The cognitive neuroscience of creativity

Creativity is a fundamental activity of human information processing (M. A. Boden, 1998). It is generally agreed to include two defining characteristics: “The ability to produce work that is both novel (i.e., original, unexpected) and appropriate (i.e., useful, adaptive concerning task constraints)” (Sternberg & Lubart, 1999, p. 3). Much has been written about creativity from social, psychological, developmental, cognitive, and historical perspectives, and a number of theories have been proposed from those viewpoints (Amabile, 1983; Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Eysenck, 1993; Gardner, 1993; Gruber, 1981; Guilford, 1950; Martindale, 1995; Mednick, 1962; Simonton, 1988; Sternberg & Lubart, 1995; Ward, Smith, & Finke, 1999; Wertheimer, 1982). However, little is known about the brain mechanisms that underlie creative thinking. Research on insightful problem solving, creative cognition, and expertise acquisition, as well as historic case studies of individuals with exceptional creative accomplishments have replaced the view that the creative act is a mysterious or even mystical event (Simonton, 2000). Creativity is grounded in ordinary mental processes (M. A. Boden, 1998; Ward et al., 1999; Weisberg, 1993), making creative cognition an integral part of cognitive science and thus neuroscience. Indeed, the view has been expressed that “any theory on creativity must be consistent and integrated with contemporary understanding of brain function” (Pfenninger & Shubik, 2001, p. 217). Despite such agreement among investigators, the findings of modern brain research have not been incorporated into research on creativity. Current neuroscientific explanations of creative achievements remain focused on hemispheric asymmetry (e.g., J. E. Boden & G. M. Boden, 1969; Carlsson, Wendt, & Risberg, 2000; Katz, 1986; Kinsbourne, 1982; Martindale, 1999). If we are to further our understanding of the generative capacity of the human brain, a broader neuroscientific approach must be taken. A substantial amount of evidence demonstrates that discrete circuits are involved in specific aspects of higher brain function (for reviews, see Cabeza & Nyberg, 2000; Damasio, 2001; Duncan & Owen, 2000). The capacity to identify the brain areas that are recruited during normative information processing, coupled with the data that suggest that creative thinking is the result of ordinary mental processes, forms the foundation for the framework of creativity proposed in this article. A basic assumption of the framework is that neural circuits that process specific information to yield noncreative combinations of that information are the same neural circuits that generate creative or novel combinations of that information. To integrate the neuroanatomical correlates of mental processes with the knowledge base of the field of creativity, a brief outline of brain function is presented that conceptualizes information processing as hierarchically structured. Such a functional hierarchy localizes the most sophisticated mental abilities, and thus creative mentation, in the zenithal higher order structure: the prefrontal cortex. However, no suggestion is made here that the prefrontal cortex is the “seat of creativity.” Rather, the prefrontal cortex contributes highly integrative computations to the conscious experience, which enables novel combinations of