The neuroscience of creative production: Comparing domain-specific and domain-general mechanisms

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There has been a surge of interest in creativity and its neural basis in recent years. This applies not only to an understanding of the evolutionary origins of human cognition and material culture, but also more pragmatically to a perspective of creativity as being a major driving force for economic and cultural development, especially in our fast-paced world of technological change. One of the central questions about the biological basis of creativity is whether creativity depends mainly on domain-specific or domain-general mechanisms. Compelling arguments have been made to support both models of creativity in psychology and neuroscience. Thus far, no work on the neuroscience of creativity has examined more than one domain at a time in the same participants. In addition, much of the literature on creative production has focused on domain-general tasks that do not offer the potential to address domain specificity in creative production. Therefore, I am proposing to carry out both cross-modal and multi-modal neuroimaging studies of creative production in order to explore the domain-specificity vs. -generality of the brain mechanisms for creativity. I will join this with an imaging genomics approach that combines neuroimaging data with genetic information about candidate genes for creative production. In the cross-modal experiments, three domains of creative production (e.g., drawing, singing, and body movement) will be looked at individually and then compared with one another using "conjunction" analyses of neuroimaging data that can identify shared brain networks. The goal will be to determine which brain areas are shared across the three domains and which areas are specific to each domain. In the multi-modal experiments, creative production will occur simultaneously across two domains (e.g., creating a melody with words), and this will be compared with creative production in each domain separately (i.e., creating a melody alone and creating a text alone), again with the aim of identifying domain-specific vs. domain-general brain areas. Finally, the cross-modal analysis will be consolidated with an analysis of about dozen candidate genes for creativity in order to perform a combined imaging-genomics analysis, where genotypes for the candidate genes will be used as regressors for the neuroimaging data. Overall, this research program will provide the first approach that examines creative production across more than one domain, and will do so using two complementary neuroimaging approaches and a combined imaging-genomics analysis. This will shed new light on whether creative production is dependent more on domain-specific or domain-general mechanisms. The issue has important implications for how creativity can be enhanced both in the classroom and in the corporate world, in particular whether creativity training should focus on domain-specific or domain-general approaches.