Where in the brain is creativity? The fallacy of a creativity faculty in the brain

Abstract

The neuroscience of creativity is built on a tacit and near universal assumption that is false. Paradoxically, this is not contentious; once made explicit, the assumption is readily conceded as false. Psychology regards creativity as made up of many complex, multifaceted, and varied cognitive and emotional processes deployed across many different domains. But we instead think of, and treat, creativity as if it were a single, separate, cohesive, and discrete thing—as in, Einstein had it. In a straightforward extension of this fallacy, cognitive neuroscientists have looked for uniquely creative cognition that (1) is distinct from all other kinds of cognition and (2) has a proprietary neural substrate. In other words, a standalone and monolithic creativity faculty in the brain that manages only creativity and all creativity. First, this paper brings into sharp focus the nature and ubiquity of this fallacy. It then outlines the alternative theoretical position that is (1) based on fundamental neural principles and (2) predicated on taking seriously the concept of creativity as complex and diverse. Like morality or secretiveness, it holds that creativity does not exist as its own, specialized entity in the brain. Instead, its neurocognitive mechanisms are distributed, embedded, and varied; that is, creativity is everywhere and multiply realizable.

Full text

Frontiers in Psychology 01 frontiersin.org
Where in the brain is creativity?
The fallacy of a creativity faculty
in the brain
ArneDietrich *
Department of Psychology, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon
The neuroscience of creativity is built on a tacit and near universal assumption
that is false. Paradoxically, this is not contentious; once made explicit, the
assumption is readily conceded as false. Psychology regards creativity as
made up of many complex, multifaceted, and varied cognitive and emotional
processes deployed across many dierent domains. But we instead think of,
and treat, creativity as if it were a single, separate, cohesive, and discrete thing—
as in, Einstein had it. In a straightforward extension of this fallacy, cognitive
neuroscientists have looked for uniquely creative cognition that (1) is distinct
from all other kinds of cognition and (2) has a proprietary neural substrate. In
other words, a standalone and monolithic creativity faculty in the brain that
manages only creativity and all creativity. First, this paper brings into sharp focus
the nature and ubiquity of this fallacy. It then outlines the alternative theoretical
position that is (1) based on fundamental neural principles and (2) predicated on
taking seriously the concept of creativity as complex and diverse. Like morality
or secretiveness, it holds that creativity does not exist as its own, specialized
entity in the brain. Instead, its neurocognitive mechanisms are distributed,
embedded, and varied; that is, creativity is everywhere and multiply realizable.
KEYWORDS
alternative uses test, consciousness, divergent thinking, multiple realizability,
neuroscience, default mode network, reification, neuroimaging
1 Introduction
Consider a few soundbites that could have been overheard in a local bar, business meeting,
or discussion among friends: “Creativity is associated with intrinsic curiosity and playfulness;
creative people are more sensitive and observant; they tolerate ambiguity better and maintain
a child-like naiveté; creativity is enhanced by mindfulness, exercise, and keeping an open
mind; creative thinking needs a positive attitude and the ability to perceive complex patterns;
there is a thin line between madness and creative genius; creative personalities are not afraid
of taking risks; they are oen chaotic and rebellious but at the same time self-critical and
reective; mindwandering facilitates creative insights in the unconscious mind.”
To forestall any impression that the present article targets claims circulating in the
general public, consider a sampler from recent neuroscience articles: “… the ability to
generate creative ideas is characterized by increased functional connectivity between the
inferior prefrontal cortex and the default network …” (Beaty etal., 2014). “… the highly
creative group utilized bilateral prefrontal regions when doing the Brick task, while the low
creative group used functions predominantly on the le side” (Carlsson etal., 2000). “But,
once the brain is suciently focused, the cortex needs to relax in order to seek out the more
remote association in the right hemisphere, which will provide the insight” (Lehrer, 2008).
OPEN ACCESS
EDITED BY
Stephan Schleim,
University of Groningen, Netherlands
REVIEWED BY
Fernando Giraldez,
Universidad Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Anna Abraham,
University of Georgia, UnitedStates
*CORRESPONDENCE
Arne Dietrich
arne.dietrich@aub.edu.lb
RECEIVED 22 January 2024
ACCEPTED 16 April 2024
PUBLISHED 30 April 2024
CITATION
Dietrich A (2024) Where in the brain is
creativity? The fallacy of a creativity faculty in
the brain.
Front. Psychol. 15:1373299.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1373299
COPYRIGHT
© 2024 Dietrich. This is an open-access
article distributed under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution License
(CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction
in other forums is permitted, provided the
original author(s) and the copyright owner(s)
are credited and that the original publication
in this journal is cited, in accordance with
accepted academic practice. No use,
distribution or reproduction is permitted
which does not comply with these terms.
