Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality (SWU), Ministry of Education, Chongqing 400715, China.
School of Psychology, Southwest University (SWU), Chongqing 400715, China.
Cereb Cortex. 2020 Mar 21;30(2):708-717. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhz120.
Creativity is the ability to generate original and useful products, and it is considered central to the progression of human civilization. As a noninherited emerging process, creativity may stem from temporally dynamic brain activity, which, however, has not been well studied. The purpose of this study was to measure brain dynamics using entropy and to examine the associations between brain entropy (BEN) and divergent thinking in a large healthy sample. The results showed that divergent thinking was consistently positively correlated with regional BEN in the left dorsal anterior cingulate cortex/pre-supplementary motor area and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, suggesting that creativity is closely related to the functional dynamics of the control networks involved in cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control. Importantly, our main results were cross-validated in two independent cohorts from two different cultures. Additionally, three dimensions of divergent thinking (fluency, flexibility, and originality) were positively correlated with regional BEN in the left inferior frontal gyrus and left middle temporal gyrus, suggesting that more highly creative individuals possess more flexible semantic associative networks. Taken together, our findings provide the first evidence of the associations of regional BEN with individual variations in divergent thinking and show that BEN is sensitive to detecting variations in important cognitive abilities in healthy subjects.
创造力是产生原创和有用产品的能力,被认为是人类文明进步的核心。作为一种非遗传性的新兴过程,创造力可能源于暂时动态的大脑活动,但这尚未得到充分研究。本研究旨在使用熵来测量大脑动力学,并在一个大型健康样本中检查大脑熵(BEN)与发散思维之间的关联。结果表明,发散思维与左背侧前扣带皮层/辅助运动区和左背外侧前额叶的区域 BEN 呈一致的正相关,这表明创造力与涉及认知灵活性和抑制控制的控制网络的功能动态密切相关。重要的是,我们的主要结果在来自两个不同文化的两个独立队列中得到了交叉验证。此外,发散思维的三个维度(流畅性、灵活性和新颖性)与左额下回和左颞中回的区域 BEN 呈正相关,这表明更具创造力的个体具有更灵活的语义联想网络。总之,我们的研究结果提供了区域 BEN 与发散思维个体差异相关的第一个证据,并表明 BEN 能够敏感地检测到健康受试者中重要认知能力的变化。