The creative ability of a human brain represents perhaps the highest cognitive reach of 3.8 billion years of evolution. Human creativity has widely recognized value for learning and practice in the arts and sciences, and as a driver of the modern innovation economy. Because creativity has such broad and diverse impacts, the neuroscience of creativity is being pursued by a diverse set of researchers. At this very early stage, disconnected efforts are being undertaken separately and haphazardly by researchers siloed within sub-disciplines of psychology, education, industry, and clinical neuroscience. For the neuroscience of creativity to fulfill its considerable potential, there is a critical need for greater communication and cohesion among stakeholders. Hence, using this Special Issue on the neuroscience of creativity, we hope to bring together both expository and new empirical work from many leading creativity neuroscience labs and highlight research priorities for the field. The aim is for this issue to provide a beacon that helps coalesce a growing field around promising directions in order to catalyze basic understanding of how creativity happens in the brain and how to enhance it. We plan to include in the Special Issue neuroimaging empirical research, brief opinions, perspectives, and review articles. Our goal will be for the majority (~75%) of articles to be empirical papers, with the remaining devoted to other formats.
Non-exhaustive list of relevant topics for the neuroscience/neural correlates of:
creative thinking
changes in state creativity
interventions (e.g., neuromodulation/training) associated with creativity