1. Introduction to Creativity and the Brain

The experience of creativity is universal, instantly recognizable, and endlessly fascinating. We are consistently astonished by the feats of imagination accomplished in the arts and science by own species. The creative process in which imagination comes to life through art, written verse, or the formulation and testing of hypotheses in science is marvel at not easily communicable to others. How does it work? How does imagination become a tangible creation that can be experienced and explored by others? Over the span of a lifetime, understandably take on many kinds of creation and creative experience (Khalil & Demarin, 2023).

The challenge of exploring the creative experience and imagination through its digitization and dissemination is also present. Digitization is a creative activity, which changes the experience of a work from private to shared, mediated now by the technologies and affordances of the new medium. Relative to the originals, there is a creative rereading and reinterpreting. The making of digital surrogates and the creative documentation and exposition of original works is also a challenge. How does the creation of new artifacts, linked to the originals but different in their affordances and experience, change the understanding and appreciation of the originals? How does the new creativity that arises happen within the dimensions of the old works (A. Wiggins & Bhattacharya, 2014) ?

2. Neurobiological Basis of Creativity

This section is devoted to the neurobiological basis of creativity. The aim is to investigate the neurobiological basis of creativity, or in other words, the physiology of creativity. Specifically, the objective is to look at the relationship between creativity and brain functions. Creativity is in the brain. Therefore, to understand creativity, it is necessary to understand the brain. The investigation of the relationship between creativity and brain functions will uncover the neurobiological basis of creativity, which will generate new insights into the creative process.

Creativity is a cognitive phenomenon involving a new and useful process, idea, product, or solution (Park et al., 2016). Because of its novelty and usefulness, it is different from non-creative thought processes or ideas. However, the thought process of creation, creation, or the act of creation is not known, despite the importance of understanding creation. The act of creation, creating a new and useful thought process of design is complex and intricately interwoven with a thought process of conceiving unconnected ideas. To untangle these complicate multi-dimensional thought processes of creativity, it is necessary to look at the physiological facets of creativity; such efforts will look at the creative processes as working with cognitive circuits in the brain and consider creativity at the level of brain functions and circuits (Khalil & Demarin, 2023).

Neuro-Scientific Studies of Creativity have been enabled by remarkable advances in brain imaging tools. With the development of brain imaging techniques, structural and functional brain imaging data have been obtained. Using these neuroimaging techniques, creativity has been actively studied with the aim of uncovering the neural correlates of creative processing by observing which brain areas are activated during creativity tasks—or vice versa, which tasks activate specific brain areas. The most widely utilized tools to investigate creativity in brain imaging studies are fMRI, PET, and EEG. With the advent of new technologies, it became possible to investigate the brain processes in a spatial and temporal manner. Thanks to these possibilities, many Neuro-Scientific studies on creativity have been actively pursued. Creativity refers to the act or process of creating new ideas, new products, or new alternatives intended to solve existing problems. It can also be defined as making new connections between existing thoughts, skills, or knowledge and as thinking out of the box, being original, or coming up with something novel. Because of its novelty and usefulness, creativity is different from non-creative thought processes or ideas. Creativity flourishes in a free explorative environment and brings about new ideas or inventions that change paradigms of technology, art, culture, or science. Creativity is, simply speak, outside-the-box thinking.

2.1. Neurotransmitters and Creativity

Neurotransmitters, the chemical messengers in the brain, have been implicated in the cognitive processes associated with creativity. Elevated levels of dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin have been linked to fluency and originality in creative thinking. Therefore, cognitive tasks requiring creativity were correlated with specific patterns of activation and inhibition in the dopaminergic, noradrenergic, and serotonergic brain systems (Khalil et al., 2019).

Balances in the activities of the three neurotransmitter systems, dopaminergic, noradrenergic, and serotonergic, are hypothesized to shape the creative brain profile. Regarding the dopaminergic system, two sources of dopamine are proposed: a ventral system originating in the ventral tegmental area projecting to limbic and forebrain areas involved in the conditioning and hedonic aspects of motivation (the reward system) and a basal system originating in the substantia nigra projecting to the striatum and cortex traditionally linked to motor systems and sensory processing. The dopaminergic reward system is hypothesized to be activated during the incubation period of the creative process, searching for solutions, and/or retrieval of long-term memories beyond the cognitive control. This state is favorable to fluency but, at a later stage, should be compensated by a decreased activation of the reward system for the emergence of originality. An analogous mechanism has been proposed to explain the relation between dopamine and cognitive flexibility (Khalil & Demarin, 2023).

