Creativity involves discarding trivial and easily achievable solutions, but until now little was known about how this happens at the brain level.
Scientists from Queen Mary University of London and Goldsmiths University have found that alpha brain waves play a crucial role in suppressing our habitual thinking patterns in order to stimulate more creative ideas.
The results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show these brain waves (alpha oscillations in the right temporal region of the brain) are amplified when a person needs to suppress obvious and deceptive associations while solving creative problems. This can occur both in convergent thinking (systematic and logical) and in divergent (free and spontaneous).
The researchers showed that stimulating the brain's right temporal lobe at the alpha frequency increased its ability to suppress obvious associations in these two types of thinking. This has been demonstrated by connecting electrical current to the brain using non-invasive transcranial electrical stimulation (tACS). This technique practically does not cause any side effects and is not accompanied by discomfort.
“If we need to come up with alternative uses for the glass, we must first suppress our past experiences that lead us to think of the glass as a container,” said lead researcher Dr. Caroline Di Bernardi of Queen Mary. …
"To understand the processes that underlie the development of new and adequate ideas, we need to decompose the process of creativity into its constituent components and processes and analyze them in their context before we can put it back together and understand the whole process."
Researchers have shown the neural mechanisms responsible for creativity by tracing electrical activity in the brain using an electroencephalogram (EEG), which picks up electrical signals through small sensors placed on the head. The use of transcranial electrical stimulation made it possible to see its effect on the brain.
Topographic distribution of remote element binding creativity versus alpha stimulation power
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How does the brain cope with a series of creative tasks, such as finding an associative word chain? Every time we look for a connection between words, we start with the most obvious and strong relationship and gradually move on to weaker or more distant associations (for example, cat → dog → animal → pet → person → people → family).
Previous research has shown that some people are creative of others because they are able to avoid strong associations in order to reach distant ones - and this study shows that alpha waves are actively involved in this process.
“Two roads in the forest diverged, I chose the less beaten track. And it made everything different [Two roads diverged in a wood, I took the one less traveled by. And that has made all the difference], wrote the poet Robert Frost. To think creatively, you have to take a less beaten path, and our results show how this happens at the level of brain activity,”says study co-author Professor Joydeep Bhattacharya.
The findings of the researchers show potential ways of influencing the processes in the brain that are responsible for creativity, including by stimulating certain areas of the brain.