Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.
Brain Res. 2012 Oct 30;1482:55-70. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2012.09.007. Epub 2012 Sep 13.
The objective of the study was to investigate creativity in relation to brain function by assessing creative thinking in various neurological populations. Several measures were employed to assess different facets of creative thinking in clinical groups with frontal lobe, basal ganglia or parietal-temporal lesions relative to matched healthy control participants. The frontal group was subdivided into frontolateral, frontopolar and frontal-extensive groups. Hierarchical regression analyses were employed to assess the significance levels associated with the effects after accounting for IQ differences between the groups. Findings were only considered noteworthy if they at least suggested the presence of a strong trend and were accompanied by medium to large effect sizes. The parietal-temporal and frontolateral groups revealed poorer overall performance with the former demonstrating problems with fluency related measures, whereas the latter were also less proficient at producing original responses. In contrast, the basal ganglia and frontopolar groups demonstrated superior performance in the ability to overcome the constraints imposed by salient semantic distractors when generating creative responses. In summary, the dissociations in the findings reveal the selective involvement of different brain regions in diverse aspects of creativity. Lesion location posed selective limitations on the ability to generate original responses in different contexts, but not on the ability to generate relevant responses, which was compromised in most patient groups. The noteworthy findings from this exploratory study of enhanced performance in specific aspects of creative cognition following brain damage are discussed with reference to the generic idea that superior creative ability can result from altered brain function.
这项研究的目的是通过评估各种神经病变人群的创造性思维，来研究大脑功能与创造力之间的关系。研究采用了多种方法来评估前额叶、基底神经节或顶颞叶病变的临床患者组与匹配的健康对照组在不同方面的创造性思维。前额叶组又进一步分为额外侧、额极和额广泛组。在考虑到组间智商差异后，采用分层回归分析评估与效应相关的显著性水平。只有当存在明显的趋势且具有中等至较大的效应量时，结果才被认为是有意义的。顶颞叶和额外侧组的整体表现较差，前者在流畅性相关测量方面存在问题，而后者在产生原创性反应方面也不那么熟练。相比之下，基底神经节和额极组在生成创造性反应时表现出了更好的克服显著语义干扰因素的能力。总的来说，这些发现的差异揭示了不同大脑区域在创造力的不同方面的选择性参与。病变部位对在不同情境下产生原创性反应的能力造成了选择性限制，但对生成相关反应的能力没有影响，而大多数患者组的这种能力都受到了损害。这项探索性研究的显著发现是，在脑损伤后，特定方面的创造性认知能力得到了增强，这与大脑功能改变可以导致更高的创造性能力的普遍观点有关。