2.2. Brain Regions Involved in Creativity

Research on creativity has predominantly focused on psychological processes or individual differences in creative performance. However, creativity is a cognitive operation of the brain, and neuro-scientific studies of creativity have emerged to investigate how the brain supports and enables the act of creation. Systematic search for neuro-anatomical substrates of creativity has been performed using advanced brain imaging techniques (Park et al., 2016). In addition to creativity research using functional neuro-imaging technology, there have been attempts to explore creativity from a developmental perspective. The recent resurgence of interest in the neural basis of creativity has produced paradoxical findings, providing pieces of conflicting evidence regarding the brain areas underlying original thinking (Gonen-Yaacovi et al., 2013).

The hope of future creativity research would be to resolve inconsistencies regarding neural correlates of creativity by adopting a system-level understanding of brain architecture. It is plausible that the brain regions involved in creativity might be processed in a parallel/sub-systemic manner, but the resulting state could be combined in an integrated fashion. To date, creativity has been considered to emerge from synchronous interactions between numerous neural circuits that subserve divergent and convergent processes in a temporal sequence (i.e. the dual-pathway hypothesis). Recent ingenuity studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have started to dynamically monitor the brain activity (e.g. using the sliding-window Fourier transform analysis of fMRI) of creative individuals who are solving a divergent thinking task where multiple solutions are expected.

3. The Creative Process

The creative process is widely regarded as one of the most mysterious and appealing aspects of human cognition. It continuously generates new elements from the past under various forms, tones, and shades. The periodical emergence of many novel and fantastical manifestations may help to provide alternatives and options to resolve challenges in a constantly changing environment. Creative insight is considered one of the most essential and attractive components of such a creative process. Insight includes the a-ha moment, a sudden realization or emergence of an idea or find. Despite remarkable discoveries regarding cognition, perception, and memory, creative processes still remain poorly understood and have barely been addressed in neuroscience (Khalil et al., 2019).

Creativity can be addressed through conducting elaborate experimental investigations. Interestingly, creativity is not just limited to the expertise of extraordinary individuals, remarkable artists, designers, inventors, and scientists, tremendous creative contributions can be seen throughout culture and societies in various tones or shades. Nevertheless, no culture can be separated from creativity as creativity is the foundation against which culture flourishes (A. Wiggins & Bhattacharya, 2014). People of any culture cannot contemplate the beauty of a painting, enjoy the rhythm of a song, express the tenderness of love by comparison with a blooming rose, or challenge the tyranny of ignorance and oppression through a piece of work of a courageous and noble poet.

3.1. Idea Generation

The genesis of a creative act depends on a novel idea, or a non-obvious combination of old ideas, mentally constructed by the creator. Thus, idea generation is a central function of creativity that has been broadly defined as the ability to produce new mental representations (Khalil et al., 2019). Among the divergent thoughts, creative ideas often share two key properties, namely novelty and appropriateness, creating the need for selective mechanisms for their further development and defense.

Although most ideation acts in daily life are classified as non-creativity and creativity based on their novelty, the cognitive mechanisms underlying the two ideational processes have been largely neglected. According to the “interactive activation” model proposed by Wiggins & Bhattacharya (A. Wiggins & Bhattacharya, 2014) , ideation is a sequential process, involving initially activated associative thoughts spreading across the semantic networks. The spreading thoughts, which share common semantic nodes with the target concept, would be differentially forwarded to higher order cognition for selection. Such cascading flow of idea generation is well supported by the features of circumstance semantics in cognition and consciousness.

