文档介绍：Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
2004, 11 (6), 1011-1026
The cognitive neuroscience of creativity
ARNE DIETRICH
American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon
This article outlines a framework of creativity based on functional neuroanatomy. Recent advances
in the field of cognitive neuroscience have identified distinct brain circuits that are involved in specific
higher brain functions. To date, these findings have not been applied to research on creativity. It is pro-
posed that there are four basic types of creative insights, each mediated by a distinctive neural circuit.
By definition, creative insights occur in consciousness. Given the view that the working memory buffer
of the prefrontal cortex holds the content of consciousness, each of the four distinctive neural loops
terminates there. When creativity is the result of deliberate control, as opposed to spontaneous gener-
ation, the prefrontal cortex also instigates the creative process. Both processing modes, deliberate and
spontaneous, can guide putation in structures that contribute emotional content and in
structures that provide cognitive analysis, yielding the four basic types of creativity. Supportive evi-
dence from psychological, cognitive, and neuroscientific studies is presented and integrated in this ar-
ticle. The new theoretical framework systematizes the interaction between knowledge and creative
thinking, and how the nature of this relationship changes as a function of domain and age. Implications
for the & and sciences are briefly discussed.
Creativity is a fundamental activity of human informa- Despite such agreement among investigators, the find-
tion processing (M. A. Boden, 1998). It is generally agreed ings of modem brain research have not been incorporated
to include two defining characteristics:"The ability to pro- into research on creativity. Current neuroscientific expla-
duce work that is both novel (., original, unexpect