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Physical exercise can evoke changes in the brain structure. Consequently, these can lead to positive impacts on brain health. However, physical exercise studies including coordinative exercises are rare. Therefore, in this study, we investigated how 12 weeks of physical exercise breaks (PEBs) with coordinative exercises, focusing mainly on juggling tasks, affected the brain structure. The participants were randomly allocated to an intervention group (IG, n = 16; 42.8 ± 10.2 years) and a control group (CG, n = 9; 44.2 ± 12.3 years). The IG performed the PEBs with coordinative exercises twice per week for 15-20 min per session. Before the intervention, after 6 weeks of the intervention, and after 12 weeks of the intervention, participants underwent a high-resolution 3T T1-weighted magnetic resonance imagining scan. Juggling performance was assessed by measuring the time taken to perform a three-ball cascade. A surface-based analysis revealed an increase in vertex-wise cortical depth in a cluster including the inferior parietal lobe after 6 and 12 weeks of training in the IG. After 12 weeks, the IG showed a decrease in gray matter (GM) volume in a cluster primarily involving the right insula and the right operculum. The changes in the GM volume were related to improvements in juggling performance. No significant changes were found for the CG. To conclude, the present study showed that regular engagement in PEBs with coordinative exercises led to changes in brain structures strongly implicated in visuomotor processes involving hand and arm movements., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Recognizing and perceiving meaningful patterns in an ever-changing environment is fundamental to (human) beings. Apophenia, patternicity, and the propensity to perceive meaningful coincidences might result from the human brain working as a prediction machine that constantly matches sensory information to prior expectations. The propensity for Type I errors varies between people and, at its extreme, is associated with symptoms of schizophrenia. However, on a nonclinical level seeing meaning in randomness might be benevolent and was found to be associated with creativity and openness. However, hardly any neuroscientific investigation has examined EEG patterns of the propensity to experience meaningful coincidences in this manner. We hypothesized deviations in brain functions as one potential reason why some people experience more meaning in random arrangements than others. The gating by inhibition theory suggests that alpha power increases represent basic control mechanisms of sensory processes during varying task requirements. We found that people perceiving more meaningful coincidences had higher alpha power during an eyes-closed versus eyes-opened condition compared with people experiencing less meaningful coincidences. This indicates deviations in the sensory inhibition mechanism of the brain, which are critically relevant for higher cognitive functions. Applying Bayesian statistics, we replicated this finding in another independent sample., (© 2023 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.)

The ability to generate humor gives rise to positive emotions and thus facilitate the successful resolution of adversity. Although there is consensus that inhibitory processes might be related to broaden the way of thinking, the neural underpinnings of these mechanisms are largely unknown. Here, we use functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, a humorous alternative uses task and a stroop task, to investigate the brain mechanisms underlying the emergence of humorous ideas in 24 subjects. Neuroimaging results indicate that greater cognitive control abilities are associated with increased activation in the amygdala, the hippocampus and the superior and medial frontal gyrus during the generation of humorous ideas. Examining the neural mechanisms more closely shows that the hypoactivation of frontal brain regions is associated with an hyperactivation in the amygdala and vice versa. This antagonistic connectivity is concurrently linked with an increased number of humorous ideas and enhanced amygdala responses during the task. Our data therefore suggests that a neural antagonism previously related to the emergence and regulation of negative affective responses, is linked with the generation of emotionally positive ideas and may represent an important neural pathway supporting mental health.

Humor comprehension is increasingly recognized as showing parallels to more conventional creative cognition; yet our understanding of brain mechanisms underlying creative cognition in a humorous context is still limited. The present study addressed this issue by investigating functional patterns of EEG alpha activity while 93 participants viewed nonverbal humorous cartoons until they indicated having recognized the punch line, and subsequently vocalized their idea as to what constituted it. In a similar fashion, EEG was also assessed during performance of the Alternate Uses Task (AUT), in order to identify similarities and differences in EEG alpha activity implicated in conventional creative cognition vs. humor comprehension. Analyses revealed a pattern of robust task-related alpha power increases in both tasks, which were markedly more right-lateralized at ventral fronto-temporal sites in the humor task as compared to the AUT. Findings are interpreted in line with recent literature on the functional role of alpha activity in the creativity domain. Altogether, this study adds further evidence to the particular role of EEG alpha oscillations in creative cognition and supports the idea that conventional creative ideation and the comprehension of humor share neural mechanisms affiliated to creative cognition., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest None declared., (Copyright © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The neuroscientific investigation of creative cognition has advanced by considering the functional connectivity between brain regions and its dynamic changes over time, which are consistent with stages in the ideation process. Surprisingly, although the communication between neuronal networks takes place in a time-scale of milliseconds, EEG studies investigating a time-course in cortico-cortical communication during creative ideation are rare and findings are typically restricted to the verbal domain. Therefore, this study examined functional coupling using EEG (task-related phase-locking in the upper-alpha range) during creative thinking in the figural domain. Using an innovative computerized experimental paradigm, we specifically investigated the stage of idea generation and the stage of idea elaboration in an adapted picture completion task. The findings confirmed a hypothesized increase of functional coupling from idea generation to elaboration, which was most pronounced in frontal-central as well as frontal-temporal networks. The connectivity in the frontal-parietal/occipital network already increased during idea generation and remained constant during elaboration. Importantly, more original participants generally showed higher functional connectivity in all brain networks. This elevated functional coupling with frontal brain regions might reflect increased executive processes related to internal attention, motor planning, and semantic selection processes supporting highly original thought in the figural domain., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest None declared., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The present study investigated whether children with a typical dyslexia profile and children with isolated spelling deficits show a distinct pattern of white matter alteration compared with typically developing peers. Relevant studies on the topic are scarce, rely on small samples, and often suffer from the limitations of conventional tensor-based methods. The present Constrained Spherical Deconvolution study includes 27 children with typical reading and spelling skills, 21 children with dyslexia and 21 children with isolated spelling deficits. Group differences along major white matter tracts were quantified utilizing the Automated Fiber Quantification software and a lateralization index was calculated in order to investigate the structural asymmetry of the tracts. The two deficit groups mostly displayed different patterns of white matter alterations, located in the bilateral inferior longitudinal fasciculi, right superior longitudinal fasciculus, and cingulum for the group with dyslexia and in the left arcuate fasciculus for the group with isolated spelling deficits. The two deficit groups differed also with respect to structural asymmetry. Children with dyslexia did not show the typical leftward asymmetry of the arcuate fasciculus, whereas the group with isolated spelling deficits showed absent rightward asymmetry of the inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus. This study adds evidence to the notion that different profiles of combined or isolated reading and spelling deficits are associated with different neural signatures., (© 2018 The Authors. Human Brain Mapping published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

