Creativity

Stills from "The Limits of Control" by Jim Jarmusch, 2009

Creativity is the fountainhead of human civilizations. All progress and innovation depend on our ability to change existing thinking patterns, break with the present, and build something new. Given the central importance of this most extraordinary capacity of the human mind, one would think that the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms of creative thinking are the subject of intense research efforts in the behavioral and brain sciences. To study creative ideas, and how and where they arise in the brain, is to approach a defining element of what makes us human. […] There are several reasons why neuroscientists did not tackle creativity with the same kind of resolve as they did, say, with attention, memory, or intelligence. The most important of these is surely the problem of finding a way to study the creative process, especially its neural basis, in the laboratory […] The most important of these is surely the problem of finding a way to study the creative process, especially its neural basis, in the laboratory— under tightly controlled conditions. Clearly, one cannot simply take a volunteer, shove him/her into the nearest brain scanner, and tell him/her: Now, please be creative! The same, one might think, holds for insights. An insight is so capricious, such a slippery thing to catch in flagrante, that it appears almost deliberately designed to defy empirical inquiry.

A Review of EEG, ERP, and Neuroimaging Studies of

Creativity and Insight, Arne Dietrich and Riam Kanso, American University of Beirut