Study finds link between creativity of person, their semantic memory and brain function

The study was led by the group of Emmanuelle Volle, at Paris Brain Institute and their international collaborators. They established this link for the first time. The results were published in 'Science Advances'.

The results indicated that real-life creativity relied on individual differences in semantic memory organization that can be predicted from brain functional connectivity.

Creativity is a cognitive function that we use in our everyday life, to solve problems, cope with change, and innovate. In neuroscience, it is usually defined as the ability to produce something new and appropriate to a specific context. In real-life, this capacity I applied in diverse activities, including, for instance, visual art, sciences, music or writing, in which we can reach various levels of achievement.

According to the associative theory of creativity, creative thinking relied, at least in part, on the organization of associations in semantic memory, i.e., on the way elements of our knowledge are connected to each other.

"Hence, the organization of connections in semantic memory may determine our ability to link distant concepts in novel ways and may vary across individuals. Yet, the brain mechanisms underlying the link between semantic memory organization and creativity remained to be explored" explained Marcela Ovando-Tellez, lead author of the study.

The group of Emmanuelle Volle at Paris Brain Institute, and their collaborators, Mathias Benedek (University of Graz, Austria) and Yoed Kenett (Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Israel), accepted the challenge.

The authors used a semantic relatedness judgment task, asking participants to rate the semantic relationships between multiple pairs of words during the fMRI acquisition. Based on these ratings they built individual maps of pairwise semantic associations called semantic networks. The organization of the semantic networks was explored using network-based tools and related to creativity. To assess real-life creativity, participants were asked to fill a questionnaire about their creative activities and achievements in 8 different domains including literature, cooking, music, sport, performing arts, science and engineering.

First, their results showed that the organization of semantic memory networks predicted individual real-life creativity. This indicated that participants with higher creative activities and achievements had semantic memory networks that were less segregated and more efficient.

Second, the authors explored the brain functional connectivity during the task and identified specific functional connectivity patterns predicting the semantic network organization that fostered creativity, i.e., less segregated networks. Finally, and "closing the loop", such individual semantic network organization mediated the link between brain connectivity and real-life creativity.

"The originality of our study is to link three levels of investigation, behaviour in real-life, cognitive processes and the brain, by combining recently developed computational approaches to predict complex cognitive functions from brain connectivity and to explore individual semantic networks" added Emmanuelle Volle, last author of the study.

Taken together, these results provided a new understanding of some of the individual neurocognitive mechanisms underlying real-life creative behaviour. (ANI)