The Relationship Between Remote Sematic Connection And Creative Thinking

As the fountainhead and flowing water of human civilization, creativity is not only linked to the social development but also to almost all areas of our everyday life. Most studies regard creativity as a whole and explore the cognitive and neural mechanism of creativity though comparing the creative condition to uncreative condition. But several theory approaches such as geneplore model, four stages model, blind variation and selective retention theory, heuristic prototype theory are trying to divide creativity into different stages or elements. It is important to explore creativity though dividing it into different stages. Though it is still unclear that what are the specific elements of creativity, researchers hold the opinion that sematic process is an important element in creativity. Connecting remote concepts and generating original and useful combination is an important part of creativity. Creativity is related to the ability to build connection between dissimilar concepts which led to new ideas. Researchers explore sematic process in creativity for the point of view conceptual expansion and sematic distance and found that prefrontal cortex, temporal are related to select, control and integrate sematic knowledge.Based on previous theoretical research and experimental research, study one and study two explore the relationship between sematic connection and creativity and their neural mechanism. Study one explore the relationship between sematic connection and creativity and the neural mechanism of remote sematic connection. Total of 101 subjects take part in the experiment. They were measured by sematic connection task, creativity tendency questionnaire, and divergent thinking task. Firstly, we compared the accuracy of remote sematic connection and close sematic connection. Secondly, we explore the relationship between sematic connection and creativity (divergent thinking and creativity tendency). Then, we explore the structure basis of remote sematic connection. The result found that the accuracy of remote sematic connection is lower than close sematic connection; remote sematic connection is positively related to imagination (subscale of creativity tendency questionnaire); gray matter volume of lingual gyrus is positively related to remote sematic connection. These results revealed that remote sematic association is closely related to creativity, and lingual gyrus is its structure basis.Study two used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) method to explore the difference of brain activity between different sematic distances in a small sample (N=20). We analyze the activation pattern of sematic connection and the activation difference of remote sematic connection and close sematic connection. Result found that sematic connection was related to prefrontal cortex, inferior parietal lobe, and temporal lobe. Remote sematic connection condition (compare to close sematic connection condition) was related to activation in bilateral inferior frontal gyrus and posterior temporal lobe. These results revealed that remote sematic association is closely related to activation of lingual gyrus, bilateral inferior frontal gyrus and bilateral posterior temporal lobe.In conclusion, study one and study two revealed that remote semantic connection plays an important role in creativity; high creativity individuals can connect dissimilar concepts and generate useful product; prefrontal cortex, temporal lobe and lingual gyrus play an important role in sematic connection. These regions also involved in creativity process. Lingual gyrus may be related to sematic process on early stage, prefrontal cortex may be related to eliminating irrelevant information and breaking the existing set, temporal lobe may be related to activating information which related to vocabulary.