Understanding how our brains work in creative activities helps us better understand its mystery. The mechanism behind our creative ability remains a mystery, even to scientists, and will remain a challenge for decades to come.
Perhaps the magic around creativity is also that we can’t measure it, which is why we continue to think of it as the most important human trait there is.
Creativity in the Brain
The brain has been mapped several times for the purpose of investigating creativity. There are a number of brain regions, mainly functioning separately, that are responsible for registering and processing emotions, memories, and the associations between them.
For example, a recent study found that when we are not doing an active action, a network of brain regions called the Default Network becomes active. In a state of mind-wandering, we will link memories and our imagination together, creating spontaneous ideas.
When we make a focused search for original ideas, which is essential to the creative process, we do not rely on our default network, but other regions are active so that we can adapt a specific concept according to our imagination (Primary visual cortex).
“Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.”
Getting new ideas: A Connection Between Memories And Our Imagination
A human being consists largely of memories and the emotions associated with them. Through these memories, our personalities are formed, and we can recognize and place situations. Creative ideas are formed by aspects of these memories: smells, colors, shapes, and contexts. As memories become distorted and warped over time by our new experiences and learning moments, new perspectives can emerge.
When you think back on a situation, through your imagination and your memory, you will be able to reconstruct this situation in your mind again. Remembering a moment will not be identical to how it was in reality but will be changed by our imagination.
This works the same for a future situation, where our brain, related to our previous memories, creates possible scenarios based on our imagination.
Creative Individuals And The Blank Page
It is often thought that creative people are specifically good at seeing solutions to complex problems. While this is true, the greatest ability of a creative person is to fill in a blank page. This blank page represents a potential elaboration of the brain’s creativity.
Every person would know to some extent how to deal with blank starts where he is responsible for the end result. This shows that there is a creative mindset in every individual, which either costs or generates energy for that person. Someone with an artistic personality will be energized as soon as a problem arises for which no solution has yet been found. The brain will then automatically start thinking in terms of possibilities rather than focusing on the magnitude of the problem itself.
Creative Releases Neurotransmitters
The reason for acting creatively is simply because most people derive satisfaction from it. The familiar chemicals dopamine, serotonin, and the love hormone oxycotin are produced when we get into a creative workflow or imagine ourselves in imagination. But do these substances have anything to do with the reason to be creative?
Ideas arise from our subconscious, which means that inspiration can be perceived as spontaneous. We cannot properly reason out how an idea comes about, which is also the essence of creative inspiration. What we do know is that increased levels of substances such as dopamine and serotonin—an elated feeling—lead to more openness to creativity.
The Right Circumstances for Optimal Creativity
It’s no secret that consistent meditation or mindfulness causes you to get things in better order throughout the day. You’ll notice the same thing with a good night’s sleep: better focus and more motivation. The “desire” to do something is crucial to your productivity in a day, be it creative expression or sports.
Creativity in dreams
A good night’s sleep not only makes you physically and mentally fitter the next day but also provides the motivation to think creatively. In addition, we have dreams in REM sleep, where a processing of thoughts and events takes place. This mixture of memories outlines a completely new reality. So our subconscious is capable of being creative without our focused attention.
Yet creative thinking does not depend only on how motivated you are, because you can also become inspired without actually performing anything. It is important to experience something, such as reading a book, that sparks your creative brain.
If you want to spark creativity, you will have to find a source of inspiration in your environment. A film, book, or work of art that works as a reference to link your own style and feeling to gives the opening for your own interpretation.
Researching Creativity is a Work in Progress.
What makes studying creativity and neuroscience so tricky is that we cannot say in what frequency or order memories occur that inspire us. We do know, through recent research, that brain regions such as the Hippocampus and the Default Network work together to create new combinations between memories and imagination.
In the coming decades, we will also begin to experience creativity in Artificial Intelligence is going to mean. We can already see, in image generation software like DALL-E and SORA, that an AI can create new material from existing photo sources, just as our creative brain does.
