Back

Creative Brains Show Reduced Mid Frontal Theta

Wokke, M. E.; Ridderinkhof, K. R.; Padding, L.

2019-06-01 animal behavior and cognition
10.1101/370494 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Creativity is considered to be the driving force behind innovation and progress, yet the mechanisms supporting creative thought remain elusive. In the current study, we investigated whether fluctuations in top-down control are related to creative thinking. Here, participants performed a caption this task in which they had to provide an original and apt caption to accompany a presented picture, while EEG signals were recorded. To assess changing levels of top-down control, we made use of the strong relationship between mid frontal oscillatory activity in the theta range (4-7 HZ) and top-down control. Results demonstrate that specifically during the process of optimization and implementation of creative solutions, lower levels of mid frontal theta resulted in higher levels of creativity. In addition, increased creativity related to enhanced functional connectivity between occipital and mid frontal cortex. Together, our findings indicate that creativity benefits from a top-down induced shift towards an internally-oriented state during idea optimization and evaluation.

Matching journals

The top 2 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

1
Scientific Reports
○ 3612 papers in training set
Top 0.1%
48.7%
Similar papers in this journal
2
iScience
○ 1154 papers in training set
Top 0.3%
10.2%
Similar papers in this journal
50% of probability mass above
3
eLife
● 5828 papers in training set
Top 21%
6.0%
Similar papers in this journal
4
Communications Biology
○ 993 papers in training set
Top 6%
3.1%
Similar papers in this journal
5
Nature Human Behaviour
○ 95 papers in training set
Top 0.7%
3.0%
Similar papers in this journal
6
PLOS Biology
● 486 papers in training set
Top 2%
2.7%
7
European Journal of Neuroscience
○ 189 papers in training set
Top 1%
2.5%
8
Neuropsychologia
○ 85 papers in training set
Top 0.7%
2.0%
9
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
● 2444 papers in training set
Top 29%
1.7%
10
Nature Communications
○ 5641 papers in training set
Top 46%
1.7%
11
Cortex
○ 119 papers in training set
Top 1%
1.7%
12
The Journal of Neuroscience
● 1025 papers in training set
Top 8%
1.4%
13
PLOS ONE
● 5266 papers in training set
Top 50%
1.4%
14
Current Biology
○ 665 papers in training set
Top 9%
1.1%
15
Cerebral Cortex
◐ 396 papers in training set
Top 5%
0.9%
16
Progress in Neurobiology
○ 47 papers in training set
Top 1%
0.8%
17
Communications Psychology
○ 22 papers in training set
Top 0.4%
0.8%
18
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
● 393 papers in training set
Top 6%
0.8%
19
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
● 135 papers in training set
Top 2%
0.8%
20
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
○ 17 papers in training set
Top 0.4%
0.6%
21
Psychophysiology
○ 77 papers in training set
Top 1%
0.6%

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.