In the arts and sciences, but also in everyday life, creative thinking is central. Recently studies in psychology and neuroscience have identified the regions of the brain involved in creativity. A new international study more precisely reveals the neural architecture behind a highly creative brain. It’s an opportunity to answer the question: why are certain people more creative than others?

For their study, Roger E. Beaty (a psychologist at Harvard) and his Austrian and Chinese colleagues focused on the neurocognitive characteristics of highly creative people. They wanted to find out whether there is a specific profile of brain connectivity in these individuals and whether creative thinking could be reliably predicted by looking at the strength of connectivity within the neural network. The researchers wanted to create a real mapping of the brain during an activity involving creative reflection. According to the authors, a person’s creative capacity could be, at least in part, explained by the connection between three brain networks.

163 people recruited from the University of North Carolina participated in this study (113 women, average age = 22.5). Many of these participants had a taste for art, music, and science. The participants were given a “divergent thinking" task which consisted of finding alternative uses for objects. The subjects had 12 seconds to orally respond. Three researchers ranked the ideas from the most common (use a sock to warm your feet) to the most unusual (use it to filter water). During these tests, fMRI scans were carried out in order to measure blood flow in certain parts of the brain.

The scientists first observed that the most successful participants (those who showed the greatest creativity) also reported having a creative hobby. Then, the researchers correlated each person’s creativity score with all of the possible brain connections (about 35,000) and eliminated those that were uncorrelated with creativity scores. From this sorting, the researchers were able to identify a “highly creative” network that combines three specific brain areas. The first, known as the “default network,” is linked to spontaneous thinking, such as mind wandering and daydreaming. It can play a major role in idea generation. The second, the executive control network, is a group of areas that are activated when people need to concentrate or to control their thinking processes. The third, the saliency network, acts as a switching mechanism between the two other networks; it helps us to determine where we should focus our attention. Interesting fact: the results of this study suggest that the most creative people are able to better co-activate these three networks, which usually work separately (the default and executive control networks tend to work against each other).

Finally, the researchers used predictive modeling to test the possibility of estimating a person’s creative potential. The results showed a significant correlation between the predicted and actual creativity scores. In addition, these “predictions” were also performed on three other samples of participants (notably in Austria and China) with the same results. Thus, depending on the strength of the connections in the network described above, it's possible to predict a person’s creative potential.

According to R. Beaty: “Our findings indicate that the creative brain is “wired” differently and that creative people are better able to engage brain systems that don’t typically work together.” It remains to be seen whether these creative networks are malleable or relatively fixed. For example, will taking a painting class stimulate greater connectivity within these networks?