Dynamical Biomarkers of Creative Cognition Across Divergent and Convergent Problem-Solving

Creativity fluctuates markedly from moment to moment, even within the same individual, yet the neural dynamics that determines whether a given attempt produces a highly creative idea remains poorly understood. Prior studies have identified static EEG correlates of creative thinking, but these do not explain how brain activity is dynamically organized before and during successful idea generation. Here, we model creative cognition as trajectories through a neural state space using energy landscape analysis (ELA) of EEG recorded during two complementary problem-solving paradigms: the divergent Alternative Uses Test (AUT) and the convergent, goal-directed Fusion Innovation Test (FIT). Across both tasks, creative success was associated with dissociable dynamical signatures in the resting and ideation stages. Before ideation, greater diversity of resting-state patterns of activity, corresponding to possible attractors, indexed a preparatory substrate of creative potential, showing weak trial-level effects but robust subject-level coupling with performance. During ideation, higher creativity was predicted by how the brain traversed its accessible state space: successful trials were characterized by traversal biased toward sustained exploration within stable attractor basins rather than frequent switching between basins of attraction ({beta} = 0.104, p = 0.004, trial-level). These findings identify a task-invariant, biologically grounded dynamical mechanism of creative cognition and show that creative performance depends not only on which neural states are available, but also on how neural activity traverses that state space.