TYPE Hypothesis and Theory
PUBLISHED 30 April 2024
DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1373299

Dietrich 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1373299
Frontiers in Psychology 02 frontiersin.org
“EEG Alpha power increases during creative ideation …” (Fink and
Benedek, 2014). “… insight culminates with a sharp increase in
neural activity in the right anterior temporal lobe at the moment of
insight” (Kounios and Beeman, 2014). “… when participants were
being creative, as opposed to uncreative, there was an increase in
activity in the prefrontal areas, including bilateral medial frontal gyri
and le anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)” (Howard-Jones et al.,
2005). “… general, creative idea generation (i.e., divergent thinking)
was associated with extended activations in the le prefrontal cortex
and the right medial temporal lobe, and with deactivation of the
right temporoparietal junction.” … “We conclude that the process of
idea generation can begenerally understood as a state of focused
internally-directed attention involving controlled semantic retrieval”
(Benedek etal., 2014). “… individual creativity, as measured by the
divergent thinking test, is mainly related to the regional gray matter
of brain regions known to beassociated with the dopaminergic
system, congruent with the idea that dopaminergic physiological
mechanisms are associated with individual creativity” (Takeuchi
et al., 2010). “A region of le frontopolar cortex, previously
associated with creative integration of semantic information,
exhibited increased activity and functional connectivity to anterior
cingulate gyrus and right frontopolar cortex during cued
augmentation of state creativity” (Green etal., 2015).
While one might betempted to quibble with one or the other
specic claim, this article submits that they are all false, along with a
seemingly innite number of other such proclamations about the
nature of creativity.
2 The creativity faculty
So, where is the error here? ere are, in fact, two separate errors,
made in succession. e rst is the creativity faculty fallacy, the
mistaken thinking that creativity is its own and unied thing. e
second is the false category formation, the habit of prematurely linking
this creativity faculty, in its entirety, to one side of a specic ability,
characteristic, trait, behavior, mental process, or neural system, despite
evidence that creative acts can just as well come into existence
otherwise (Dietrich, 2015, 2019a).
Note that these opening statements are all universal claims, made
about creativity as a whole. In consequence, they inherently contain
two assumptions about the nature of creativity: that it is (1) an
independent and (2) a homogeneous entity. e false category
formation is a claim about how this entity then relates to other
phenomena, a matter briey highlighted in a later section. is
current section focuses on bringing to the fore the tacit assumption of
a standalone and monolithic creativity faculty, because any lack of
clarity here, at the level of the psychological construct, is prone to lead
to mistakes once it is applied to neuroscience.
In a view approaching unanimity, psychology regards creativity as
made up of many complex, multifaceted, and varied cognitive and
emotional processes deployed across many dierent domains (e.g.,
Torrance, 1974; Weisberg, 1993; Runco, 1999; Ward et al., 1999;
Dietrich, 2004; Abraham, 2013, 2018; Baer, 2016). What scientists,
designers, artists, engineers, entrepreneurs, or ballet dancers do to
becreative in their respective spheres are so distinct that these varied
activities cannot be subsumed under the category of “creativity.”
Creative behavior manifests itself in the human population in such a
variety of ways that its underlying cognitive and neural processes must
necessarily bevery diverse.
Despite this appreciation of the complexity and diversity of
creativity at the theoretical level, this is not how wethink of, and treat,
creativity in practice, either in the public arena or in the professional
eld. Instead, weconceive of, and empirical investigate, creativity as if
it were a single, separate, cohesive, and discrete thing. In personality
and social psychology, for instance, it is its own character trait that
exists apart from all other traits (e.g., Amabile, 1983; Eysenck, 1993;
Gardner, 1993; Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). Steve Jobs, for instance, was
considered creative. e claim is not that hehad a part, aspect, feature,
or type of creativity, nor is his innovative output understood in terms
of a mix of other qualities, processes, or abilities.
In cognitive psychology, the explicit rationale of empirical work is
to investigate creativity head-on, as a sovereign cognitive unit in its
own right and with its own boundaries (e.g., Guilford, 1967; Smith
etal., 1995; Boden, 1998; Runco, 2004). is rationale is reected in
the experimental methods.