3.2. Incubation and Insight

The creative act can be a long and industrious process. Often, someone will be confronted with a difficult problem or task to undertake in the beginning. Several attempts may be made to come up with a possible solution, but the requisite ideas may not materialize. An incubation period can then occur, or a period of time during which nothing further is consciously done toward solving the problem. The conclusion that incubation can enhance creative performance is supported by diverse lines of evidence and scholarly research (M. Ritter & Dijksterhuis, 2014). It is hypothesized that, during the incubation period, fixation effects are overcome by unconscious processes that, for example, lead to alternative representations of the problem. These conjectures are suitable for experimental investigation and have implications for the understanding of everyday creative problem-solving in the absence of explicit cues. Several ideas or thoughts that can solve the problem mentally compete for attention and, as a consequence, fixation can occur (A. Wiggins & Bhattacharya, 2014). Often, a single and inappropriate idea is elaborated upon, ignoring other more creative or novel solutions that require thinking about the problem in a different way. Fixation problems are not only observed in non-creative problem-solving contexts but they can also occur in creative attempts to find solutions to ill-defined problems. The problem representation might be too narrow-minded or too convergent, accounting for, for example, the inability to produce alternative uses for common objects. For creative problem-solving, this would mean that, once a functional idea is constructed, thinking about it too closely can impede the generation of alternatives or more non-obvious ideas.

3.3. Evaluation and Elaboration

When Capek’s clever. robots got bored with repetition, they invented a game. Each word spoken had to be changed into a new one by at least one letter. The responses grew more and more far-fetched. So much did they wander from the subject, that they presented no consideration for it at all. The experimental fun of the game soon outstripped its communicative function. The robot, who had originally answered the simple question: “What is the weather like?” with the word “cloudy,” ended up the game with the answer “sunburnt.” The game illustrates the function of creativity as freedom from fixation — not just mental fixation, but from the vocabulary of the familiar language itself.

Creativity has a literary aspect. Generally speaking, in the folk tradition this aspect is limited to good invention of structure, while the rediscovery of mythic plot-transitions is considered to be an act of uncreative rehashing. The self-repeating use of the events of life by historically continuously existing celibate tale-forms is deemed creativity (Sowden et al., 2014). In an international perspective of authorship in creativity, the integrative figure is learned of this textual reincarnation. It is the template of a nation’s short mythology, voice-corrected by oral poetry. Opera has mythos-dramatic one, visual art icons didactic-visual one, and painting principles of profound experience are involved.

4. Neuroplasticity and Creativity

More than 30 years ago, it was first realized that neuroplasticity continues throughout life, in contrast to the classical view of the organ as completely formed by early adulthood (Khalil & Demarin, 2023). This has various implications for learning, thinking, and experiencing emotion. Neuroplasticity can be considered as a structural hypothesis, in which delineating the transient elements that subserve cognition explains creativity, vis-a-vis social processing. After a brief overview of neuroplasticity, its mechanisms and factors that create cognitive plasticity, a few real-world implications are drawn. It outlines cognitive neuroplasticity as a structural conception of the mechanisms underlying creative thought, cheering neat experiments that manipulate creativity in real-world situations.

An increasing number of studies have revealed that the healthy, adult human brain is more malleable and capable of robust reorganization than was previously thought (Abraham, 2014). Aiding this is an experimental renaissance in the recent discovery of neural plasticity mechanisms common to all vertebrates, ranging from the induction of long-term changes in synaptic efficacy or strength (i.e., long-term potentiation and depression) to knock-on effects on the structure and morphology of neurons. Both natural experience and specific training induce cortical changes. Factors such as age, hormonal state, motivation, and increased arousal can accelerate plastic changes. Such a malleable organ can have both beneficial and detrimental effects. It is welcomed because it allows potential beneficial changes in response to a mere good experience (wide consideration, constant reinforcement), while it is seen as a disadvantage when having harmful ill experiences (narrow consideration, dispassionate processing).

5. The Role of Emotions in Creativity

Creativity is not only a cognitive or psychological construct, but it is also a psychobiological process directly related to emotional states, temperament and personality traits. Emotions, personal inclinations, temperament and personality function in both real and imaginary creative performances. Hardly any emotional process will be totally independent of the cognitive process upon which it relies. Although considerable overlap or interaction exists in basic neuroanatomy, many dimensions, including anatomical distinctness, neuromodulation, time course and particularity of response, differentiate both systems (Penagos-Corzo, 2018).

Maters of creativity, consistent with social constructs, enjoy creative acts (Fb, Al, + Lh, E), while others do not (Fb, Al, + Lh, E). Many negative emotions inhibit creativity. Other, more complex emotions, such as guilt, shame, sadness, nostalgia and fear restrict associated ideation (Fb, Hn, Lh, E). Most emotions enhance creativity when pleasant or arousing (Fb, + Fr, + As, Al, – St, + Lh, E). Both valence and arousal influence the extent that affective processes enhance or inhibit cognitive flexibility, risk taking behavior, outcome expectancies, and / or divergent thinking (Khalil et al., 2019). The creative process can be enhanced by positive, negative or mixed emotional states under certain situations.

