Training your brain to be more creative: brain functional and structural changes induced by divergent thinking training - PubMed (original) (raw)

. 2016 Oct;37(10):3375-87.

doi: 10.1002/hbm.23246. Epub 2016 May 9.

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Training your brain to be more creative: brain functional and structural changes induced by divergent thinking training

Jiangzhou Sun et al. Hum Brain Mapp. 2016 Oct.

Abstract

Creativity is commonly defined as the ability to produce something both novel and useful. Stimulating creativity has great significance for both individual success and social improvement. Although increasing creative capacity has been confirmed to be possible and effective at the behavioral level, few longitudinal studies have examined the extent to which the brain function and structure underlying creativity are plastic. A cognitive stimulation (20 sessions) method was used in the present study to train subjects and to explore the neuroplasticity induced by training. The behavioral results revealed that both the originality and the fluency of divergent thinking were significantly improved by training. Furthermore, functional changes induced by training were observed in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and posterior brain regions. Moreover, the gray matter volume (GMV) was significantly increased in the dACC after divergent thinking training. These results suggest that the enhancement of creativity may rely not only on the posterior brain regions that are related to the fundamental cognitive processes of creativity (e.g., semantic processing, generating novel associations), but also on areas that are involved in top-down cognitive control, such as the dACC and DLPFC. Hum Brain Mapp 37:3375-3387, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Keywords: DLPFC; dACC; divergent thinking; neural plasticity.

© 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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Figures

Figure 1

Figure 1

Cognitive stimulation training improved divergent thinking performance. Participants had significantly higher fluency and originality after training both in the fMRI tasks and in the DT tasks. [Color figure can be viewed in the online issue, which is available at

http://wileyonlinelibrary.com

.]

Figure 2

Figure 2

Behavioral data during the training sessions.

Figure 3

Figure 3

Activity patterns in the contrasts, AUT > OCT (red) and AUT < OCT (blue), before and after training. All effects were corrected by the cluster‐level FWE (voxel level uncorrected P <0.001), corrected P < 0.05. [Color figure can be viewed in the online issue, which is available at

http://wileyonlinelibrary.com

.]

Figure 4

Figure 4

Increased activity (post‐test minus pre‐test) during the fMRI tasks. (A) Brain areas that showed increased activity in the TG. Significant levels for correction were set at P < 0.05, small volume corrected. (B) Bar charts displayed the average amount of activation or deactivation. [Color figure can be viewed in the online issue, which is available at

http://wileyonlinelibrary.com

.]

Figure 5

Figure 5

Structural changes. The gray matter volume increased in response to cognitive stimulation training. [Color figure can be viewed in the online issue, which is available at

http://wileyonlinelibrary.com

.]

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