Following our folk psychology understanding of creativity, early
theories in the 50s and 60s presumed that creativity is an autonomous,
domain-general capacity or talent. is was operationalized with the
notion of divergent thinking, dened as the ability to generate multiple
solutions to an open-ended problem (Guilford, 1950, 1967), which led
to the subsequent development of several standardized psychometric
instruments, such as the Remote Associates Test (RAT; Mednick,
1962) or the Torrance Test of Creative inking (TTCT; Torrance,
1974). While the general-capacity theories have been replaced in favor
of the view that creativity is complex, multifaceted, and varied,
divergent thinking tests have thrived and come to dominate the
experimental approach to creativity research, most likely because they
are easy to use and readily available (Baer, 2022).
Bracketing for now that these ‘creativity tests’ have been shown for
over half a century to lack ecological validity, certainly in the severely
shortened version used for neuroimaging (e.g., orndike, 1963;
Crockenberg, 1972; Wallach, 1976; Sternberg, 1985; Plucker, 1999;
Ward etal., 1999; Kerr and Gagliardi, 2003; Silvia etal., 2008; Arden
etal., 2010; Dietrich and Kanso, 2010; Sawyer, 2012; Abraham, 2013;
Weisberg, 2013; Baer, 2016 for a detailed overview, see Baer, 2022), the
divergent thinking paradigm is unambiguously committed to a
creativity faculty because its logical foundation rests on establishing
two distinct mental categories, creative and noncreative. Based on
these two groups, stimuli, or conditions, a series of statistical contrasts
is performed and the results are discussed. As the explicit intention is
to separate out the creative dimension distinguishing the two mental
classes, this paradigm, by design, controls for all cognitive and
emotional processes known to operate in the mind, such as, for
instance, fear, working memory, perception, theory of mind, top-down
attention, emotional regulation, or a dozen other well-dened
processes. As a matter of consequence, this experimental approach
inherently leads to the investigation of creativity as a sovereign
mental faculty.
To briey anticipate a later discussion, the alternative approach,
of course, would beto fully dissolve this mental unit into the same
mental processes with which cognitive psychology conceptualizes and
operationalizes all other higher-order mental faculties (Dietrich,
2019b). In contrasting these approaches further, the creativity faculty
assumption essentially asks the question of what creative cognition is,
and nothing else. In holding all other thinking processes constant, it

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necessarily looks for a specialized mechanism that integrates
noncreative input and computes uniquely creative output. e
alternative approach would fully collapse creativity into the well-
known and well-dened units of cognitive psychology until it
disappears into the brain’s standard information-processing system.
ere would beno residue containing or being creativity itself; there
would beno further, specialized thing to nd.
Similar thinking exists for the construct of consciousness. In the
study of consciousness, this is best illustrated by the distinction
between the easy and the hard problems (Chalmers, 1996). Following
one line of argument, the easy problems are mental phenomena—
attention, emotion, memory etc.—that lend themselves to scientic
inquiry and are thus solvable in principle. In contrast, there is a hard
problem—consciousness itself—which is something else, a thing unto
itself. is problem cannot besolved, not even in principle, using the
scientic method, since it is of a dierent kind. Nearly all of the
famous thought experiments in the study of consciousness—
philosophical zombie, qualia, Chinese room, Mary the color scientist,
etc.—revolve around the assumption that consciousness is a discrete
and separable thing (Blackmore, 2005; Dietrich, 2007b). Naturally, this
position raises the question of what the nature of this further thing is.
e opposing view is that consciousness cannot beseparated from
other mental processes. e hard problem is simply a collection of
easy problems that solves itself as wemake progress on these easy
problems. By breaking down consciousness into its components from
the outset and distributing it throughout the information-processing
system, the hard problem, as a separate and separable entity,
disappears (Dennett, 1996).
Since its introduction and critique (e.g., Fodor, 1983; Churchland,
1988), the concept of modularity is well established in psychology and
neuroscience. A broad consensus has emerged in psychology holding
that abstract, higher-order, and complex psychological constructs do
not exist as discrete, monolithic cognitive faculties. While memory,
attention, or perception remain common units of folk psychology,
cognitive psychologists have long broken them up into types and
subcomponents and developed empirical methods to investigate
them. For instance, Posner and Petersen (1990) break up attention
into several separate processes, such as engaging, disengaging, and
shiing, while Baddeley (1986, 2000) divides working memory into
the phonological loop, the visuo-spatial sketchpad, the episodic buer,
and the central executive. Accordingly, experimental research is no
longer set up to study such folk psychology concepts directly and in
their entirety.
is has not happened in the case of creativity. e initial idea of
divergent thinking, for instance, has never been developed further. It
is a vague compound construct, and no one, since its conception over
half a century ago, has made a coherent proposal of what is in it in
terms of the kinds of individual mental processes for which psychology
has valid psychometric tools and that can bedetected by neuroimaging
technology, such as top-down attention, semantic retrieval, inhibition,
shiing, cognitive control, spreading activation, feature detection, or
a dozen other well-dened processes. Divergent thinking simply
serves today, as it did then, as a stand-in for (the whole of) creativity,
and the rationale and makeup of the testing instruments as well as the
testing procedures elevate it to a sovereign cognitive entity in its own
right and with its own boundaries. Creativity, therefore, continues to
be treated, in theory and practice, as a standalone and
monolithic faculty.
