Relating inter-individual differences in verbal creative thinking to cerebral structures: an optimal voxel-based morphometry study.

Creativity can be defined the capacity of an individual to produce something original and useful. An important measurable component of creativity is divergent thinking. Despite existing studies on creativity-related cerebral structural basis, no study has used a large sample to investigate the relat...

Descripción completa

Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Feifei Zhu, Qinglin Zhang, Jiang Qiu
Formato: article
Lenguaje:EN
Publicado: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2013
Materias:
R
Q
Acceso en línea:https://doaj.org/article/846a33c5d3524c1b925073ad9ed58516
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
Descripción
Sumario:Creativity can be defined the capacity of an individual to produce something original and useful. An important measurable component of creativity is divergent thinking. Despite existing studies on creativity-related cerebral structural basis, no study has used a large sample to investigate the relationship between individual verbal creativity and regional gray matter volumes (GMVs) and white matter volumes (WMVs). In the present work, optimal voxel-based morphometry (VBM) was employed to identify the structure that correlates verbal creativity (measured by the verbal form of Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking) across the brain in young healthy subjects. Verbal creativity was found to be significantly positively correlated with regional GMV in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), which is believed to be responsible for language production and comprehension, new semantic representation, and memory retrieval, and in the right IFG, which may involve inhibitory control and attention switching. A relationship between verbal creativity and regional WMV in the left and right IFG was also observed. Overall, a highly verbal creative individual with superior verbal skills may demonstrate a greater computational efficiency in the brain areas involved in high-level cognitive processes including language production, semantic representation and cognitive control.