The flower, the gene, the brain and the creative process

Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is a stage of sleep that evolved in part to provide a privileged time in each day when the brain is disconnected from sensory input and freed of intentional, directed thought. The neurochemistry and neurophysiology of the brain during REM sleep is optimized for the exploration of normally ignored connections and associations within the brain’s vast repertoire of stored information. This includes changes in the activity of dorsolateral prefrontal, anterior cingulate, and medial orbital frontal cortices and the hippocampus, and reductions in norepinephrine and increases in acetylcholine in the cortex. This exploration of normally weak associations is critical to the creative process, and REM sleep can thus be considered a period of unbridled creativity. Much of this creative process is reflected in the content of dreams. Even without waking dream recall, changes within associative networks produced by the brain mechanisms of dream construction can leave these brain networks—and the individual—primed for reactivation at a later time, leading to the “discovery” of creative insights. Some, but not all, of these brain changes are also seen during periods of quiet rest with activation of the default mode network (DMN). When active, this network can likewise provide a state of enhanced creativity. Nevertheless, REM sleep and dreaming provide a protected two hours every day when creative processes run at full speed.

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Effects of Restorative Environments on Creativity in Case of Architecture Education

EAAE Annual Conference Proceedings ◽

10.51588/eaaeacp.65 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 242-257

Author(s):

Beste Sabir

Keyword(s):

Creative Process ◽

Quantitative Methods ◽

Free Association ◽

Architectural Education ◽

Architecture Education ◽

Restorative Environments ◽

Creative Processes ◽

Education Production ◽

Architectural Production ◽

The Brain

Creativity is a mental process, and cognitive psychology has focused on this subject, especially in the last century. While neuroscience concentrates on creative processes; new data emerges. When we consider architectural production as a creative process, the "free association REST thinking mode" focuses on the principle of free circulating thought, allowing relaxation and free-thinking to lead to new connections (creative moments) in the brain. The paper aims to focus on how spaces affect the creative process in case of architectural education, production, and creation. If REST mode — as relaxation, meditation, and awareness — supports the process of creation, how do restorative (calming, meditative) spaces and environments affect this process as well? With this approach, students will be questioned with quantitative methods to collect data about the effects of faculty and meditative environments on the creative process.

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Homo creators: deconstruction of the diverging way of thinking

Scientific bulletin of the Southern Institute of Management ◽

10.31775/2305-3100-2019-1-121-129 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 121-129

Author(s):

N. V. Chumicheva

Keyword(s):

Creative Process ◽

Point Of View ◽

Intuitive Notion ◽

Neural Ensembles ◽

Creative Insight ◽

Psychological Structure ◽

Working Performance ◽

Associative Thinking ◽

Way Of Thinking ◽

The Brain

The problem with generating advertising ideas, metaphors, narrative strands for video commercials, podcasts, and nontrivial script languages are on the copywriter’s agenda almost every day. The mass-produced creative approach is quite difficult, as far as “the Muse is mute” being an unachievable goal. The proposed article attempts to analyze the stages of creative impulse from the point of view of the psychological structure of associative thinking intuitive notion impulsive insights, and its correlation with the structure of consciousness.The article analyzes the convergent, and divergent pathways of the neural ensembles of the brain at all modeled spontaneous, or planned stages of the Muse’s first indications (‘AHA! ‘moment or sudden creative insight). The structure of non-trivial advertising images and original ideas in catching psycho-triggers; principles of brain’s working performance in an inspired moment; the whole creative process in challenging situations – the author tries to answer these and other question, to draw some conclusions against the present neuropsychological background.

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Creativity and the Brain’s Default Mode Network

Secrets of Creativity ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190462321.003.0006 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 107-123

Author(s):

Marcus E. Raichle

Keyword(s):