3 The creativity faculty in the brain
A key factor that has been kept clamped so far is the level of
description. e degree of validity of a construct as an explanatory
tool depends on the level of description at which it attempts to
function (Bechtel, 2009). Creativity is commonly dened and
measured not in terms of a mental event but of a product—something
novel and useful (Runco, 2004) to which “surprising” is sometimes
added (Boden, 2004). A patent oce deems creative inventions, a
buyer appraises paintings, an audience evaluates performances, and
the Nobel Foundation awards scientic discoveries. e idea that there
is a capacity or mental process that goes along with the creative
product is an abstract and hypothetical construct. is is
uncontroversial psychology, along with the consensus that there is a
near endless number of ways humans can produce a creative product.
e matter becomes a fallacy when the abstract and hypothetical
construct is mistaken for a real and denite entity. is fallacy of
concreteness and illusionary unity is known as the reication fallacy
(e.g., Boag, 2011). Reication is the process of taking an ambiguous
and abstract concept and turning it into a tangible and concrete
thing. As can beseen by the claims about (the whole of) creativity
cited in the beginning of this paper as well as the empirical
methodology of establishing a categorical distinction between
creative and noncreative, “thing-making” is the default paradigm of
creativity research. And once in place, researchers tend to ignore the
complexities contained in the concept and begin to treat it as a
homogeneous whole.
At the macroscopic level of human interactions in society, the folk
conception of creativity as a discrete and holistic psychological entity
might have some utility. Even if reied, a creativity faculty can still
meaningfully inform a research program on creativity—at that level.
Some might argue, therefore, that reication can betolerated at that
level of description, if the limits of the construct remain
properly conceptualized.
But this fallacy becomes deadly when it is applied, tout court, to
lower levels of description. Departing from a reied, bona de
creativity faculty, cognitive neuroscientists have simply adopted the
invalid, but readily available, testing methodology used in cognitive
psychology and added a physiological measurement as a dependent
variable to it, such as EEG or fMRI. is has led to the same, direct
creative-vs-noncreative contrasts, except that such a brain study
inherently looks for a one-to-one match between the creativity faculty
and the neurocognitive substrates exclusively dedicated to it. Aer all,
creative thinking is obviously special and there must besomething that
makes it so.
It is helpful to esh out what this course of action commits us to
at the level of the brain. In both rationale and methodology, it assumes,
from the outset, the existence of uniquely creative cognition—
something specic in the brain that unites creative behavior across all
the widely dierent domains, contexts, and instantiations, from a
modern dance performance to ideas in quantum physics. At the
cognitive level, a creativity faculty would imply some sort of special
cognitive process or processes not associated with any other mental
capacity. It could also bethe computation itself, the set of rules and
permissible transformations that is supposed to perform the
specialized creative computation. At the neural level, this mapping
would imply some sort of corresponding marker of brain activity that
manages only creativity and all creativity.

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Given that such a research program violates the consensus view
that creativity is complex and diverse, and thus supported by many
dierent cognitive and emotional processes housed all over the brain,
it is not surprising that a creativity faculty has so far neither appeared
anywhere in the brain, nor are there any coherent theoretical proposals
for what its nature might be.
e fallacy of a standalone creativity faculty in the brain can
perhaps best be seen by drawing on the historical parallel of
phrenology (Dietrich, 2015). In the 1800s, Francis Gall associated 27
mental faculties with areas on the skull, including centers for
mirthfulness, combativeness, marvelousness, secretiveness, and the
organ of philoprogenitiveness (love for osprings). e error comes
into clear view here because modern personality theory no longer
considers these psychological constructs entities. And, with reication
exploded, the fallacy of a matching unit at the cognitive or neural
levels of description is also laid bare. Secretiveness simply does not
refer to a real thing in the brain.
A curious disconnect in the eld is that, once drawn out like this,
creativity neuroscientists typically waste no time explicitly renouncing
any allegiance to a creativity faculty in the brain. Undoubtedly as a
result of the association with phrenology, they would climb over one
another to put ideological distance between themselves and this
fallacy. Nevertheless, virtually any study in the cognitive neuroscience
literature betrays a commitment to it, both in terms of rationale and
methodology (for a few representative examples, see Carlsson etal.,
2000; Howard-Jones etal., 2005; Takeuchi etal., 2010; Baird etal.,
2012; Benedek etal., 2014; Fink and Benedek, 2014; Kounios and
Beeman, 2014; Green etal., 2015; Beaty etal., 2016).