This fMRI study investigated brain activity while soccer players were imagining creative moves in real soccer decision-making situations. After presenting brief video clips of a soccer scene, participants had to imagine themselves as the acting player and think either of a creative or obvious move that might lead to a goal. Findings revealed stronger activation during trials in which the generation of obvious moves was required, relative to trials requiring creative moves. The reversed contrast (creative > obvious) showed no significant effects. Activations were mainly left-lateralized, primarily involving the cuneus, middle temporal gyrus, and the rolandic operculum, which are known to support the processing of multimodal input from different sensory, motor and perceptual sources. Interestingly, more creative solutions in the soccer task were associated with smaller contrast values for the activation difference between obvious and creative trials, or even with more activation in the latter. Furthermore, higher trait creative potential (as assessed by a figural creativity test) was associated with stronger activation differences between both conditions. These findings suggest that with increasing soccer-specific creative task performance, the processing of the manifold information provided by the soccer scenario becomes increasingly important, while in individuals with higher trait creative potential these processes were recruited to a minor degree. This study showed that soccer-specific creativity tasks modulate activation levels in a network of regions supporting various cognitive functions such as semantic information processing, visual and motor imagery, and the processing and integration of sensorimotor and somatosensory information., (© 2018 The Authors. Human Brain Mapping published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

A growing body of evidence suggests that creativity is associated with functional connectivity across widespread neural networks, including regions associated with executive processes and cognitive control, along with regions linked to the default mode network (DMN) of the brain. This study investigated whether a three-week verbal divergent thinking training modulates functional connectivity in networks that have been related to creativity. In a task-based functional imaging study (Fink et al., 2015), the employed creativity training was found to modulate brain activity in regions closely associated with semantic memory demands. Hence, the specific aim of this study was to assess whether the observed task-related brain changes relate to changes in functional connectivity patterns of the brain at rest, as assessed by independent component analysis. The participants were tested at three time points with an inter-test interval of four weeks each, and randomly assigned to two groups which received the verbal creativity training time-delayed. Findings revealed that successful training of verbal creativity was mirrored by functional connectivity changes in the DMN, sensorimotor and auditory network, and the attention network. These rather global changes in resting-state functional connectivity supplement the findings of task-based fMRI, where changes in more task specific brain regions were found., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

This study investigated EEG activity in the upper alpha band during the well-known Picture Completion Task of the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT), a widely used creative ideation task in the figural domain. The application of a sophisticated computerized version of the TTCT facilitating the online assessment and digitalizing of participant's drawings allowed to separate two central stages of the creative ideation process (i.e., idea generation and idea elaboration). During idea generation, the participants' task was to generate an initial draft of an original and creative completion of the presented abstract lines and figures of the TTCT. During idea elaboration, the participants were required to mentally improve the originality of the initially generated idea/draft. Creative ideation in this figural task was generally associated with comparatively strong desynchronization of upper alpha power over parietal and occipital sites, indicating high visual/figural processing demands. Interestingly, the stage of idea elaboration was accompanied by a relative increase of upper alpha power at parietal and occipital sites compared to the stage of idea generation, indicating heightened top-down processing demands. Furthermore, task performance was associated with relative increases of upper alpha power at frontal sites and relative decreases at centro-temporal sites from the stage of idea generation to idea elaboration. This association suggests the importance of increased inhibitory control over stimulus-based bottom-up information and motor imagery in order to achieve more creative outputs. Taken together these findings add to the relevant literature in that they a) extend research on the relationship between EEG alpha activity and creativity to the figural domain, and b) support a multistage view of creative ideation, involving cognitive control and mental imagery as important components of creativity., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) is a non-invasive brain stimulation method that allows to directly modulate brain oscillations of a given frequency. Using this method, it was recently shown that increasing alpha (10Hz) oscillations improved creative ideation with figural material and that increasing gamma (40Hz) oscillations speeded up performance in a figural matrices intelligence task. The aim of the present study was to examine whether these findings generalize to verbal creativity and intelligence tasks. In addition, we explored whether the stimulation effects are moderated by individual differences in creative potential and intelligence. Twenty-two adults received 10Hz, 40Hz and sham tACS while they worked on a verbal creativity (alternate uses) task and a verbal intelligence (anagram) task. Analyses revealed that 10Hz stimulation had a marginally significant effect on ideational fluency in the alternate uses task, whereas originality was unaffected. The beneficial effect of stimulation on fluency tended to emerge mainly in the individuals with higher creative potential. In the verbal intelligence task, in contrast, 40Hz stimulation did neither impact on performance nor interacted with individual differences in intelligence. These findings provide first tentative evidence that enhancing alpha oscillations through tACS may improve creative thinking not only in the figural but also in the verbal domain. The previously reported beneficial effect of gamma tACS on figural intelligence, however, could not be observed in a verbal task. In sum, the present study further corroborates the causal link between alpha oscillations and creative thinking and suggests that tACS may be a promising tool to enhance cognitive processes., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

