The Neural Basis Of Creative Imagery Generation

Creative imagination refers to the process of creating a new representation in one's mind according to a certain purpose or task.This process has an extremely significant influence on creative activity.The generation of great inventions in the field of science and typical images in the field of art,all need novel appearances can be produced in engineers' and artists' mind at first,so creative imagination is the key factor to develop creative activity smoothly.Without creative imagination,all of the creative activities are difficult to complete.Although a diverse range of research has been developed,the current researches about creative imagination almost focus on the development of the children's and adolescents' creative imagination,the measurement of creative imagination and the cognitive process of creative imagination.The neural basis of creative imagination is still unknown.In order to explore the neural basis of creative imagination,In this study functional magnetic resonance imaging(FMRI)was employed to compare the neural activity patterns of subjects under three different conditions: a creative imagination task,an ordinary imagination task and a baseline task.In creative imagination condition,the classic conceptual combination(wisniewski,1996)was adopted to generate novel appearances.In the creative imagination task,subjects were asked to generated novel appearances corresponding to the combination concepts,and in the ordinary imagination task,subjects were asked to generated existed appearances corresponding to the ordinary concepts.The baseline task consisted of six squares as experimental materials.We hypothesized that compared with ordinary imagination condition,creative imagination condition would lead to activations in the left prefrontal cortex of the brain,which is closely connected with creativity.Our FMRI data show that compared with ordinary imagination condition and baseline,creative imagination condition involved significant activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus BA47,BA45 and the left superior frontal gyrus BA6.We hold that the left inferior frontal gyrus BA47 participate in the process of weak semantic associative strength,the left inferior frontal gyrus BA45 is involved in the process of long distance semantic association,and the left superior frontal gyrus BA6 plays a crucial role in the process of mental image operation,those regions of the brain could be the key areas responsible for the generation of novelty mental imagery.The discovery of the creative imaginary neural activity model in this study has deepened the understanding of the creative activities and makes an important contribution to the creative activities in theory.