasks as well as coordination of complex action underlying sequential planning that is an integral part of improvisation of music (Dolan et al, 2013;Beaty, 2015;Dikaya and Skirtach, 2015;Landau and Limb, 2017;Stevens and Zabelina, 2019). Our finding of greater power for improv over scale in the frontal area comprising regions of the MFC, ACC, and SMA (Figure 2, Table 1) are consistent with many fMRI studies investigating improvisation (Bengtsson et al, 2007;de Manzano and Ullén, 2012a,b;Donnay et al, 2014;Pinho et al, 2014;McPherson et al, 2016;Landau and Limb, 2017;Lu et al, 2017;Dhakal et al, 2019).…”

“…It should be pointed out that alpha frequency band power is often thought to reflect cortical inhibition (cortical idling) in various brain regions (e.g., DLPFC, occipital regions; Fink and Benedek, 2014;Dikaya and Skirtach, 2015;Stevens and Zabelina, 2019). This, however, is not always the case.…”