Indeed, the entire rationale of current neuroimaging studies of
creativity rests on the premise that there actually is such a thing as a
creativity faculty and that this thing exists, as such, in the brain.
Logically inherent in this rationale is that there must besome sort of
contrasting “normal” thinking occurring in the brain—the control
condition, in other words—to which an extra something—the creative
bit—is added to make the sparkling dierence. Looking for it in the
brain just makes plain sense (notice the singular). With the creativity
faculty rmly in place, the experimental procedure is then deliberately
designed with the intention of isolating this creative bit and detecting
it with neuroimaging tools. It does so by making a series of direct
creative versus noncreative contrasts with the goal of identifying (1)
uniquely creative cognition that is distinct from all other kinds of
cognition and that (2) has an exclusive neural signature, beit a brain
region, a neural network, connectivity, or any other substrate system
proprietary to creativity (Figure1).
Even if we bracket for a moment the mountain of evidence
showing that the current psychometric instruments in the eld, such
as the Alternative Uses Test, do not possesses any demonstrated
ecological validity (for a detailed critique, see Baer, 2022), any nding
from this neuroscience paradigm should beconsidered an artifact of
misguided theorizing. It simply follows from the complexity and
diversity inherent in the psychological construct of creativity that
there must be a multitude of very dierent, and perhaps even
opposing, mental processes and neural instantiations that can possibly
result in the creation of something novel and useful. But as the
sweeping generalizations in the opening statements show, it is one
thing to commit to a view and quite another to go along with all the
consequences that come with it. When wefactor in complexity, as
wemust, wereally have to factor it in.
Again, other areas of cognitive neuroscience such as attention or
memory can serve as examples of good practices (Barrett, 2009; Satel
and Lilienfeld, 2013). e folk concept of memory, for instance, has
undergone a radical conceptual change throughout the twentieth
century and today no cognitive neuroscientist would present a
neuroimaging study on (the whole of) memory or draw conclusions
mirroring the quotes from the beginning of this paper. Indeed, types
or subcomponents of memory, such as episodic memory and working
memory, are decomposed ever further with ever more specic
cognitive tests, and there are multiple meta-analyses showing
cumulative and congruent insights (e.g., Chen et al., 2017; Emch
etal., 2019).
In a more recent example, moral neuroscience shied soon aer
its founding from a moral faculty assumption and a direct moral-vs-
nonmoral experimental approach to investigating the contribution of
standard mental processes to moral judgment (Young and Dungan,
2012). at is, rather than controlling for nonmoral dimensions in an
experiment, researchers studied them directly, by, for instance,
comparing dierent types of moral stimuli in order to discern which
mental processes and neural substrates play a role in which type of
moral reasoning.
4 The false category formation
e rst error in the statements at the beginning of the article is
the creativity faculty fallacy, which results from the failure to
decompose creativity into the information-processing units that make
up the standard knowledge base of psychology and neuroscience. e
second error is the false category formation. e latter error results
from the failure to carve nature at its joints. It occurs subsequent to
the creativity faculty fallacy and is committed by ascribing to (the
whole of) creativity one pole of various bipolar dimensions, ignoring
the other end. Indeed, it is the second error, the false category
formation, that fully exposes the rst error, the creativity faculty
fallacy, because without this second step, the reication process
underlying the “thing-making” of creativity would bedicult to
detect otherwise.
Divergent thinking serves as the canonical example. By common
consent, which is also now reected in items of the TTCT (Cramond
and Kim, 2009), one can also becreative with the exact opposite
Normal
Thinking
The
Creative
Bit
FIGURE1
The creative bit. A creativity faculty in the brain that manages only
creativity and all creativity. For the current neuroimaging paradigm to
make sense, this entity (1) must exist as a separate and separable
thing, (2) beextractable by the psychometric method, (3) have a
proprietary neural code that (4) is visible to the neuroimaging
technology wecurrently have. For creativity, none of this probably
exists.

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Frontiers in Psychology 05 frontiersin.org
process: convergent thinking (Weisberg, 1999; Runco, 2004; Dietrich,
2007a; Simonton, 2015). Standard examples might be Edison’s
“empirical dragnet” method that yielded a total of 1,093 patents;
Watson and Crick’s disciplined approach of testing the stability of
DNA base pairs; Bach’s assembly-line tactic of composing hundreds
of cantatas; or the countless times weconverged on creative solutions
by methodically eliminating alternatives?
is raises the obvious question of what, exactly, is creative about
divergent thinking. If both divergent and convergent thinking can lead
to both creative and non-creative thinking, the concept of divergent
thinking is incapable of isolating the subject matter of interest –
creativity! In short, the use of divergent thinking as a proxy for creative
thinking is theoretically incoherent. e treatment and the control
condition cannot contain the same variable.
