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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Rats have an imagination, new research suggests

As humans, we live in our thoughts: from pondering what to make for dinner to daydreaming about our last beach vacation.

Now, researchers at HHMI's Janelia Research Campus have found that animals also possess an imagination.

A team from the Lee and Harris labs developed a novel system combining virtual reality and a brain-machine interface to probe the rat's inner thoughts.

They found that, like humans, animals can think about places and objects that aren't right in front of them, using their thoughts to imagine walking to a location or moving a remote object to a specific spot.

Like humans, when rodents experience places and events, specific neural activity patterns are activated in the hippocampus, an area of the brain responsible for spatial memory. The new study finds rats can voluntarily generate these same activity patterns and do so to recall remote locations distant from their current position.

"The rat can indeed activate the representation of places in the environment without going there," says Chongxi Lai, a postdoc in the Harris and Lee Labs and first author of a paper describing the new findings. "Even if his physical body is fixed, his spatial thoughts can go to a very remote location."

This ability to imagine locations away from one's current position is fundamental to remembering past events and imagining possible future scenarios. Therefore, the new work shows that animals, like humans, possess a form of imagination, according to the study's authors.

"To imagine is one of the remarkable things that humans can do. Now we have found that animals can do it too, and we found a way to study it," says Albert Lee, formerly a Group Leader at Janelia and now an HHMI Investigator at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

A novel brain-machine interface

The project began nine years ago when Lai arrived at Janelia as a graduate student with an idea to test whether an animal could think. His advisor, Janelia Senior Fellow Tim Harris, suggested Lai walk down the hall to chat with Lee, whose lab had similar questions.

Together, the labs worked to develop a system to understand what animals are thinking -- a real-time "thought detector" that could measure neural activity and translate what it meant.

The system uses a brain-machine interface (BMI), which provides a direct connection between brain activity and an external device. In the team's system, the BMI produces a connection between the electrical activity in the rat's hippocampus and its position in a 360-degree virtual reality arena.

The hippocampus stores mental maps of the world involved in recalling past events and imagining future scenarios. Memory recall involves the generation of specific hippocampal activity patterns related to places and events. But no one knew whether animals could voluntarily control this activity.

The BMI allows the researchers to test whether a rat can activate hippocampal activity to just think about a location in the arena without physically going there -- essentially, detecting if the animal is able to imagine going to the location.

Probing the rat's inner thoughts

Once they developed their system, the researchers had to create the "thought dictionary" that would allow them to decode the rat's brain signals. This dictionary compiles what activity patterns look like when the rat experiences something -- in this case, places in the VR arena.

The rat is harnessed in the VR system, designed by Shinsuke Tanaka, a postdoc in the Lee Lab. As the rat walks on a spherical treadmill, its movements are translated on the 360-degree screen. The rat is rewarded when it navigates to its goal.

At the same time, the BMI system records the rat's hippocampal activity. The researchers can see which neurons are activated when the rat navigates the arena to reach each goal. These signals provide the basis for a real-time hippocampal BMI, with the brain's hippocampal activity translated into actions on the screen.

Next, the researchers disconnect the treadmill and reward the rat for reproducing the hippocampal activity pattern associated with a goal location. In this "Jumper" task -- named after a 2008 movie of the same name -- the BMI translates the animal's brain activity into motion on the virtual reality screen. Essentially, the animal uses its thoughts to navigate to the reward by first thinking about where they need to go to get the reward. This thought process is something humans experience regularly. For example, when we're asked to pick up groceries at a familiar store, we might imagine the locations we will pass along the way before we ever leave the house.

In the second task, the "Jedi" task -- a nod to Star Wars -- the rat moves an object to a location by thoughts alone. The rat is fixed in a virtual place but "moves" an object to a goal in the VR space by controlling its hippocampal activity, like how a person sitting in their office might imagine taking a cup next to the coffee machine and filling it with coffee. The researchers then changed the location of the goal, requiring the animal to produce activity patterns associated with the new location.

The team found that rats can precisely and flexibly control their hippocampal activity, in the same way humans likely do. The animals are also able to sustain this hippocampal activity, holding their thoughts on a given location for many seconds -- a timeframe similar to the one at which humans relive past events or imagine new scenarios.

"The stunning thing is how rats learn to think about that place, and no other place, for a very long period of time, based on our, perhaps naïve, notion of the attention span of a rat," Harris says.

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New evidence indicates patients recall death experiences after cardiac arrest

Up to an hour after their hearts had stopped, some patients revived by cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) had clear memories afterward of experiencing death and had brain patterns while unconscious linked to thought and memory, report investigators in the journal Resuscitation, published by Elsevier.

In a study led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, in cooperation with 25 mostly US and British hospitals, some survivors of cardiac arrest described lucid death experiences that occurred while they were seemingly unconscious. Despite immediate treatment, fewer than 10% of the 567 patients studied, who received CPR in the hospital, recovered sufficiently to be discharged. Four in 10 of patients who survived, however, recalled some degree of consciousness during CPR not captured by standard measures.

The study also found that in a subset of these patients, who received brain monitoring, nearly 40% had brain activity that returned to normal, or nearly normal, from a "flatline" state, at points even an hour into CPR. As captured by EEG, a technology that records brain activity with electrodes, the patients saw spikes in the gamma, delta, theta, alpha, and beta waves associated with higher mental function.

Survivors have long reported having heightened awareness and powerful, lucid experiences, say the study authors. These have included a perception of separation from the body, observing events without pain or distress, and a meaningful evaluation of their actions and relationships. This new work found these experiences of death to be different from hallucinations, delusions, illusions, dreams, or CPR-induced consciousness.

The study authors hypothesize that the "flatlined," dying brain removes natural inhibitory (braking) systems. These processes, known collectively as disinhibition, may open access to "new dimensions of reality," they say, including lucid recall of all stored memories from early childhood to death, evaluated from the perspective of morality. While no one knows the evolutionary purpose of this phenomenon, it "opens the door to a systematic exploration of what happens when a person dies."

Senior study author Sam Parnia, MD, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Medicine at NYU Langone Health and director of critical care and resuscitation research at NYU Langone, says, "Although doctors have long thought that the brain suffers permanent damage about 10 minutes after the heart stops supplying it with oxygen, our work found that the brain can show signs of electrical recovery long into ongoing CPR. This is the first large study to show that these recollections and brain wave changes may be signs of universal, shared elements of so-called near-death experiences."

Dr. Parnia adds, "These experiences provide a glimpse into a real, yet little understood dimension of human consciousness that becomes uncovered with death. The findings may also guide the design of new ways to restart the heart or prevent brain injuries and hold implications for transplantation."

Called the AWAreness during REsuscitation (AWARE)-II study -- it followed 567 men and women who suffered cardiac arrest during hospital stays between May 2017 and March 2020 in the United States and United Kingdom. Only hospitalized patients were enrolled to standardize the CPR and resuscitation methods used, as well as recording methods for brain activity. A subset of 85 patients received brain monitoring during CPR. Additional testimony from 126 community survivors of cardiac arrest with self-reported memories was also examined to provide greater understanding of the themes related to the recalled experience of death.

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