Relating Inter-Individual Differences In Verbal Creative Thinking And Figural Creative Thinking To Cerebral Structures

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 creativity in different domain (verbal creativity or figural creativity) and regional gray matter volumes (GMVs) and white matter volumes (WMVs) respectively.In the present work, optimal voxel-based morphometry (VBM) was employed to identify the structure that correlates creativity in different domain, respectively,(measured by the verbal form of Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking or the figural 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. Figural creativity was found to be significantly positively correlated with regional GMV in the right middle frontal gyrus (MFG) and significantly negatively correlated with regional GMV in the left paracentral lobule (consisted of the left superior frontal gyrus and the left superior parietal lobule). The right MFG might be the nerve center of the response inhibition. It might involve interference suppression from spatial information, indicating that higher-level figural creativity individuals may demonstrate a greater cognitive flexibility, such as interference suppression. The left superior frontal gyrus (SFG) may involve execution control and monitoring of cognitive activities of other brain areas. Higher-level figural creativity individuals with a smaller GMV in the left SFG demonstrate a greater GMV in the right MFG, indicating that a diminished capacity of the left prefrontal cortex in Inhibitory controlling the activity of the right prefrontal cortex. Thus, the right prefrontal can get rid of the top-down control and be relatively independent. It can relatively free to play the role of cognitive function, resulting to a stronger figural creativity. In the other hand, the left superior parietal lobule (SPL) might involve spatial attention swift, maintaining covert attention, spatial information manipulation and rearrangement, which are essential to creative processing. It seems be contradictory to our result that figural creativity was negatively correlated with regional GMV in the left SPL. However, from the perspective of neurological efficiency, the relationship between figural creativity and regional GMV in the left SPL caught been interpreted like this:the invalid synaptic connections in the left SPL were "pruned". It facilitates the valid synaptic connections stronger, the nerve conduction Information more efficient, leading to promote the neurological computational efficiency of the left SPL. In addition, there were common cognitive component among creativity in different domain, such as cognitive control and attention swift. Meanwhile, the brain areas responsible for the common cognitive component in different creative domain were different. There also were separately specific components among creativity in different domain:the verbal manipulation skill in verbal creativity processing and the spatial manipulation and representation in figural creativity processing.