The Cognitive Neuroscience Of Creativity英文电子书.pdf

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 functionalneuroanatomy. Recent advances in the field of cognitiveneurosciencehave identified distinct brain circuitsthat are involved in specific higher brain functions.To date, these findings have not been appliedto research on creativity.It ispro- posed that there are four basic types of creative insights, each mediated by a distinctive neural circuit. By definition,creativeinsights occur in consciousness.Giventhe 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 instigatesthe creative process. Both processing modes, deliberate and spontaneous, can guide neural computation in structures that contribute emotional content and in structures that provide cognitive analysis, yielding the four basic types of creativity. Supportiveevi- dence from psychological, cognitive, and neuroscientific studies ispresented and integrated in this ar- ticle. The new theoretical framework systematizesthe 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).