This study investigated task-related changes of EEG alpha power while participants were imagining creative moves in soccer decision-making situations. After presenting brief video clips of a soccer scene, participants had to imagine themselves as the acting player and to think either of a creative/original or an obvious/conventional move (control condition) that might lead to a goal. Performance of the soccer task generally elicited comparatively strong alpha power decreases at parietal and occipital sites, indicating high visuospatial processing demands. This power decrease was less pronounced in the creative vs. control condition, reflecting a more internally oriented state of information processing characterized by more imaginative mental simulation rather than stimulus-driven bottom-up processing. In addition, more creative task performance in the soccer task was associated with stronger alpha desynchronization at left cortical sites, most prominently over motor related areas. This finding suggests that individuals who generated more creative moves were more intensively engaged in processes related to movement imagery. Unlike the domain-specific creativity measure, individual's trait creative potential, as assessed by a psychometric creativity test, was globally positively associated with alpha power at all cortical sites. In investigating creative processes implicated in complex creative behavior involving more ecologically valid demands, this study showed that thinking creatively in soccer decision-making situations recruits specific brain networks supporting processes related to visuospatial attention and movement imagery, while the relative increase in alpha power in more creative conditions and in individuals with higher creative potential might reflect a pattern relevant across different creativity domains., (Copyright © 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Background and Objectives: Previous research indicated that more left-lateralized prefrontal activation during cognitive reappraisal efforts was linked to a greater capacity for generating reappraisals, which is a prerequisite for the effective implementation of cognitive reappraisal in everyday life. The present study examined whether the supposedly appropriate brain activation is relevant in terms of more distal outcomes, i.e., chronic stress perception., Design and Methods: Prefrontal EEG alpha asymmetry was recorded while female participants were generating reappraisals for stressful events and was correlated with their self-reported chronic stress levels in everyday life (n = 80)., Results: Women showing less left-lateralized brain activity in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex during cognitive reappraisal efforts reported experiencing more stress in their daily lives. This effect was independent of self-efficacy beliefs in managing negative emotions., Conclusion: These findings underline the practical relevance of individual differences in appropriate brain activation during emotion regulation efforts and the assumedly related basic capacity for the generation of cognitive reappraisals to the feeling of being stressed. Implications include the selection of interventions for the improvement of coping with stress in women in whom the capability for appropriate brain activation during reappraisal efforts may be impaired, e.g., due to depression or old age.

This fMRI study investigated what brain processes contribute to the generation of new ideas. Brain activation was measured while participants generated new original object uses, recalled original object uses, or recalled common object uses. Post-scan evaluations were used to confirm what ideas were newly generated on the spot or actually retrieved from memory. When compared to the recall of common ideas, the generation of new and old original ideas showed a similar activation pattern including activation of bilateral parahippocampal and mPFC regions, suggesting that the construction of new ideas builds on similar processes like the reconstruction of original ideas from episodic memory. As a difference, the generation of new object uses involved higher activation of a focused cluster in the left supramarginal gyrus compared to the recall of original ideas. This finding adds to the converging evidence that the left supramarginal gyrus is crucially involved in the construction of novel representations, potentially by integrating memory content in new ways and supporting executively demanding mental simulations. This study deepens our understanding of how creative thought builds on and goes beyond memory., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

People's ability to think creatively is a primary means of technological and cultural progress, yet the neural architecture of the highly creative brain remains largely undefined. Here, we employed a recently developed method in functional brain imaging analysis-connectome-based predictive modeling-to identify a brain network associated with high-creative ability, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data acquired from 163 participants engaged in a classic divergent thinking task. At the behavioral level, we found a strong correlation between creative thinking ability and self-reported creative behavior and accomplishment in the arts and sciences ( r = 0.54). At the neural level, we found a pattern of functional brain connectivity related to high-creative thinking ability consisting of frontal and parietal regions within default, salience, and executive brain systems. In a leave-one-out cross-validation analysis, we show that this neural model can reliably predict the creative quality of ideas generated by novel participants within the sample. Furthermore, in a series of external validation analyses using data from two independent task fMRI samples and a large task-free resting-state fMRI sample, we demonstrate robust prediction of individual creative thinking ability from the same pattern of brain connectivity. The findings thus reveal a whole-brain network associated with high-creative ability comprised of cortical hubs within default, salience, and executive systems-intrinsic functional networks that tend to work in opposition-suggesting that highly creative people are characterized by the ability to simultaneously engage these large-scale brain networks., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