Like the creativity faculty fallacy, the false category formation is
ubiquitous. A selected list of the most common claims of what is
supposed to be associated with (the whole of) creativity might
bedivided into processes (divergent thinking, defocused attention,
latent inhibition, intelligence, imagination, intuition, remote
associations, lateral thinking, cognitive dissonance, incubation, etc.),
states of consciousness (REM sleep, madness, daydreaming,
mindfulness, psychedelic drugs, ow, unconscious thinking, etc.), or
brain activity (right brains, prefrontal cortex, low arousal, alpha
synchrony, default mode network, network connectivity, etc.)
(Mednick, 1962; DeBono, 1968; Singer, 1975; Jamison, 1993;
Martindale, 1995, 1999; Schooler and Melcher, 1995; Boden, 1998;
Carlsson etal., 2000; Pfenninger and Shubik, 2001; Carson etal., 2003;
Wagner etal., 2004; Howard-Jones etal., 2005; Dijksterhuis, 2006;
Baird etal., 2012; Jung etal., 2013; Fink and Benedek, 2014; Kounios
and Beeman, 2014; Green etal., 2015; Beaty etal., 2016; Chrysikou,
2018; Nikolaidis and Barbey, 2018).
Paradoxically, it is uncontroversial in the eld that their
opposites—focused attention, “ordinary” consciousness, convergent
thinking, for instance—or their invariability can also besources of
creative behavior (e.g., Weisberg, 1999; Dietrich, 2015; Simonton,
2015). In addition, all these processes, states of consciousness, and
brain activity pattern are also involved in non-creative cognition. e
default mode network, for instance, has been linked to nearly
everything by now from stimulus-independent thought, stimulus
dependent thought, social cognition, mind-wandering, or self-
referential thinking (e.g., Legrand and Ruby, 2009). Regardless of how
strongly the association to creativity might feel, processes such as
intuition, incubation, insight, divergent thinking, or remote
association can produce non-creative outcomes, reinforcing the
conclusion that such simple, a priori divisions are instances of false
category formations.
e false category formation is a powerful illusion. Such quick and
simple associations seduce us into thinking that wehave done all the
theorizing work that can bedone, that wecan stop, when, in fact,
we have solved nothing. An easy way to break the back of this
comforting but misleading habit is to simply ask ourselves a few
straightforward, follow-up questions each time we fall prey to it:
What, exactly, is creative about it? How is creativity linked to, say,
intuition? For what kinds of creativity might the opposite betrue? In
which situations does it not apply? What domains are included, which
excluded? Since the associated phenomenon also plays a role in
noncreative thinking, what aspect of it makes it uniquely creative?
What such an exercise would reveal is that, upon further inspection,
virtually no claim survives closer scrutiny if applied to creativity as a
whole. is should tell us, in turn, that weneed to go back to work on
our understanding of creativity.
e lack of such a line of probing questions is likely also the reason
why falsication has failed in the eld. For any one claim, instances of
creativity are easy to nd, and, without a follow-up, none is ever retired or
leads to a decomposition of the multifaceted concept of creativity. is has
generated a highly fragmented literature (e.g., Arden etal., 2010; Dietrich
and Kanso, 2010; Sawyer, 2011; Yoruk and Runco, 2014; Wu etal., 2015;
Abraham, 2018; Cogdell-Brooke etal., 2020). To give two examples of
this deeply self-contradictory literature, creativity—again, without
qualifying it any further—is said to beassociated with mental disorders
(e.g., Jamison, 1993; Kaufman, 2005), a claim that lives happily side by side
in the literature with its opposite, that is, creativity is accompanied by
psychological wellbeing (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Dietrich, 2014) and
positive thinking (Seligman, 2002). Creativity is also said to belinked to
low arousal (Martindale, 1999), which cannot bereconciled with creative
acts in high-pressure situations, such as the imaginative ways in which
NASA engineers solved the problems of the otherwise doomed Apollo 13
mission or a creative move in the last seconds of a basketball game to beat
the buzzer. One can do this back-and-forth with nearly all claims,
including, for example, attention, intuition, playfulness, working memory,
happiness, intelligence, inhibition, incubation mindwandering, states of
consciousness, drug states, prefrontal cortex activation, or dopamine.