Default Mode Network ◽

Creative Process ◽

Brain Function ◽

Dominant Role ◽

Dominant Mode ◽

Intrinsic Activity ◽

Default Mode ◽

Evoked Activity ◽

The Many ◽

The Brain

It may be surprising to learn that the brain’s intrinsic, ongoing activity is the dominant mode of brain function, present and largely nonconscious whether we are daydreaming, sleeping, or engaged in the full range of human behaviors. Intrinsic activity is easily seen in the ongoing electrical activity of the brain, where extensive averaging is needed to separate evoked activity from intrinsic activity. Reinforcing its dominant role in brain function is the fact that it accounts for well over 90% of the enormous cost of brain function. A productive discussion of creativity must, therefore, take into account the role of intrinsic activity. Fortunately, intrinsic activity is highly organized, a feature highlighted by the recent discovery of the brain’s default mode network (DMN) that serves a dominant role in the overall organization of intrinsic activity. The relationship between the DMN and memory-related structures such as the hippocampus has the hallmark of how an internal model of the environment is built and maintained, which is critical for prediction, imagination, and creativity. More generally the DMN is concerned with our internal mental state (i.e., an egocentric perspective) whereas the networks with which it interacts offer an allocentric perspective. It is at this interface between the egocentric and allocentric perspective that the comfort one has with risk-taking, a necessary component of the creative process, is adjudicated. Exploring the many facets of the DMN’s role in the intrinsic activities of the brain will likely yield new insights into the creative process.

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Creativity in Modernist Literary Writers

Secrets of Creativity ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190462321.003.0017 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 319-335

Author(s):

Suzanne Nalbantian

Keyword(s):

Henry James ◽

Creative Process ◽

Sleep Mode ◽

Dynamic Interactions ◽

Creative Processes ◽

Anais Nin ◽

Conscious Processing ◽

Transformative Process ◽

Literary Devices ◽

The Brain

This chapter presents a theory of creativity as a transformative process, derived from the study of a group of modernist writers used as case studies. Such transformation has analogues in the neuroscientific study of creativity, which deals with dynamic interactions between nonconscious and conscious processing. Certain literary authors illuminate the extent to which the creative process is conscious and top-down yet also nonconscious and bottom-up according to different states of the brain at different stages of the creative process. The prefix “trans” describes the brain’s interconnectivity that is exemplified in the transforming strategies that contribute to the artistry of these authors. Writers like Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Anaïs Nin transform their life material into the art of their fiction through a variety of literary devices that can be scrutinized. The autobiographical material derives from various preliminary modes of creativity—the default mode network (DMN) in Nin, the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep mode among the Surrealists, encoded emotional memories in the case of Woolf and Nin, and fragments of quotidian life in the case of Henry James, Joyce, and Faulkner. These writers were cognizant of their creative processes, writing about them in notes, letters, diaries, memoirs, and prefaces and enacting them in their creative works.

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Henry James and the Creative Process

Secrets of Creativity ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190462321.003.0013 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 239-258

Author(s):

Peter Schneck

Keyword(s):

Henry James ◽

Creative Process ◽

Aesthetic Experience ◽

Contextual Factors ◽

Human Experience ◽

Cultural Practice ◽

To Come ◽

Distinct Features ◽

The Brain

Creativity as a process may be said to constitute a particular mode of experience and to own a specific phenomenology which can be described, compared, and evaluated. Creativity can be viewed as a cultural practice whereby contextual factors, with the environment that lies outside the brain, must be considered beyond the exclusive biological and neural foundations of aesthetic experience. The work of Henry James presents a writer’s continuous attempt to come to a deeper understanding of the creative process at the center of his art, driven by an understanding of human experience as essentially based and grounded in creativity. Looking at James’s notebooks, his prefaces, and also some of his works, we can trace the creative process in all its complexity, as a particular mode of experience and also as a “method” or strategy to stimulate and sustain the creative state. James shows us that there are distinct features of “creative states” which are not exclusive to literary creativity. The diversity and innovativeness of human experience is a creative factor in itself, so that “everyday” little-c contributes to big-C. James’s thorough exploration of the creative process may be compared to more recent attempts in the sciences to understand creativity in cognition in general and literature in particular.

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Unterrichts- und Evaluierungsmethoden zur Förderung des kreativen Übersetzens

Lebende Sprachen ◽

10.1515/les.2005.125 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 50 (3) ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Hannelore Lee-Jahnke

Keyword(s):

Creative Process ◽

Creative Thinking ◽

Anterior Hypothalamus ◽

Sexual Fantasies ◽

The Brain

The creative process, however, as most mental activities, is not only governed by intellect, but also by emotion. Some neurologists have put forward the hypothesis that creative thinking is closely connected with the anterior hypothalamus in the brain, which is the centre of libido and lust and motivates not only sexual fantasies but fantasies and daydreaming of all types. Such fantasies seem to be important for creative thinking. (Kussmaul 1995:48).

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