The investigation of neurocognitive processes underlying more real-life creative behavior is among the greatest challenges in creativity research. In this fMRI study, we addressed this issue by investigating functional patterns of brain activity while participants were required to be creative in an affective context. Affective creativity was assessed in terms of individual's inventiveness in generating alternative appraisals for anger-evoking events, which has recently emerged as a new ability concept in cognitive reappraisal research. In addition, a classic divergent thinking task was administered. Both creativity tasks yielded strong activation in left prefrontal regions, indicating their shared cognitive processing demands like the inhibition of prepotent responses, shifting between different perspectives and controlled memory retrieval. Regarding task-specific differences, classic creative ideation activated a characteristic divergent thinking network comprising the left supramarginal, inferior temporal, and inferior frontal gyri. Affective creativity on the other hand specifically recruited the right superior frontal gyrus, presumably involved in the postretrieval monitoring of reappraisal success, and core hubs of the default-mode network, which are also implicated in social cognition. As a whole, by taking creativity research to the realm of emotion, this study advances our understanding of how more real-life creativity is rooted in the brain. Hum Brain Mapp 39:393-406, 2018. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., (© 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

During the course of divergent thinking (DT), the number of generated ideas decreases while the originality of ideas increases. This phenomenon is labeled as serial order effect in DT. The present study investigated whether different executive processes (i.e., updating, shifting, and inhibition) specifically contribute to the serial order effect in DT. Participants' executive functions were measured by corresponding experimental tasks outside of the EEG lab. They were required to generate original uses of conventional objects (alternative uses task) during EEG recording. The behavioral results revealed that the originality of ideas was higher in later stage of DT (i.e., Epoch 2) than in its earlier stage (i.e., Epoch 1) for higher-shifting individuals, but showed no difference between two epochs for lower-shifting individuals. The EEG results revealed that lower-inhibition individuals showed stronger upper alpha (10-13Hz) synchronization in left frontal areas during Epoch 1 compared to during Epoch 2. For higher-inhibition individuals, no changes in upper alpha activity from Epoch 1 to Epoch 2 were found. These findings indicated that shifting and inhibition contributed to create a serial order effect in DT, perhaps because individuals suppress interference from obvious ideas and switch to new idea categories during DT, thus more original ideas appear as time passes by., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The ways in which humour can be used are related to the manifold interpersonal functions humour can serve, some of which are positive, and some negative. In the present study, phasic changes in the functional coupling of prefrontal and posterior cortex (EEG coherence) during other people's auditory displays of happy and sad mood were recorded to predict people's typical use of humour in social interactions. Greater use of benevolent humour, the intentions of which are in keeping with the characteristics of "laughing-with" humour, was associated with greater decreases of prefrontal-posterior coupling during the processing of happy laughter. More loose prefrontal-posterior coupling indicates loosening of control of the prefrontal cortex over the incoming perceptual information, thereby opening up the perceptual gate and allowing the brain to become more affected by the social-emotional signals. Greater use of humour styles linked to malicious intentions of "laughing-at" humour was associated with responses indicating a wider opened perceptual gate during the processing of other people's crying. The findings are consistent with the idea that typical humour styles develop in line with the rewarding values of their outcomes (e.g., interaction partners are happy or hurt), which in turn are defined through the individuals' latent interpersonal goals.

Neuroscientific studies in the field of creativity mainly focused on tasks drawing on basic verbal divergent thinking demands. This study took a step further by investigating brain mechanisms in response to other types of creative behavior, involving more "real-life" creativity demands in the context of emotion regulation and well-being. Specifically, functional patterns of EEG alpha activity were investigated while participants were required to generate as many and as different ways as possible to reappraise presented anger-eliciting situations in a manner that reduces their anger. Cognitive reappraisal involves some of the same cognitive processes as in conventional verbal creativity tasks, inasmuch as it requires an individual to inhibit or disengage from an emotional event, to shift attention between different perspectives, and to flexibly adopt new solutions. To examine whether alpha oscillations during cognitive reappraisal are different from those during conventional creative ideation, the EEG was also assessed during performance of the Alternative Uses task, requiring individuals to generate as many and as original uses of an object as possible. While cognitive reappraisal was associated with a similar pattern of alpha power as observed in conventional verbal creative ideation, the former yielded significantly stronger alpha power increases at prefrontal sites, along with lower alpha increases at more posterior cortical sites, indicating higher cognitive control and less spontaneous imaginative thought processes in the generation of effective strategies to regulate an ongoing negative emotional state.