In sum, the one-two punch of the creativity faculty fallacy
followed by the false category formation virtually ensures that
statements such as those at the beginning of the present paper are
false. Given the sheer varieties and complexities, in domains and
processes, in which humans can possibly generate creative products,
any association of creativity, as a reied and monolithic unit, to any
phenomenon is likely to befalse, irrespective of what specic claim is
being made. Creativity per se simply cannot belinked to any trait,
thing, characteristic, behavior, habit, mental process, or neural activity
in a straightforward manner.
5 What if creativity is fully integrated
in the brain?
Naturally, this leaves open the question of how else weshould think
about creativity. Creative achievements are so remarkable that there must
bea striking dierence, a place or mechanism that marks the crucial
moment when a creative idea jumps out from all the noise of the ordinary
mental buzz. e creativity faculty is such an intuitive way of thinking
about creative cognition that the fallacy is nearly impossible to shake. But
an examination of this intuition shows that it cannot nd a defensible
position within the information-processing theories of psychology and
neuroscience. Like other complex, higher-order psychological
phenomena—political conviction, goodness, or religious belief, for
instance—creativity does not exist as its own, specialized entity at the
cognitive or neural levels, despite seeming so at the psychological level.
A more capable candidate is the conception that the
neurocognitive mechanisms of creativity are distributed, embedded,
and varied; that is, creativity is everywhere and multiply realizable by
the standard functional units of cognitive neuroscience (Dietrich,
2015). e position follows, as a matter of consequence, from two
basic concepts in neuroscience—nonlinearity and modularity.
Nonlinearity refers to the understanding that the brain is a
dynamic information processor. In consequence, every neural circuit
or network that computes information must also produce novel

Dietrich 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1373299
Frontiers in Psychology 06 frontiersin.org
combinations, or variation, of that information. Indeed, novelty is an
inevitable outcome of a complex, nonlinear system. Novelty
production, then, is distributed in the brain (Dietrich, 2004).
Modularity refers to the understanding that the brain is organized
into specialized modules. In consequence, neural networks that
process specic content to yield “normative” combinations of that
content must also be the neural networks that generate creative
combinations of that content. at is, the recombination of bits and
pieces of content into novel congurations must come from the same
neural circuits that normally handle those bits and pieces of content.
e assumption of a further, independent module whose output is
separately added to a neural circuit to render its computation creative,
makes neither computational sense nor has any evidentiary basis.
Creative computation, then, is embedded (Dietrich, 2004). If painting,
math, and parking the car engage totally dierent brain areas and
processes, so should creative painting, creative math, and creative
car-parking. Creativity, in this view, is not a separate and separable
thing in the brain, but an emerging outcome of the brain’s standard
information-processing operations.
Finally, multiple realizability refers to the idea that creativity can
berealized by a wide variety of standard mental processes, properties,
states, events, neural mechanisms, or their combination. Indeed, the
combinatorial possibilities might bevast. For instance, some creative
products might come about in a state of low arousal, while others can
begenerated by high arousal or, indeed, no change in arousal levels at
all. Likewise, some creative thinking might require the engagement of
focused attention, while other forms might benet from more
mindwandering. Yet others need perhaps more episodic memory, or
ne motor skills, or more acetylcholine transmission, or a cognitive
restructuring. In short, there is likely an innumerable array of
coordinated patterns at several levels of the functional system of the
brain that could support the computation of a novel, useful, and
perhaps surprising outcome. And this is not even accounting for the
fact that real-world creative behavior is temporarily extended,
requiring many dierent steps, each requiring very dierent processes
and substrates, before a creative end product sees the light of day.
ere is neuropsychological evidence that is consistent with the
idea of multiple realizability. For instance, there are several studies
showing that brain damage does not impair creativity, with artists
continuing to be creative despite relevant brain impairments
(Bogousslavsky, 2005, 2006). Similarly, using the arts (e.g., melodic
intonation) for rehabilitating patients with aphasia points toward
multiple routes for creativity (Norton etal., 2009).
Fully disciplined, this conception on the neural basis of creativity
is bad news for a localizationist position and/or uniqueness
assumption on creativity. If creativity, as argued here, is not its own
specialized thing at the cognitive or neural levels, but distributed,
embedded, and multiply realizable by the brain’s ordinary functional
components, what the current neuroimaging template based on the
creativity faculty assumption would nd, depends only on how
wedecide to look. Besides there being no uniquely creative cognition
or neural code, each purported “creativity test” would only implicate
its own, idiosyncratic set of cognitive processes and neural activity.