6. The Impact of Environment and Experience on Creativity

More recent models that propose global explanations of creative thinking recognize the necessity of considering multiple factors when attempting to comprehend the neural basis of creativity. The concept of multiple-factor models emerged to go beyond the dual models of creativity by considering the simultaneous operations of three (or more) systems that function in conjunction. The two multiple-factor models proposed postulate the information processing mechanisms underlying different aspects of the creative thinking process in general or the many operations underlying different types of creative insight. The mental operations provide cognitive explanations for developing creative ideas and applying them in the frameworks of motivation, perception, learning, thinking, and communication. Many models characterize the mechanisms of association as the only processes relevant to creativity. However, the attempts to formulate the mechanisms of the creative process with a focus on the associative aspect mostly do not cover much of it. This is evident with regard to the model proposed by Mednick and the variation of this model by Baughman and Mumford (Khalil & Demarin, 2023).

The correlation between the brain process approach and the neuroscientific perspective is apparent, given that neuroscience investigates the structure and function of the human nervous system. It would be inaccurate to view the creative process as a singular or unified entity. The term serves as a concise descriptor for multifaceted arrays of cognitive, motivational, and emotional processes implicated in various mental activities such as perception, memory, imagination, appreciation, reasoning, strategizing, etc. Several mental processes related to creativity have been studied psychologically, such as conceptual expansion, creative imagery, overcoming knowledge constraints, analogical reasoning, and metaphor processing (S. Scotney et al., 2019).

7. Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying Creative Thinking

Creative thinking is the mental process where original and innovative ideas are generated, varied, and combined. This creative act is framed as a transformation of ideas in the mind. Theoretical formulations that incorporate cognitive mechanisms (e.g., thinking in new ways, internal visualization, lists of prior knowledge, seeing things differently) are presented, and novel experimental paradigms to psychologically test their predictions are proposed. Interdisciplinary creativity research in psychology, neuroscience, and the arts is encouraged. Creativity is at the foundation of all aspects of human life. Becoming increasingly creative is viewed as a normative goal for individuals and societies. Furthermore, creative processes, such as invention, innovation, artistic expression, and design, are warmly welcomed by various arms of academia, including social sciences, cognitive sciences, and neurophysiology. These creative processes are also understood, studied, and fueled by fields outside academia, such as commerce, industry, and policy. Creativity refers to the conception or development of ideas and products that are both novel and appropriate. Novelty distinguishes creative ideas from those that are merely familiar or mundane, while appropriateness implies that creative ideas are not merely outlandish fantasies; they can be successfully implemented, accepted, and financed (A. Wiggins & Bhattacharya, 2014). However, creativity research is also a challenging endeavor. Creativity is complex, multifaceted, and, as far as individuals are concerned, in many ways elusive. It can be viewed as a ‘black box’ or ‘mystery box’—an unobservable cognitive mechanism within the mind that utopianists believe can be learned or understood, but that skeptics believe will forever remain opaque and unknowable (Wang, 2022). Emerging out of this box, however, tendentiously creative acts become visible and discoverable as a sequence of transformations of ideas. A transformation is understood as a change of state, so the original idea changes in some way through a transformation of either addition (variation) or subtraction (simplification).

8. Neuroimaging Studies of Creativity

The use of neuroimaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), positron emission tomography (PET), and electroencephalography (EEG), has expanded dramatically in the last decades. Neuroimaging tools have been increasingly employed in creativity research, allowing for a more tailored examination of creativity’s neural correlates (E. Jung et al., 2013). Additionally, creativity is one of the fundamental cognitive skills grouping flourishes in innovative social and economic domains. However, scientific understanding of creativity and the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms has not kept pace with the interest in promoting creativity, resulting in an incongruous relationship between contemporary societal needs and scientific progress (Park et al., 2016).

Functional neuroimaging studies on creativity have primarily featured homogenous groups of creative professions (e.g., artists, musicians, scientists, architects) accomplishing natural creative activities from their respective domains and thus fall short of the Utrecht notion of creativity. These studies provide invaluable insight but fail to directly address the fundamental issues. Four relevant areas deserving attention for the future embrace and maturation of experimental creativity research are: (1) over-investigation of exclusively the arts; (2) the creative individual’s perspective; (3) furthering creativity’s temporal dynamics; and (4) examining the ontogeny of creativity. Posits that the Center for Advanced Brain Imaging should become a testing ground for creativity research within these new contexts.