Introduction: Throughout the history, various examples of eminent creative people suffering from mental disorders along with some empirical research reports strengthened the idea of a potential link between creativity and psychopathology., Methods: This study investigated different facets of psychometrically determined creativity in 20 females diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) relative to 19 healthy female controls. In addition, group differences in grey matter (GM) were examined., Results: Behavioural findings revealed no significant differences between the BPD group and healthy controls with respect to verbal and figural-graphic creative task performance and creativity-related personality characteristics. Whole-brain voxel-based morphometry analyses revealed a distinct pattern of GM reductions in the BPD group (relative to controls) in a network of brain regions closely associated with various cognitive and emotional functions (including the bilateral orbital inferior frontal gyri and the left superior temporal gyrus), partly overlapping with creativity-related brain regions. Correlation analyses moreover revealed that in the BPD group GM reductions in the orbital parts of the inferior and middle frontal gyri were associated with lower levels of creativity., Conclusions: This study provides no indications in favour of the putative link between creativity and psychopathology, as sometimes reported in the literature.

This functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) study was designed to investigate changes in functional patterns of brain activity during creative ideation as a result of a computerized, 3-week verbal creativity training. The training was composed of various verbal divergent thinking exercises requiring participants to train approximately 20 min per day. Fifty-three participants were tested three times (psychometric tests and fMRI assessment) with an intertest-interval of 4 weeks each. Participants were randomly assigned to two different training groups, which received the training time-delayed: The first training group was trained between the first and the second test, while the second group accomplished the training between the second and the third test session. At the behavioral level, only one training group showed improvements in different facets of verbal creativity right after the training. Yet, functional patterns of brain activity during creative ideation were strikingly similar across both training groups. Whole-brain voxel-wise analyses (along with supplementary region of interest analyses) revealed that the training was associated with activity changes in well-known creativity-related brain regions such as the left inferior parietal cortex and the left middle temporal gyrus, which have been shown as being particularly sensitive to the originality facet of creativity in previous research. Taken together, this study demonstrates that continuous engagement in a specific complex cognitive task like divergent thinking is associated with reliable changes of activity patterns in relevant brain areas, suggesting more effective search, retrieval, and integration from internal memory representations as a result of the training., (© 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

The present research used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine whether the ability to generate creative ideas corresponds to differences in the intrinsic organization of functional networks in the brain. We examined the functional connectivity between regions commonly implicated in neuroimaging studies of divergent thinking, including the inferior prefrontal cortex and the core hubs of the default network. Participants were prescreened on a battery of divergent thinking tests and assigned to high- and low-creative groups based on task performance. Seed-based functional connectivity analysis revealed greater connectivity between the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and the entire default mode network in the high-creative group. The right IFG also showed greater functional connectivity with bilateral inferior parietal cortex and the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the high-creative group. The results suggest that the ability to generate creative ideas is characterized by increased functional connectivity between the inferior prefrontal cortex and the default network, pointing to a greater cooperation between brain regions associated with cognitive control and low-level imaginative processes., (Copyright © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Neuroscientific studies revealed first insights into neural mechanisms underlying creativity, but existing findings are highly variegated and often inconsistent. Despite the disappointing picture on the neuroscience of creativity drawn in recent reviews, there appears to be robust evidence that EEG alpha power is particularly sensitive to various creativity-related demands involved in creative ideation. Alpha power varies as a function of creativity-related task demands and the originality of ideas, is positively related to an individuals' creativity level, and has been observed to increase as a result of creativity interventions. Alpha increases during creative ideation could reflect more internally oriented attention that is characterized by the absence of external bottom-up stimulation and, thus, a form of top-down activity. Moreover, they could indicate the involvement of specific memory processes such as the efficient (re-)combination of unrelated semantic information. We conclude that increased alpha power during creative ideation is among the most consistent findings in neuroscientific research on creativity and discuss possible future directions to better understand the manifold brain mechanisms involved in creativity., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Neuroscience studies on creativity have revealed highly variegated findings that often seem to be inconsistent. As recently argued in Fink and Benedek (Neurosci Biobehav Rev, 2012), this might be primarily due to the broad diversity in defining and measuring creativity as well as to the diversity of experimental procedures and methodologies used in this field of research. In specifically focusing on one measure of brain activation and on the well-established process of creative ideation (i.e., divergent thinking), EEG studies revealed a quite consistent and replicable pattern of right-lateralized brain activity over posterior parietal and occipital sites. In this study, we related regional gray matter density (as assessed by means of voxel-based morphometry) to different facets of psychometrically determined verbal creativity in a sample of 71 participants. Results revealed that verbal creativity was significantly and positively associated with gray matter density in clusters involving the right cuneus and the right precuneus. Enhanced gray matter density in these regions may be indicative of vivid imaginative abilities in more creative individuals. These findings complement existing functional studies on creative ideation which are, taken as a whole, among the most consistent findings in this field.

