The “Creative Right Brain” Revisited: Individual Creativity and Associative Priming in the Right Hemisphere Relate to Hemispheric Asymmetries in Reward Brain Function

Abstract

The idea that creativity resides in the right cerebral hemisphere is persistent in popular science, but has been widely frowned upon by the scientific community due to little empirical support. Yet, creativity is believed to rely on the ability to combine remote concepts into novel and useful ideas, an ability which would depend on associative processing in the right hemisphere. Moreover, associative processing is modulated by dopamine, and asymmetries in dopamine functionality between hemispheres may imbalance the expression of their implemented cognitive functions. Here, by uniting these largely disconnected concepts, we hypothesize that relatively less dopamine function in the right hemisphere boosts creativity by releasing constraining effects of dopamine on remote associations. Indeed, participants with reduced neural responses in the dopaminergic system of the right hemisphere (estimated by functional MRI in a reward task with positive and negative feedback), displayed higher creativity (estimated by convergent and divergent tasks), and increased associative processing in the right hemisphere (estimated by a lateralized lexical decision task). Our findings offer unprecedented empirical support for a crucial and specific contribution of the right hemisphere to creativity. More importantly our study provides a comprehensive view on potential determinants of human creativity, namely dopamine-related activity and associative processing.

From STEM to STEAM: How to Monitor Creativity

“…Amabile and Tighe (1993) described creativity as driven by intrinsic motivation. Even at a neuronal level, a link with motivation was found with dopamine-related activities as a determinant of human creativity (Aberg et al, 2016). This is a promising starting point for research into fostering school motivation (Aberg et al, 2016), as creativity may support intrinsic motivation in (science) classes.…”

“…Even at a neuronal level, a link with motivation was found with dopamine-related activities as a determinant of human creativity (Aberg et al, 2016). This is a promising starting point for research into fostering school motivation (Aberg et al, 2016), as creativity may support intrinsic motivation in (science) classes. Furthermore, recent evidence has found neurophysiological gender differences (Abraham, 2016;Tyan et al, 2017).…”

“…Particular brain areas have been identified with creativity. Aberg, Doell, and Schwartz (2016), for instance, have described the right brain hemisphere as specifically contributing to creativity and dopamine-related activities as a determinant of human creativity.…”

Cognate Costs in Bilingual Speech Production: Evidence from Language Switching

“…Importantly, the magnitude of this congruency effect is modulated by the presence of conflict in the preceding trial: it is smaller following a high conflict, incongruent trial than following a low conflict, congruent trial (Gratton et al, 1992 ). Although some researchers have accounted for these adaptation effects in the Flanker Task in terms of stimulus repetition (e.g., Mayr et al, 2003 ; Nieuwenhuis et al, 2006 ), such effects are also present in the Stroop and Simon tasks; the fact that the effect generalizes to other tasks that induce high amounts of conflict and when stimulus repetition has been controlled suggests that common mechanisms for mediating conflict may exist (e.g., Stürmer et al, 2002 ; Kerns et al, 2004 ).…”

Creative conceptual expansion: A combined fMRI replication and extension study to examine individual differences in creativity

“…This is more challenging than one might expect given than the focus in the present study follows a local approach whereas neuroimaging research on creativity is increasingly shifting to the norm of global approaches to understanding creative neurocognition where the focus is on uncovering the dynamics of the interactions between large-scale networks (Abraham, in press). Several studies have examined the brain basis of individual differences in creativity (e.g., Aberg, Doell, & Schwartz, 2016;Jung et al, 2010;Takeuchi et al, 2010aTakeuchi et al, , 2010b. For instance, a well designed recent comparison of brain activity of high and low creative individuals using task-based fMRI and task-free resting state connectivity analyses revealed heightened functional connections between hub regions of the default mode network (posterior cingulate), the central executive network (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) and the salience network (anterior insula) (Beaty et al, 2018).…”