The Importance of the Default Mode Network in Creativity—A Structural MRI Study.pdfVIP

€ S I M O N E K UH N S I M O N E M . R I T T E R € B A R B A R A C . N . M UL L E R R I C K B . V A N B A A R E N M A R C E L B R A S S A P D I J K S T E R H U I S The Importance of the Default Mode Network in Creativity—A Structural MRI Study ABSTRACT Anecdotal reports as well as behavioral studies have suggested that creative per- formance benefits from unconscious processes. So far, however, little is known about how creative ideas arise from the brain. In the current study, we aimed to investigate the neural correlates of creativity by means of structural MRI research. Given that unconscious and less controlled processes are important in creative thinking, struc- tural brain research may find a positive correlation between well-established creativ- ity measures and cortical thickness in brain structures of the default mode network (i.e., the counterpart of the cognitive control network). Individuals performed the Alternative Uses task by which an individual’s cognitive flexibility and the average uniqueness and average creativity of a participant’s ideas were assessed. We com- puted optimized voxel-based-morphometry (VBM) to explore the correlation between inter-individual differences in c