Andy’s Quick Hits (256): How Creative Brains Function Differently

Can you learn creativity? Well, you can learn anything, and you can certainly learn to be more creative. But the big question is do those people high in creativity have brains that function differently? There has been a bunch of research that has promoted this idea that those high in creativity do have brains that function differently but there is still a lot to learn.

To help answer this question in more detail researchers at UCLA put exceptionally creative visual artists and scientists, known as “Big-C” types (selected by a panel of experts and objective criteria) — into brain scanners to try to see what was happening in their brains during creative tasks.

And what did they find?

Ariana Anderson et al. found that, yes, creative people do use their brains differently and in an interesting way. When the brain processes information and engages in tasks the brain tends to send all signals through standard pathways and these are connected through various “hubs” such as a region called the thalamus.

However, in creative people’s brains this seems to happen differently. They connect regions of the brains without going through these hubs.

This therefore suggests that this is an inborn process — I, for example, have no idea…