Neuroscience research has thoroughly studied how nonliteral language is processed during metaphor comprehension. However, it is not clear how the brain actually creates nonliteral language. Therefore, the present study for the first time investigates the neural correlates of metaphor production. Participants completed sentences by generating novel metaphors or literal synonyms during functional imaging. Responses were spoken aloud in the scanner, recorded, and subsequently rated for their creative quality. We found that metaphor production was associated with focal activity in predominantly left-hemispheric brain regions, specifically the left angular gyrus, the left middle and superior frontal gyri-corresponding to the left dorsomedial prefrontal (DMPFC) cortex-and the posterior cingulate cortex. Moreover, brain activation in the left anterior DMPFC and the right middle temporal gyrus was found to linearly increase with the creative quality of metaphor responses. These findings are related to neuroscientific evidence on metaphor comprehension, creative idea generation and episodic future thought, suggesting that creating metaphors involves the flexible adaptation of semantic memory to imagine and construct novel figures of speech. Furthermore, the left DMPFC may exert executive control to maintain strategic search and selection, thus facilitating creativity of thought., (Copyright © 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Behavioral research has revealed that some cognitive features may be similar between creative and psychotic/schizophrenic-like thoughts. In this study, we addressed the potential link between creativity and schizotypy at the level of the brain by investigating functional patterns of brain activity (using functional magnetic resonance imaging) during creative cognition in preselected groups with low versus high psychometrically determined schizotypy. Our findings revealed an association between the originality component of creativity and reduced deactivation of right parietal brain regions and the precuneus during creative cognition, congruent with the idea that more-creative people may include many more events/stimuli in their mental processes than do less-creative people. Similarly, the high-schizotypy group showed weaker deactivation of the right precuneus during creative cognition. The fact that originality and schizotypy show similar functional brain activity patterns during creative ideation (i.e., reduced deactivation of the right precuneus) strongly supports the contention that similar mental processes may be implicated in creativity and in psychosis proneness.

As it is the case in brainstorming, each single idea a person generates to a specific problem may stimulate new ideas or solutions in others. In this fMRI study, we investigate the effects of cognitive stimulation via the exposure to other people's ideas on the originality of generated ideas. Participants are requested to generate alternative uses of conventional everyday objects subsequent to a short cognitive stimulation intervention in which they are exposed to other ideas, which were either common or highly original. In a control condition, meaningless pseudowords are shown. Results suggest that cognitive stimulation via common or moderately creative ideas was effective in improving creativity. At the neurophysiological level, temporo-parietal brain regions (primarily right-hemispheric) turned out to be particularly sensitive to cognitive stimulation, possibly indicating that cognitive stimulation via relevant memory cues results in a state of heightened focused attention to memory that facilitates efficient retrieval and recombination of existing knowledge., (Copyright © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

Studies investigating reading and spelling difficulties heavily focused on the neural correlates of reading impairments, whereas spelling impairments have been largely neglected so far. Hence, the aim of the present study was to investigate brain structure and function of children with isolated spelling difficulties. Therefore, 31 children, aged ten to 15 years, were investigated by means of functional MRI and DTI. This study revealed that children with isolated spelling impairment exhibit a stronger right hemispheric activation compared to children with reading and spelling difficulties and controls, when engaged in an orthographic decision task, presumably reflecting a highly efficient serial grapheme-phoneme decoding compensation strategy. In addition, children with spelling impairment activated bilateral inferior and middle frontal gyri during processing correctly spelled words and misspelled words, whereas the other two groups showed bilateral activation only in the misspelled condition, suggesting that additional right frontal engagement could be related to generally higher task demand and effort. DTI analyses revealed stronger frontal white matter integrity (fractional anisotropy) in controls (compared to spelling and reading impaired children), whereas no structural differences between controls and spelling impaired children were observed., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Previous fMRI studies in English-speaking samples suggested that specific interventions may alter brain function in language-relevant networks in children with reading and spelling difficulties, but this research strongly focused on reading impaired individuals. Only few studies so far investigated characteristics of brain activation associated with poor spelling ability and whether a specific spelling intervention may also be associated with distinct changes in brain activity patterns. We here investigated such effects of a morpheme-based spelling intervention on brain function in 20 children with comparatively poor spelling and reading abilities using repeated fMRI. Relative to 10 matched controls, children with comparatively poor spelling and reading abilities showed increased activation in frontal medial and right hemispheric regions and decreased activation in left occipito-temporal regions prior to the intervention, during processing of a lexical decision task. After five weeks of intervention, spelling and reading comprehension significantly improved in the training group, along with increased activation in the left temporal, parahippocampal and hippocampal regions. Conversely, the waiting group showed increases in right posterior regions. Our findings could indicate an increased left temporal activation associated with the recollection of the new learnt morpheme-based strategy related to successful training.

In the present study, high-density event-related potentials were recorded to examine the electrophysiological correlates of logogriph problem solving in using a new experimental paradigm (learning-testing model) that was adopted in order to enable subjects to find a solution on their own initiative. For each trial, subjects were given a target logogriph followed by three types of base logogriphs: surface similarity logogriphs (SUSL, the base logogriph and target logogriph share some same words), structural similarity logogriphs (STSL, the base and target logogriphs do not have any words in common), and baseline logogriphs (BSL, the base and target logogriphs are all simple character-generation tasks). The results demonstrated a more negative event-related potential deflection during STSL than during SUSL in both the 300-500 and 1,100-1,300 ms time windows, most likely reflecting the breaking of mental sets during insight-like problem solving. Moreover, SUSL and STSL demonstrated greater positivity than BSL in a time window between 900 and 1,700 ms, possibly reflecting processes such as forming novel associations.

