Neuroscience of Creativity

Relation of Topic with Personal Experience

Creativity is one of the mission of a teacher in every age, and discipline. As he may be creative to motivate students, he has to generate creativity in his pupils. In this way, understanding the relation between the neurobiology of creativity and its cognition is useful to every teacher.

Introduction

Creativity is a complex process to be studied, however a lot of recent researchers in Neuroscience and Education have worked in this topic and have established interesting finding. Involving a great amount of the brain in networks, it is not totally clear the biologic process. However, it seems that the problem in the educative field is not the neurobiology but the neuromythology of creativity. In a first part, creativity will be defined following educative and neuroscientific point of views and limitations in experimentation. In a second part, the neurobiology of creativity will be presented and associated with its cognitive meaning.

I. Creativity in Neuroscientific Research

It is important to recognize the concept of creativity to familiarise the idea of what the neuroscientific can do or not in this field. Briefly, the consensus is that something creative is novel, useful (cooperative, appropriate), original (never seen before) and responding to a problem (intervention)(Pope, 2005)(Sawyer, 2012).

In Animals, it is possible to consider creativity in three steps: recognition of the problem (novelty), observation of it and create an innovative behaviour(Kaufman & Kaufman, 2004). For example, some animals are able to create a new behaviour to give solution to a new situation (Animal innovation, 2003). Furthermore, in neuroscience it is common to use animal for investigation. In fact, ...

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... activations after training in Creative task during a period of time to see the possible enhancement of creativity in the central nervous system. Although the complexity of the creative process difficult direct application and clear classroom strategy, neuroscientific knowledge can be shared to recognise creativity in an educative environment.

Works Cited

Abraham, A., Pieritz, K., Thybusch, K., Rutter, B., Kröger, S., Schweckendiek, J., … Hermann, C. (2012). Creativity and the brain: Uncovering the neural signature of conceptual expansion. Neuropsychologia, 50(8), 1906–1917. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2012.04.015

Animal innovation. (2003). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Aziz-Zadeh, L., Liew, S.-L., & Dandekar, F. (2013). Exploring the neural correlates of visual creativity. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 8(4), 475–480. doi:10.1093/scan/nss021