Origins of creativity in the brain

Have you ever had the solution for a tough problem suddenly hit you when you're thinking about something entirely different? Creative thought is a hallmark of humanity, but it's an ephemeral, almost paradoxical ability, striking unexpectedly when it's not sought out.

And the neurological source of creativity -- what's going on in our brains when we think outside the box -- is similarly elusive.

But now, a research team led by a University of Utah Health researcher and based in Baylor College of Medicine has used a precise method of brain imaging to unveil how different parts of the brain work together in order to produce creative thought.

Their findings published in BRAIN on June 18.

The new results could ultimately help lead to interventions that spark creative thought or aid people who have mental illnesses that disrupt these regions of the brain.

Outside the bo

Higher cognitive processes like creativity are especially hard to study. "Unlike motor function or vision, they're not dependent on one specific location in the brain," says Ben Shofty, MD, PhD, assistant professor of neurosurgery in the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine and senior author on the paper. "There's not a creativity cortex."

But there's evidence that creativity is a distinct brain function. Localized brain injury caused by stroke can lead to changes in creative ability -- both positive and negative. That discovery suggests that narrowing down the neurological basis of creativity is possible.

Shofty suspected that creative thought might rely strongly on parts of the brain that are also activated during meditation, daydreaming, and other internally focused types of thinking. This network of brain cells is the default mode network (DMN), so called because it's associated with the "default" patterns of thought that happen in the absence of specific mental tasks. "Unlike most of the functions that we have in the brain, it's not goal-directed," Shofty says. "It's a network that basically operates all the time and maintains our spontaneous stream of consciousness."

The DMN is spread out across many dispersed brain regions, making it more difficult to track its activity in real time. The researchers had to use an advanced method of brain activity imaging to understand what the network was doing moment-to-moment during creative thought. In a strategy most commonly used to pinpoint the location of seizures in patients with severe epilepsy, tiny electrodes are implanted in the brain to precisely track the electrical activity of multiple brain regions.

Participants in the study were already undergoing this kind of seizure monitoring, which meant that the research team could also use the electrodes to measure brain activity during creative thinking. This provided a much more detailed picture of the neural basis of creativity than researchers had been able to capture before. "We could see what's happening within the first few milliseconds of attempting to perform creative thinking,"Shofty says.

Two steps toward originality

The researchers saw that during a creative thinking task in which participants were asked to list novel uses for an everyday item, like a chair or a cup, the DMN lit up with activity first. Then, its activity synchronized with other regions in the brain, including ones involved in complex problem-solving and decision-making. Shofty believes this means that creative ideas originate in the DMN before being evaluated by other regions.

What's more, the researchers were able to show that parts of the network are required specifically for creative thought. When the researchers used the electrodes to temporarily dampen the activity of particular regions of the DMN, people brainstormed uses for the items they saw that were less creative. Their other brain functions, like mind wandering, remained perfectly normal.

Eleonora Bartoli, PhD, assistant professor of neurosurgery at Baylor College of Medicine and co-first author on the paper, explains that this result shows that creativity isn't just associated with the network but fundamentally depends on it. "We moved beyond correlational evidence by using direct brain stimulation," she says. "Our findings highlight the causal role of the DMN in creative thinking."

The activity of the network is changed in several disorders, such as ruminative depression, in which the DMN is more active than normal, possibly related to increased dwelling on negative internally directed thoughts. Shofty says that a better understanding of how the network operates normally may lead to better treatments for people with such conditions.

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A new understanding of mental illness

The causes of psychiatric disorders are poorly understood. Now, in work led by researchers at McGill University, there is evidence that a wide range of early onset psychiatric problems (from depression, anxiety and addictions to dyslexia, bulimia, and ADHD) may be largely due to the combination of just three factors. The first is biological -- in the form of individual variability in the brain's dopamine reward pathway. The second is social -- and points to the important role of early childhood neglect or abuse. And the third is psychological -- and relates to temperament, and particularly to tendencies toward impulsivity and difficulty controlling emotions. These findings have implications for understanding both the causes of a wide range of psychiatric disorders and the features worth targeting in early intervention efforts.

"Until recently, it was thought that psychiatric disorders reflected discrete disease entities, each with their own unique causes," says Marco Leyton, the senior author on a recent study published in Neuropsychopharmacologyand a professor in McGill's Department of Psychiatry and Senior Scientist at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre. "The present research upends this idea, suggesting instead that most early onset disorders largely reflect differential expressions of a small number of biological, psychological and social factors."