Cognitive stimulation via the exposure to ideas of other people is an effective tool in stimulating creativity in group-based creativity techniques. In this fMRI study, we investigate whether creative cognition can be enhanced through idea sharing and how performance improvements are reflected in brain activity. Thirty-one participants had to generate alternative uses of everyday objects during fMRI recording. Additionally, participants performed this task after a time period in which they had to reflect on their ideas or in which they were confronted with stimulus-related ideas of others. Cognitive stimulation was effective in improving originality, and this performance improvement was associated with activation increases in a neural network including right-hemispheric temporo-parietal, medial frontal, and posterior cingulate cortices, bilaterally. Given the involvement of these brain areas in semantic integration, memory retrieval, and attentional processes, cognitive stimulation could have resulted in a modulation of bottom-up attention enabling participants to produce more original ideas., (Copyright 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Neuroscientific research on creativity has revealed valuable insights into possible brain correlates underlying this complex mental ability domain. However, most of the studies investigated brain activity during the performance of comparatively simple (verbal) type of tasks and the majority of studies focused on samples of the normal population. In this study we investigate EEG activity in professional dancers (n=15) who have attained a high level of expertise in this domain. This group was compared with a group of novices (n=17) who have only basic experience in dancing and completed no comprehensive training in this field. The EEG was recorded during performance of two different dancing imagery tasks which differed with respect to creative demands. In the first task participants were instructed to mentally perform a dance which should be as unique and original as possible (improvisation dance). In the waltz task they were asked to imagine dancing the waltz, a standard dance which involves a sequence of monotonous steps (lower creative demands). In addition, brain activity was also measured during performance of the Alternative Uses test. We observed evidence that during the generation of alternative uses professional dancers show stronger alpha synchronization in posterior parietal brain regions than novice dancers. During improvisation dance, professional dancers exhibited more right-hemispheric alpha synchronization than the group of novices did, while during imagining dancing the waltz no significant group differences emerged. The findings complement and extend existing findings on the relationship between EEG alpha activity and creative thinking.

We review research on the neural efficiency hypothesis of intelligence, stating that brighter individuals display lower (more efficient) brain activation while performing cognitive tasks [Haier, R.J., Siegel, B.V., Nuechterlein, K.H., Hazlett, E., Wu, J.C., Paek, J., Browning, H.L., Buchsbaum, M.S., 1988. Cortical glucose metabolic rate correlates of abstract reasoning and attention studied with positron emission tomography. Intelligence 12, 199-217]. While most early studies confirmed this hypothesis later research has revealed contradictory evidence or has identified some moderating variables like sex, task type, task complexity or brain area. Neuroscientific training studies suggest that neural efficiency also seems to be a function of the amount and quality of learning. From integrating this evidence we conclude that neural efficiency might arise when individuals are confronted with tasks of (subjectively) low to moderate task difficulty and it is mainly observable for frontal brain areas. This is true for easier novel cognitive tasks or after sufficient practice allowing participants to develop appropriate (efficient) strategies to deal with the task. In very complex tasks more able individuals seem to invest more cortical resources resulting in positive correlations between brain usage and cognitive ability. Based on the reviewed evidence we propose future empirical approaches in this field.

Cortical activity in the EEG alpha band has proven to be particularly sensitive to creativity-related demands, but its functional meaning in the context of creative cognition has not been clarified yet. Specifically, increases in alpha activity (i.e., alpha synchronisation) in response to creative thinking can be interpreted in different ways: As a functional correlate of cortical idling, as a sign of internal top-down activity or, more specifically, as selective inhibition of brain regions. We measured brain activity during creative thinking in two studies employing different neurophysiological measurement methods (EEG and fMRI). In both studies, participants worked on four verbal tasks differentially drawing on creative idea generation. The EEG study revealed that the generation of original ideas was associated with alpha synchronisation in frontal brain regions and with a diffuse and widespread pattern of alpha synchronisation over parietal cortical regions. The fMRI study revealed that task performance was associated with strong activation in frontal regions of the left hemisphere. In addition, we found task-specific effects in parietotemporal brain areas. The findings suggest that EEG alpha band synchronisation during creative thinking can be interpreted as a sign of active cognitive processes rather than cortical idling.

In the present study, we contrast oscillatory brain activity during the production of subjectively more versus less original ideas. A sample of 26 participants worked on two verbal creativity problems and subsequently rated the produced ideas with respect to their originality. On the basis of these self-ratings, ideas were divided into a more and a less original list within each participant. Cortical activity was assessed by means of event-related changes in EEG power (synchronization and desynchronization) and phase locking in two alpha bands. Analyses revealed that more, as compared with less, original ideas elicited a stronger event-related synchronization of alpha activity (power increases from the pre-stimulus reference to the activation interval) and higher phase coupling in the right hemisphere. These findings corroborate the importance of right-hemispheric cortical networks in creative idea generation., (Copyright (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved.)

