What does a creative crisis look like? We try to work, write, draw, but nothing works, and the more we try, the worse the result. The creative impulse is not created by an effort of will. And neuroscientists seem to have figured out why.
Researchers at Stanford University were looking for areas of the brain associated with creativity and were surprised to find that the cerebellum, which is commonly believed to be responsible for controlling movement, is also associated with creativity.
The study participants were inside the magnetic resonance imaging machine. They were given the task of drawing pictures based on the verbs they were called (vote, exhale, salute), for each picture they were given 30 seconds. Before the task, basic brain activity was recorded, and then the participants assessed how difficult each drawing was for them. Design school instructors rated the creativity of each drawing on a five-point scale, while medical school researchers analyzed brain scans.
Rollo May
Courage to create. Essay on the psychology of creativity
Written in 1975, this book by one of the founders of existential psychology responds to the latest developments.
The results were unexpected. The prefrontal cortex, traditionally associated with thinking, was most active at creating the most complex drawings, and the cerebellum was especially active at working on the pictures, which scored the highest on creativity. “The more you think, the worse it gets,” sums up lead author of the study, psychologist Manish Saggar.
If it turns out that the cerebellum is associated with creativity, it will change our understanding of how the brain works. The traditional view is that the cerebellum is only responsible for controlling movement, based on studies done on monkeys. It is located at the base of the brain and is not connected to the rest of it. However, recent studies of the anatomy of the human brain have shown that in the process of evolution, many connections have appeared between the cerebellum and other regions.
Подробнее см. Manish Saggar et al. «Pictionary-based fMRI paradigm to study the neural correlates of spontaneous improvisation and figural creativity», Scientific Reports, 2015, № 5.