First study to combine three key factors: temperament, trauma and dopamine

Earlier research has suggested that each of the three factors, in isolation, has at least modest effects on the development of psychiatric disorders. In comparison, the authors of this new study had the first ever opportunity to examine all three factors together. Fifty-two young people, living in the Montreal or Quebec City areas (30 women and 22 men), who have been followed since birth by Jean Séguin (Université de Montréal) and Michel Boivin (Université Laval), had brain imaging scans (PET and MRI) that measured features of their dopamine reward pathway. These brain features were then combined with information about their temperamental traits and histories of early life adversity.

High accuracy & potential predictive value of approach

Strikingly, this combination of just three factors predicted, with over 90% accuracy, which participants had mental health problems either in the past or during the study's three-year follow-up period. Indeed, since the results are so novel and potentially so important, CIHR has provided an additional two million dollars to double the sample size and follow the participants through to their mid-20s. "And the results do need to be replicated, both in larger and ethnically more diverse groups," emphasizes the paper's first author, Maisha Iqbal, a graduate student in McGill's Integrated Program in Neuroscience. "If replicated, our research could transform the way we think about mental illnesses."

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Brain networks come 'online' during adolescence to prepare teenagers for adult life

New brain networks come 'online' during adolescence, allowing teenagers to develop more complex adult social skills, but potentially putting them at increased risk of mental illness, according to new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Adolescence is a time of major change in life, with increasing social and cognitive skills and independence, but also increased risk of mental illness. While it is clear that these changes in the mind must reflect developmental changes in the brain, it has been unclear how exactly the function of the human brain matures as people grow up from children to young adults.

A team based in the University of Cambridge and University College London has published a major new research study that helps us understand more clearly the development of the adolescent brain.

The study collected functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data on brain activity from 298 healthy young people, aged 14-25 years, each scanned on one to three occasions about 6 to 12 months apart. In each scanning session, the participants lay quietly in the scanner so that the researchers could analyse the pattern of connections between different brain regions while the brain was in a resting state.

The team discovered that the functional connectivity of the human brain -- in other words, how different regions of the brain 'talk' to each other -- changes in two main ways during adolescence.

The brain regions that are important for vision, movement, and other basic faculties were strongly connected at the age of 14 and became even more strongly connected by the age of 25. This was called a 'conservative' pattern of change, as areas of the brain that were rich in connections at the start of adolescence become even richer during the transition to adulthood.

However, the brain regions that are important for more advanced social skills, such as being able to imagine how someone else is thinking or feeling (so-called theory of mind), showed a very different pattern of change. In these regions, connections were redistributed over the course of adolescence: connections that were initially weak became stronger, and connections that were initially strong became weaker. This was called a 'disruptive' pattern of change, as areas that were poor in their connections became richer, and areas that were rich became poorer.

By comparing the fMRI results to other data on the brain, the researchers found that the network of regions that showed the disruptive pattern of change during adolescence had high levels of metabolic activity typically associated with active re-modelling of connections between nerve cells.

Dr Petra Vértes, joint senior author of the paper and a Fellow of the mental health research charity MQ, said: "From the results of these brain scans, it appears that the acquisition of new, more adult skills during adolescence depends on the active, disruptive formation of new connections between brain regions, bringing new brain networks 'online' for the first time to deliver advanced social and other skills as people grow older."

Professor Ed Bullmore, joint senior author of the paper and head of the Department of Psychiatry at Cambridge, said: "We know that depression, anxiety and other mental health disorders often occur for the first time in adolescence -- but we don't know why. These results show us that active re-modelling of brain networks is ongoing during the teenage years and deeper understanding of brain development could lead to deeper understanding of the causes of mental illness in young people."

Measuring functional connectivity in the brain presents particular challenges, as Dr František Váša, who led the study as a Gates Cambridge Trust PhD Scholar, and is now at King's College London, explained.

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Study locates brain areas for understanding metaphors in healthy and schizophrenic people

Scientists have used MRI scanners to discover the parts of the brain which understand metaphors, in both healthy volunteers and people with schizophrenia. They found that people with schizophrenia employ different brain circuits to overcome initial lack of understanding. The researchers hope this identification of brain reactions and affected areas may help people with schizophrenia to better comprehend metaphors in everyday speech. This work is presented at the ECNP congress in Copenhagen.

