summary: Researchers have identified how the brain’s default mode network (DMN) works with other regions to produce creative thinking. Using advanced brain imaging techniques, the researchers tracked brain activity in real time during creative tasks.
This study shows that the DMN generates creative ideas, which are then evaluated by other brain regions. Understanding this process may lead to interventions to enhance creativity and aid in mental health treatment.
Key Facts:
- DMN Role: The default mode network generates creative ideas.
- Real-time Tracking: Advanced imaging was used to track brain activity during creative tasks.
- Mental health impacts: This insight could lead to treatments for disorders that affect the DMN.
sauce: University of Utah
Have you ever had the solution to a tricky problem suddenly pop into your head while you were thinking about something completely different? Creative thinking is a human trait, but it’s a fleeting, almost paradoxical ability that appears suddenly when you’re not looking for it.
And the neurological sources of creativity – what goes on in the brain when we think outside the box – are similarly elusive.
But now a team of researchers led by the University of Utah Health and based at Baylor College of Medicine has used sophisticated brain imaging techniques to reveal how different parts of the brain work together to produce creative thinking.
The results of their research are brain June 18th.
The new findings could eventually lead to interventions that stimulate creative thinking and help people with psychiatric disorders that disrupt these areas of the brain.
Outside the venue
Higher cognitive processes like creativity are particularly difficult to study. “Unlike motor functions or vision, they don’t depend on a specific location in the brain,” says Ben Shofty, MD, assistant professor of neurosurgery at the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine and senior author of the paper. “There is no creative cortex.”
However, there is evidence that creativity is a distinct function of the brain. Localized brain damage from stroke can produce both positive and negative changes in creativity. This finding suggests that it may be possible to narrow down the neurological basis of creativity.
Shofti suggested that creative thinking relies heavily on parts of the brain that are also activated during meditation, daydreaming, and other forms of internal thought.
This network of brain cells is called the Default Mode Network (DMN), so named because it’s associated with the “default” thought patterns that occur in the absence of any specific mental task.
“Unlike most functions in the brain, this one isn’t goal-directed,” Shofti says. “It’s essentially a network that’s always running, maintaining a spontaneous stream of consciousness.”
Because the DMN is spread across many distributed brain regions, tracking its activity in real time is difficult, so researchers have had to use advanced techniques of brain activity imaging to understand what the network is doing moment-to-moment during creative thinking.
The most commonly used strategy to pinpoint the location of seizures in people with severe epilepsy involves implanting small electrodes in the brain to precisely track electrical activity in multiple brain regions.
Because study participants were already undergoing this type of seizure monitoring, the team was also able to use electrodes to measure brain activity during creative thinking, providing a much more detailed picture of the neural underpinnings of creativity than researchers had previously been able to grasp.
“You can tell what’s going on within the first milliseconds of trying to think creatively.” Shofti says:
Two steps to originality
The researchers first observed DMN activity during a creative-thinking task that asked participants to name novel uses for everyday objects like chairs and cups.
DMN activity then synchronizes with other areas in the brain, including those involved in complex problem-solving and decision-making. Shofti thinks this means that creative ideas are born in the DMN before being evaluated in other areas.
Moreover, the researchers were able to show that one part of the network is specifically necessary for creative thinking: When the researchers used electrodes to temporarily dampen activity in specific areas of the DMN, subjects brainstormed less-than-creative uses for the things they saw, while other brain functions, like mind-wandering, remained completely normal.
Dr. Eleonora Bartoli, assistant professor of neurosurgery at Baylor College of Medicine and co-first author of the paper, explains that the results show that creativity is not just associated with networks, but that it fundamentally depends on them.
“By using direct brain stimulation, we go beyond correlational evidence,” she says. “Our findings highlight a causal role for the DMN in creative thinking.”
The network’s activity is altered in several disorders, such as ruminative depression, in which the DMN is more active than usual, possibly related to increased dwelling on inward-directed negative thoughts. Shofti says that a better understanding of how the network normally works could lead to better treatments for people with such conditions.
By characterizing the areas of the brain involved in creative thinking, Shofti hopes to eventually devise interventions to stimulate creativity: “Ultimately, the goal is to understand what’s going on in those brain networks and nudge them to be more creative.”
Funding: This research was supported by the McNair Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health (grant number R01-MH127006).
The study was a collaboration between researchers from the University of Utah Health, Baylor College of Medicine and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.
More on this creativity and neuroscience research news
author: Sophia Friesen
sauce: University of Utah
contact: Sophia Friesen – University of Utah
image: Image courtesy of Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“Electrophysiological dynamics of the default mode network and its causal role in creative thinkingBen Shofti et al. brain
Abstract
Electrophysiological dynamics of the default mode network and its causal role in creative thinking
The default mode network (DMN) is a widely distributed, intrinsic brain network that is thought to play a key role in internally directed cognition.
In this study, we performed stereoelectroencephalography in 13 patients to obtain high-resolution neural recordings across multiple canonical DMN regions during two processes related to creative thinking: spontaneous and divergent thinking. We investigated these two DMN-related higher-order cognitive functions through the tasks of mind wandering and alternative uses, respectively.
Results showed that the DMN was recruited during both tasks and revealed task-specific segregation in spatiotemporal response dynamics. Compared to the fronto-parietal network, activity in the DMN was characterized by a stronger increase in gamma band power (30-70 Hz) combined with lower theta band power (4-8 Hz). Differences in activity between the two networks were particularly pronounced during the mind wandering task.
Within the DMN, we found different dynamics depending on the task, with the alternative uses task involving greater DMN engagement during early stages of the task and mind wandering during later stages. Gamma power changes were primarily driven by lateral DMN sites, while theta power showed task-specific effects.
During the alternating use task, theta changes showed no spatial differences within the DMN, but mind wandering was associated with early lateral and late dorsomedial engagement of the DMN.
Furthermore, causal manipulation of DMN regions using direct cortical stimulation preferentially reduced response originality in an alternative uses task, without affecting fluency or mental distraction.
Our findings suggest that DMN activity is flexibly modulated as a function of specific cognitive processes, supporting its causal role in divergent thinking.
These findings reveal neural structures underpinning different forms of cognition and provide causal evidence for the role of the DMN in generating unique connections between concepts.
