Layover or nonstop? UCLA Health research says unique pattern of connectivity lets highly creative people’s brains take road less traveled to their destination
From: UCLA Health
March 28, 2022 -- A new study led by UCLA Health
scientists shows highly creative people’s brains appear to work differently
from others', with an atypical approach that makes distant connections more
quickly by bypassing the “hubs” seen in non-creative brains.
Exceptionally creative
visual artists and scientists – called “Big C” creative types – volunteered to
undergo functional MRI brain imaging, giving researchers in psychiatry,
behavioral sciences and psychology a look at how regions of the brain connected
and interacted when called upon to perform tasks that put creative thinking to
the test.
“Our results showed
that highly creative people had unique brain connectivity that tended to stay
off the beaten path,” said Ariana Anderson, a professor and statistician
at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, the lead
author of a new article in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics,
Creativity, and the Arts. While non-creatives tended to follow the same routes
across the brain, the highly creative people made their own roads.
Although the concept of
creativity has been studied for decades, little is known about its biological
bases, and even less is understood about the brain mechanisms of exceptionally
creative people, said senior author Robert Bilder, director of
the Tennenbaum Center for the Biology of Creativity at the Semel
Institute. This uniquely designed study included highly creative people
representing two different domains of creativity – visual arts and the sciences
– and used an IQ-matched comparison group to identify markers of creativity,
not just intelligence. The researchers analyzed how connections were made
between brain regions globally and locally.
“Exceptional creativity
was associated with more random connectivity at the global scale – a pattern
that is less ‘efficient’ but would appear helpful in linking distant brain
nodes to each other,” Bilder said. “The patterns in more local brain regions
varied, depending on whether people were performing tasks. Surprisingly, Big C
creatives had more efficient local processing at rest, but less efficient local
connectivity when performing a task demanding ‘thinking outside the
box.’”
Using airline route
maps for comparison, the researchers said the Big C creatives’ brain activity
is akin to skipping flights to connecting hubs to get to a small city.
“In terms of brain
connectivity, while everyone else is stuck in a three-hour layover at a major
airport, the highly creatives take private planes directly to a distant destination,”
Anderson said. “This more random connectivity may be less efficient much of the
time, but the architecture enables brain activity to ‘take a road less
traveled’ and make novel connections.”
Bilder, who has more
than 30 years’ experience researching brain-behavior relations, said, “The fact
that Big C people had more efficient local brain connectivity, but only under
certain conditions, may relate to their expertise. Consistent with some of our
prior findings, they may not need to work as hard as other smart people to
perform certain creative tasks.”
The artists and
scientists in the study were nominated by panels of experts before being
validated as exceptional based on objective metrics. The “smart” comparison
group was recruited from participants in a previous UCLA study who had agreed
to be contacted for possible participation in future studies, and from
advertisements in the community for individuals with graduate degrees. The
researchers made efforts to ensure that age, sex, race and ethnicity were
comparable to those of participants in the Big C groups.
In addition to Bilder
and Anderson, authors include Kevin Japardi, a data intelligence analyst at
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center; Kendra Knudsen, a researcher in psychology at
UCLA; Susan Bookheimer, a researcher in psychiatry, behavioral sciences and
psychology at UCLA; and Dara Ghahremani, a researcher in psychiatry and
behavioral sciences at UCLA.
The authors report no
additional disclosures or potential conflicts of interest.
https://www.uclahealth.org/news/CreativeBrain2022
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