People with schizophrenia have often problems in understanding some common figurative expressions, such as humour, irony, and spoken metaphors. They tend to take the metaphor at its literal meaning (for example, "a leap in the dark" may imply jumping and darkness for someone with schizophrenia): it may take some time for them to arrive at an understanding of what the metaphor is meant to imply. There has been little attempt to understand why this might be so at a neurological level.

A group of Polish and Czech researcher examined 30 patients who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and 30 healthy controls. While undergoing a brain scan in a high-sensitivity MRI, they read 90 brief stories. 30 of the stories had a metaphorical ending, 30 had an absurd/nonsense ending, and 30 had a neutral ending (i.e. a literal ending). The scientists monitored brain activity while the subjects were reacting to the stories.

They found that compared to controls, the patient group showed increased brain activity in certain areas, but lower brain activity in others. For example, the healthy group showed brain activation in the prefrontal cortex (near the front of the brain) and left amygdala (at the centre of the brain, near the top of the brain stem), implying that these are the brain areas where metaphors are normally processed. Instead, schizophrenia patients showed a decreased activation in the temporal suculus (an area ascending from the low central brain towards the back of the head). Researcher Martin Jáni, from the Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland said:

"Previous researchers studied brain areas that are connected to impaired metaphor understanding in schizophrenia, so comparing metaphors with literal statements. However, by adding the absurd punchline, we were able to explore the stage at which the deficit occurs. We also used everyday metaphors, which would be easily understood.

We found that biggest changes in brain activity in schizophrenia patients occur during the basic stage of metaphor processing, that is when a person needs to recognize there is incongruity between the opening sentence and the punchline. These activated areas of the brain are very different to the brain areas activated in healthy patients, as if the brain is struggling to find a compensatory mechanism, to bypass the circuits normally used to understand metaphor".

It's likely that this inability to understand the sort of conventional metaphors we use in everyday life is socially isolating for people with schizophrenia. While this at the research stage, our hope is that we can develop practical skills in patients with schizophrenia - and indeed the people who know them - which will help them understand the speech the way it was intended"

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Researcher decodes the brain to help patients with mental illnesses

Approximately 1 in 5 adults in the United States experience mental illness in a given year. Severe mental illnesses cause the brain to have trouble dealing with cognitively effortful states, like focusing attention over long periods of time, discriminating between two things that are difficult to tell apart, and responding quickly to information that is coming in fast.

A new study, published in the Journal of Neural Engineering, could improve patients' abilities to manage symptoms of mental illness.

Previous research demonstrated that applying electrical stimulation at just the right time helps the brain of a patient with a severe mental illness work through difficult cognitive tasks. However, it was done in a laboratory setting, free from the complexities of real-world activities of daily living.

Senior author Alik Widge, MD, Ph.D, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Minnesota Medical School, and investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), consisting of researchers from Brown University and MGH, including co-senior author David Borton, PhD, Assistant Professor of Engineering at Brown University, were the first to analyze patients' brain activity to detect precisely when a patient is focused and their attention is fully devoted, compared to when he or she is 'at rest'. They studied patients who were undergoing surgery for severe epilepsy, who already had measurement electrodes in the relevant brain areas.

The study, which was part of DARPA's SUBNETS program, found that specific signatures and algorithms can be used to tell when someone is focused and really trying to do a task that is hard for them, indicating that they could benefit from an electrical stimulation to get an extra push.

The study also demonstrates that there is no single region of the brain that can tell when someone is in this focused, effortful state. In order to detect when the patient started to focus on a cognitive task, the researchers had to analyze the information at the network level. It was essential to look at how the activity of one region coordinated with the activity of another.

"Using the same neural signals that could drive adaptive deep brain stimulation, we have shown that it is possible to detect mental states that might be amenable to closed-loop control," said lead author Nicole Provenza, MS, PhD candidate, Brown University. "While further research is necessary to generalize our findings to real-world applications, we hope that this work will ultimately contribute to the development of more effective brain stimulation therapies for mental illness."

"We want to take a patient-centered approach to treating mental illness," explained Widge. "The job of a stimulator is not to take away the symptoms; its job is to help the patient manage his or her symptoms. It gives the power back to the individual and just gives them a little extra help when they need it."

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