In the field of physiological study of human intelligence, strong evidence of a more efficient operation (i.e., less activation) of the brain in brighter individuals (the neural efficiency hypothesis) can be found. Most studies in this field have used single, homogeneous tasks and have not examined sex differences. In analyzing the extent of Event-related Desynchronization (ERD) in the EEG during the performance of a verbal and a visuo-spatial task, we recently found that males and females display neural efficiency primarily in the domain where they usually perform better (i.e., verbal in females and spatial in males; cf. A.C. Neubauer, A. Fink, D.G. Schrausser, Intelligence and neural efficiency: the influence of task content and sex on brain-IQ relationship. Intelligence, 30 (2002) 515-536). However, this interpretation was complicated by differences in the complexity of the two tasks. By using a verbal (semantic) and a spatial (rotation) task of comparable complexity in this research, we sought to replicate and extend our earlier findings by additionally considering the individual differences in intelligence structure and the topographical distribution over the cortex. Findings were similar to the previous study: Females (n = 35) display neural efficiency (i.e., less brain activation in brighter individuals) primarily during the verbal task, males (n = 31) in the spatial task. However, the strength of this brain activation-IQ relationship varies with the intelligence factor: In males, the highest correlations were observed for spatial IQ, in females for verbal IQ. Furthermore, the sexes displayed topographical differences of neural efficiency patterns.

Teachers' ability to critically reflect classroom situations in relation to their own actions constitutes an important prerequisite to improve teaching performance and professional behavior. This study investigated electroencephalogram activity in the alpha band during a reflection task before and after training in a sample of preservice teachers. Reflection was associated with stable brain activity patterns over two separate time points of assessment. Increased alpha power during reflection of pedagogically relevant scenarios was found at occipital sites, especially in participants with higher reflection competence. This is consistent with prior studies that showed increased alpha power during mental imagery among other tasks. Training of reflection competence, administered in a subsample of participants, was accompanied by increased reflection performance, while no intervention-related effects were found at the neurophysiological level. The findings of this study provide first preliminary evidence of increased alpha power at occipital sites as a neurophysiological indicator of reflections of pedagogically relevant educational scenarios.

Studied the influence of task content and sex on the relationship between intelligence and cortical activation in 26 males and 25 females administered verbal, numerical, and figural versions of an elementary cognitive task. Results suggest comparatively lower cortical activation in more intelligent individuals, but the pattern interacted with sex and task content. (SLD)

The neural efficiency hypothesis postulates an inverse relationship between intelligence and brain activation. Previous research suggests that gender and task modality represent two important moderators of the neural efficiency phenomenon. Since most of the existing studies on neural efficiency have used ERD in the EEG as a measure of brain activation, the central aim of this study was a more detailed analysis of this phenomenon by means of functional MRI. A sample of 20 males and 20 females, who had been screened for their visuo-spatial intelligence, was confronted with a mental rotation task employing an event-related approach. Results suggest that less intelligent individuals show a stronger deactivation of parts of the default mode network, as compared to more intelligent people. Furthermore, we found evidence of an interaction between task difficulty, intelligence and gender, indicating that more intelligent females show an increase in brain activation with an increase in task difficulty. These findings may contribute to a better understanding of the neural efficiency hypothesis, and possibly also of gender differences in the visuo-spatial domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The investigation of the neural correlates of creative cognition requires researchers to adapt creativity tasks to meet the constraints imposed by cognitive neuroscience research--assessing well-defined cognitive processes, repeated over many tasks. We present a brief review of essential study design parameters in neuroscience research on creativity, including number of task repetitions (i.e., trials), time on task, what kind of responses are collected (e.g., whether participants speak, write, draw, press buttons), and when these responses are collected (e.g., after or during task). We further examine how design parameters depend on neuroscience methods (e.g., fMRI, EEG) and task type (e.g., divergent thinking, creative problem solving). The review discloses a substantial heterogeneity of methodological approaches across studies but also identifies some established common practices. Typical adaptations include the employment of shortened tasks, which allows the realization of more tasks per session, and a more focused investigation of time-critical cognitive processes. Study designs also commonly separate periods of creative thought from response production to restrict the effect of response-related motor artifacts and to assess brain activity unique to the generation of creative ideas or solutions. We discuss the pros and cons of the various approaches with respect to the goal to increase reliability of neurophysiological measurements while maintaining valid assessments, and derive some recommendations for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creative thinking relies on the ability to make remote associations and fruitfully combine unrelated concepts. Hence, original associations and bi-associations (i.e., associations to one and two concepts, respectively) are considered elementary cognitive processes of creative cognition. In this work, we investigated the cognitive and brain mechanisms underlying these association processes with tasks that asked for original associations to either one or two adjective stimuli. Study 1 showed that the generation of more original associations and bi-associations was related to several indicators of creativity, corroborating the validity of these association performances as basic processes underlying creative cognition. Study 2 assessed brain activity during performance of these association tasks by means of fMRI. The generation of original versus common associations was related to higher activation in bilateral lingual gyri suggesting that cued search for remote representatives of given properties are supported by visually-mediated search strategies. Parametric analyses further showed that the generation of more original associations involved activation of the left inferior frontal cortex and the left ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which are consistently implicated in constrained retrieval and evaluation processes, and relevant for making distant semantic connections. Finally, the generation of original bi-associations involved higher activation in bilateral hippocampus and inferior parietal lobe, indicating that conceptual combination recruits episodic simulation processes. Together, these findings suggest that the generation of verbally cued, original associations relies not only on verbal semantic memory but involves mental imagery and episodic simulation, offering new insights in the nuanced interplay of memory systems in creative thought. • A bi-association task was devised to assess conceptual combination. • Original association and bi-association performance predicts creativity. • Generation of original associations recruits bilateral lingual gyri. • Generation of original bi-associations recruits right hippocampus and IPL. • The generation of verbally cued, original associations involves visual imagery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]