9. Creativity and Mental Health

The unexpected relationships between creativity, personality, and mood are all potential issues that call for exploration. People’s psychological well-being could affect their creative abilities, which would shed light on the psychological causes of the generally reported link between creativity and psychopathology (Khalil & Demarin, 2023). Albeit with mixed findings, there is a general consensus that some specific mood disorders, such as depression, anxiety, and hypomania, could spur creativity, while others, such as manic and psychotic symptoms, could result in the decline of creative function. Nonetheless, very few attempts have been made to understand how these mood disorders or states could affect creativity.

Although depression is extensively recognized as being linked to creative achievement, the nature of this association is still severely disputed (Zhao et al., 2022). In contrast to the majority of research supporting a facilitative role of depression in the process of creativity, some studies have shown that depression could impair creative function, especially convergent thinking processes. Recent studies have suggested that the association between creativity and depression is mediated by personality, intelligence, and horizontal attention, which has ramifications for understanding the mechanism of the creativity-depression association. Moreover, the review demonstrates that personality characteristics, such as neuroticism and openness to experience, could significantly affect the creativity-depression relationship.

10. Enhancing Creativity: Strategies and Interventions

(A. Wiggins & Bhattacharya, 2014). (Khalil & Demarin, 2023).

11. Creativity Across the Lifespan

This section describes trajectory of creativity across the lifespan. Creative abilities evolve and manifest across the lifespan through childhood and older age. Then there is the analysis on how creativity is irrelevant from one lifetime to another. Creativity is defined as a personality trait variable of individuals. It reflects active thinking or ideas about life. It reflects a process taking place in different mental states. It affects problem solving and cognitive restructuring, speculating relationships between ideas. It tolerates ambiguity and subjects from mind wandering. Posterior midbrain areas have been implicated in childhood daydreaming. Most children associatively generate multiple conceptual forms. The nature of childhood conceptual forms, hypernymy effect, broad category, and individual differences matters and should be explored in future studies. Conceptual level differences on divergences in pre-schoolers, older children, and adults are tested (Park et al., 2016). The initial hypotheses are Generation in mind has a non-executive role in changes of conceptual forms and origins of childhood hypernymy effects and broader creativity. The experimental effort encourages childhood creativity with comparable nurturing for younger generation. Divergent thinking is not a unique factor. The relationships between the components are under discussion. Its hypernymy effect, involving abstract conceptual level knowledge, would be extended to adulthood. The development of far transfer creativity needs further consideration, which should be tested with econometric methods, essentially involving age and productivity parameters (Khalil & Demarin, 2023).

12. Cultural Variations in Creativity

To understand cultural diversity, the past number of years, a good amount of research has focused on how the creative act can vary in different cultures. In this regard, a number of ideas have been presented to explain how creative expression in a culture can be understood. According to these ideas, the impact of the culture’s norms, values, and traditions on creativity can be appreciated. Following the impact of these elements, a finer grain understanding of what the particular manifestations of creativity are for given cultural contexts can be appreciated (Shao et al., 2019).

On the creative expression of individuals, despite the individual effort and creative problem-solving processes such as analogical reasoning, representation shift, and knowledge restructuring, individuals may be highly influenced by features of the environment, such as cultural and social aspects. However, the very notion of society or culture is not simple; societies may be diverse and complex, and the idea of culture has been defined as complicated and nuanced. Hence, with respect to the creative act, the idea of cultural creativity points to different consideration levels. Cultural creativity ranges from a broader scale, mainly beyond individuals, to a finer grain scale, addressing subcultures and individual cases.

13. Ethical Considerations in Neuroscientific Research on Creativity

(Khalil & Demarin, 2023)

The impact of neuroscience on philosophical, ethical, legal, social, and religious aspects of the understanding of the human mind and conduct has been termed neuroethics. In addition to general considerations of the ethical conduct of neuroimaging and brain stimulation studies, a need exists to explore specific issues related to the mapping and manipulation of creativity in the brain (Abraham, 2014). As creativity is modeled as an emergent product of multiple factors acting in concert, serious ethical implications arise from intervening in these complex systems.

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