Summary: Researchers have identified a relationship between real-life creativity, the organization of semantic memory, and brain functional connectivity.
Source: Institut du Cerveau
The team led by Emmanuelle Volle at the Paris Brain Institute, together with international collaborators, has demonstrated for the first time a direct link between everyday creative behavior, the structure of semantic memory, and patterns of brain functional connectivity.
Published in Science Advances, the study shows that real-life creativity depends on individual differences in how semantic knowledge is organized and that these differences can be predicted from functional brain connectivity measured during a semantic task.
Creativity is a cognitive capacity we use daily to solve problems, adapt to change, and innovate across many domains such as visual arts, science, music, and writing. In cognitive neuroscience, creativity is often defined as the ability to generate ideas that are both novel and appropriate to a given context. In real life, creative performance varies across people and situations, and the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms that explain those differences are an active area of research.
According to associative theories of creativity, creative thought depends at least in part on the organization of associations within semantic memory — the network of concepts and knowledge stored in the mind. How concepts are connected influences the ability to form remote associations and combine distant ideas in useful ways. However, the brain mechanisms that link semantic memory organization to creative behavior had remained largely unexplored.
To address this gap, the Paris Brain Institute team, together with Mathias Benedek (University of Graz, Austria) and Yoed Kenett (Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, Israel), used a semantic relatedness judgment task while participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). During the scan, participants rated the relatedness of many word pairs. The researchers used these ratings to construct individualized semantic networks representing pairwise associations between concepts for each participant.
The researchers analyzed the structure of these semantic networks using tools from network science and evaluated how network properties related to participants’ real-life creative activities and accomplishments. Real-life creativity was assessed through a questionnaire that asked participants about their creative involvement and achievements across eight domains, including literature, cooking, music, sports, performing arts, science, and engineering.
The study produced three main findings. First, the organization of an individual’s semantic memory network reliably predicted their real-life creativity. People who reported higher levels of creative activity and achievement tended to have semantic networks that were less segregated and more efficient, a pattern consistent with easier access to distant associations and more flexible idea combination.
Second, analysis of task-based functional connectivity revealed specific patterns of brain network interactions that predicted the semantic network configurations associated with greater creativity. In other words, particular functional connectivity profiles during the semantic judgment task corresponded to semantic memory organizations that favor creative thinking.
Third, and importantly, the study found that semantic network organization mediated the relationship between brain functional connectivity and real-life creativity. This mediation “closes the loop” by showing that functional brain patterns relate to creativity through their influence on the structure of semantic memory, linking brain activity, cognitive representation, and overt creative behavior.
Emmanuelle Volle, the study’s senior author, highlights the novelty of combining behavioral measures of real-life creativity with computational modeling of individual semantic networks and predictive approaches based on brain connectivity. This multi-level integration—behavioral, cognitive, and neural—provides a comprehensive account of how brain connectivity supports creative behavior via semantic memory structure.
Together, these results offer new insight into the neurocognitive mechanisms that underlie everyday creative behavior. They point to semantic memory organization as a key cognitive intermediate that links task-related brain connectivity with varied creative achievements, suggesting new directions for research on creativity, cognition, and brain networks.
About this neuroscience and creativity research news
Author: Press Office
Source: Institut du Cerveau
Contact: Press Office – Institut du Cerveau
Image: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Open access.
“Brain connectivity–based prediction of real-life creativity is mediated by semantic memory structure” by Marcela Ovando-Tellez et al., Science Advances
Abstract
Brain connectivity–based prediction of real-life creativity is mediated by semantic memory structure
Associative theories of creativity propose that creative cognition depends on the ability to generate remote associations and form useful connections between otherwise unrelated concepts in semantic memory. However, how real-life creative behavior depends on the structure of semantic memory and its neural substrates has been unclear.
In this study, multi-echo functional magnetic resonance imaging data were collected while participants completed a semantic relatedness judgment task. Individual ratings were used to construct personalized semantic memory networks, the properties of which significantly predicted participants’ real-life creative activities and achievements. Using a connectome predictive modeling approach, the researchers identified task-based functional connectivity patterns that predicted semantic network features related to creativity.
Furthermore, those semantic network properties mediated the relationship between functional connectivity and real-life creativity. These findings shed light on how specific brain connectivity patterns support creative behavior through the organization of semantic memory and demonstrate how computational network science can integrate behavioral, cognitive, and neural levels of analysis.