While the description of one such pattern might still bea worthwhile
end, it would have no bearing on the next “creative task,” let alone
apply to creativity as a whole. Bracketing again the lack of test validity
for a moment, this inference is supported by the highly variegated
results of the eld (e.g., Dietrich and Kanso, 2010; Sawyer, 2011). More
recent meta-analyses based on activation likelihood estimation (ALE),
if taken together (e.g., Boccia etal., 2015; Wu etal., 2015; Pidgeon
etal., 2016; Cogdell-Brooke etal., 2020), also show this absence of the
cumulative character that is so impressive in other elds of cognitive
neuroscience, such as (the various processes comprising) attention
(Posner and Petersen, 1990), memory (Gazzaniga and Mangun, 2014),
or morality (Young and Dungan, 2012).
6 Recommendations
How, then, should the neuroscience of creativity proceed? How
should werethink our experimental approach to creativity? Here are
some recommendations that arise from adopting a conception of
creativity as fully integrated into the brain’s information-
processing operations.
First is theory. In a view approaching unanimity in the eld, the
concept of creativity needs further theoretical development. But one
could hardly conclude that there is a necessity for theoretical
development from a perusal of the literature. Even when investigators
acknowledge the problem in their introductory remarks, studies
proceeds, as if the acknowledgment alone turns the water into wine,
using the same basic rationale and methodology that is essentially
unchanged since Guilford’s eorts in the 50s and 60s. Obviously, the
interpretations of the ndings from this divergent-thinking-test-plus-
neuroimaging paradigm have kept pace with current knowledge in
cognitive neuroscience—default mode network or connectivity—but
that is not the side of the equation that needs change and theory
development. Einstein once remarked to Heisenberg (as cited by
Fullbrook, 2012, p.20) “Whether you can observe a thing or not
depends on the theory youuse. It is theory which decides what can
beobserved.”
A neuroscience study claiming to present ndings on creativity
per se, even if the creativity faculty assumption is overtly denied by the
authors, will most certainly qualify as phrenology. Creativity
neuroscientists cannot run a study on creative thinking any more than
cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists can run a study on
thinking. Global statements about the nature of (the whole of)
creativity of the kind that opened the present paper are
illusion generators.
Second are types. In being more specic about theory
development, the obvious way to start making the neurocognitive
mechanisms of creativity more tractable is to parse creativity into
dierent subtypes. One recent eort (Dietrich, 2015, 2019b) proposes
to divide creativity into three distinct types, a deliberate mode, a
spontaneous mode, and a ow mode. To avoid the pitfalls of previous
such attempts, the three creativity types are explicitly dened and
delineated from one another based on the standard units of cognitive
psychology and neuroscience. By anchoring them in the existing
knowledge base, they are thus valid types in the sense that they can
betheoretically defended. A division into three subtypes can only
be regarded as a start, however. Eventually, creativity would
decompose fully into the same functional components that weuse to
operationalize all other complex, higher-order mental capacities, such
as attention, memory, or morality.
ird is approach. e integration conception of creativity defeats
a neuroscientic research program that is based on investigating (the
whole of) creativity directly, in a bipolar, yay-nay fashion. If a

Dietrich 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1373299
Frontiers in Psychology 07 frontiersin.org
neuroscience experiment is set up along the dimension of creative vs.
noncreative and a series of contrasts on the generated data set is
performed, the study unequivocally looks, as a matter of consequence,
for the brain’s creative bit, regardless of whether this proprietary entity
is a still undiscovered substrate or a unique pattern of known ones.
Inherent in this method is to treat all other cognitive and emotional
processes as confounds, which are thus held constant. In other words,
the mental processes that constitute the bedrock of cognitive
neuroscience are not seen as independent variables; they are only used
as outputs, or dependent variables. As stated above, advances in
neuroscience in recent decades have only been used to interpret the
ndings from this paradigm; they have not been used to contribute to
the theoretical development, or breakdown, of the concept of creativity
itself. Accordingly, experiments in creativity research should treat all
the standard cognitive and emotional processes of cognitive
neuroscience as likely inputs to (dierent types of) creative cognition.
Developments in the neuroscience of memory and, more recently,
morality can serve as instructive examples for the future direction of
the neuroscience of creativity.
Data availability statement
e original contributions presented in the study are included in
the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can bedirected
to the corresponding author.
Author contributions
AD: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original dra,
Conceptualization.
Funding
e author declares that no nancial support was received for the
research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Conflict of interest
e author declares that the research was conducted in the
absence of any commercial or nancial relationships that could
beconstrued as a potential conict of interest.
Publisher’s note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors
and do not necessarily represent those of their aliated organizations,
or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product
that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its
manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
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