Creativity is of central importance for human civilization, yet its neurocognitive bases are poorly understood. The aim of the present study was to integrate existing functional imaging data by using the meta-analysis approach. We reviewed 34 functional imaging studies that reported activation foci during tasks assumed to engage creative thinking in healthy adults. A coordinate-based meta-analysis using Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) first showed a set of predominantly left-hemispheric regions shared by the various creativity tasks examined. These regions included the caudal lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), the medial and lateral rostral PFC, and the inferior parietal and posterior temporal cortices. Further analyses showed that tasks involving the combination of remote information (combination tasks) activated more anterior areas of the lateral PFC than tasks involving the free generation of unusual responses (unusual generation tasks), although both types of tasks shared caudal prefrontal areas. In addition, verbal and non-verbal tasks involved the same regions in the left caudal prefrontal, temporal, and parietal areas, but also distinct domain-oriented areas. Taken together, these findings suggest that several frontal and parieto-temporal regions may support cognitive processes shared by diverse creativity tasks, and that some regions may be specialized for distinct types of processes. In particular, the lateral PFC appeared to be organized along a rostro-caudal axis, with rostral regions involved in combining ideas creatively and more posterior regions involved in freely generating novel ideas.

Intelligence Quotient (IQ) is a standardized measure of intellectual ability that taps a wide range of cognitive skills1. Across life span, IQ is generally considered to be stable with scores at one time point used to predict educational achievement and employment prospects in later years1. Neuro-imaging allows us to test whether unexpected longitudinal fluctuations in measured IQ are related to brain development. Here we show that verbal and nonverbal IQ can rise or fall in the teenage years, with these changes in performance validated by their close correlation with changes in local brain structure. A combination of structural and functional imaging showed that verbal IQ changed with grey matter in an area that was activated by speech, while nonverbal IQ changed with grey matter in an area that was activated by finger movements. By using longitudinal assessments of the same individuals, we eschewed the many sources of variation in brain structure that confound cross sectional studies. This allowed us to dissociate neural markers for verbal and nonverbal IQ and to show that these general abilities are closely linked to the sensorimotor skills involved in learning. More generally, our results emphasize the possibility that an individual’s intellectual capacity relative to their peers can weaken or strengthen in the teenage years. This would be encouraging to those whose intellectual potential may improve; and a warning that early achievers may not maintain their potential.

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