Why are some people more creative than others?

Creativity is often defined as the ability to come up with new and useful ideas. Like intelligence, it can be considered a characteristic of everyone—not just creative “geniuses” like Picasso and Steve Jobs—possessing some ability.

It’s not just your ability to draw or design products. We all need to think creatively in our daily lives, whether it's cooking dinner with leftovers or using items from our closets to create a Halloween costume.

Creative tasks range from what researchers call "small c" ideas - making a website, crafting a birthday gift or coming up with a funny joke - to "big c" ideas: writing a speech, writing poetry Or design a scientific experiment.

Psychology and neuroscience researchers have begun to identify thought processes and brain regions associated with creativity.

Recent evidence suggests that creativity involves a complex interplay between spontaneous and controlled thought, namely the ability to spontaneously brainstorm ideas and consciously evaluate them to determine whether they are actually effective.

Despite this progress, the answer to one question remains particularly elusive: What makes some people more creative than others?

In a new study In the study, my colleagues and I investigated whether a person's ability to think creatively could be explained by connections between three brain networks.

Mapping the brain during creative thinking.

In this study, we had 163 participants complete a classic test of divergent thinking called the Alternate Use Task, which asks people to come up with new and Unusual object usage.

When they completed the test, they took fMRI scans, which measure blood flow to parts of the brain.

This task assesses people's ability to detach from an object's ordinary uses. For example, in studies we showed participants different objects on a screen, such as gum wrappers or socks, and asked them to think of creative ways to use them.

Some ideas are more creative than others. For socks, one participant suggested using them to warm your feet—a common use for socks—while another suggested using them as a water filtration system.

Importantly, we found that people who did better on this task also tended to report more creative hobbies and achievements, which is consistent with previous research showing that the task measures general creative thinking ability.

After participants completed these creative thinking tasks in fMRI, we measured the functional connectivity between all brain regions—the amount of activity in one area correlated with the activity in another.

We also ranked their ideas: common uses received lower scores (using socks to warm your feet), while uncommon uses received higher scores (using socks as a water filtration system ).

We then linked each person's creativity score to all possible brain connections (about 35,000), and removed connections that were irrelevant to the creativity score based on our analysis.

The remaining connections constitute a "high creativity" network, a set of connections that are highly relevant to generating original ideas.

Two renderings show the brain's lobes connected in highly creative networks. (Roger Swinging)

After defining the network, we wanted to see if people with stronger connections in this highly creative network would do well on the task.

So we measured the strength of a person's connections in this network and then used predictive models to test whether we could estimate a person's creativity score.

The models revealed significant correlations between predicted and observed creativity scores. In other words, we can assess how creative a person is based on the strength of their connections in this network.

We further tested creative thinking abilities in three new samples of participants who did not use brain data when building network models.

Across all samples, we found that we could predict—albeit modestly—a person's creativity based on the strength of their connections in the same network.

In general, people with stronger connections come up with better ideas.

What happens in a "highly creative" network!

We found that the brain regions in the "highly creative" network belong to three specific brain systems: Default , salient and executive networks.

The default network is a group of brain regions that are involved when people engage in spontaneous thinking, such as mind wandering, daydreaming, and imagining.

This network may play a key role in idea generation or brainstorming - consider a few possible solutions.

The executive control network is a group of regions that are activated when people need to focus or control their thought processes.

This network may play a key role in idea evaluation, or in deciding whether brainstormed ideas are actually valid and modifying them to fit creative goals.

The salience network is a set of zones that act as a switching mechanism between the default and executive networks. This network may play a key role in the alternating processes of thought generation and thought evaluation.

An interesting feature of these three networks is that they are usually not activated at the same time. For example, when an execution network is activated, the default network is usually deactivated.

Our findings suggest that creative people are better able to simultaneously activate brain networks that normally work alone.

Our findings suggest that creative brains are "wired" and that creative people are better able to engage brain systems that don't normally work together.

Interestingly, this result is consistent with recent fMRI studies of professional artists, including jazz musicians improvising melodies, poets writing new lines of poetry, and visual artists sketching for book covers.

Future research is needed to determine whether these networks are plastic or relatively fixed.

For example, would drawing classes cause these brain networks to become more tightly connected? Is it possible to improve general creative thinking skills by modifying network connections?

Conversation now, these questions Still no answer. As researchers, we only need to engage our own creative networks to find out.

Roger Beach is a postdoctoral fellow in cognitive neuroscience at Harvard University.