Spontaneous Activity in Primary Visual Cortex Relates to Visual Creativity.

Cognitive and neural processes underlying visual creativity have attracted substantial attention. The current research uses a critical time point analysis (CTPA) to examine how spontaneous activity in the primary visual area (PVA) is related to visual creativity. We acquired the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data of 16 participants at the resting state and during performing a visual creative synthesis task. According to the CTPA, we then classified spontaneous activity in the PVA into critical time points (CTPs), which reflect the most useful and important functional meaning of the entire resting-state condition, and the remaining time points (RTPs). We constructed functional brain networks based on the brain activity at two different time points and then subsequently based on the brain activity at the task state in a separate manner. We explore the relationship between resting-state and task-fMRI (T-fMRI) functional brain networks. Our results found that: (1) the pattern of spontaneous activity in the PVA may associate with mental imagery, which plays an important role in visual creativity; (2) in comparison with the RTPs-based brain network, the CTP-network showed an increase in global efficiency and a decrease in local efficiency; (3) the regional integrated properties of the CTP-network could predict the integrated properties of the creative-network while the RTP-network could not. Thus, our findings indicated that spontaneous activity in the PVA at CTPs was associated with a visual creative task-evoked brain response. Our findings may provide an insight into how the visual cortex is related to visual creativity.

Flexible reconfiguration of functional brain networks as a potential neural mechanism of creativity.

Creativity relies on the reorganizing of multimodal information and flexible switching between different modes of thinking, suggesting an association between creativity and the reconfiguration of functional brain networks. Here, we investigated global and regional brain dynamics in high-creative (HCG, N = 22) and a low-creative (LCG, N = 20) groups during a divergent creative thinking task. We found that during the creative thinking task, the HCG demonstrated higher global network flexibility, as compared to the LCG. In addition, creative thinking in the HCG was associated with significantly higher regional flexibility in the medial superior temporal gyrus, superior parietal lobule, precuneus, nucleus accumbens, and the ventral inferior frontal gyrus. Interestingly, the LCG demonstrated decreased regional flexibility in the medial superior temporal gyrus, superior parietal lobule, and the ventral inferior frontal gyrus. We also found that the changes in global and regional flexibility in the creative compared with the control tasks were good features allowing for distinguishing between the HCG and the LCG. Taken together, these findings provide evidence that divergent creative thinking is associated with flexible reconfiguration of brain networks involved in verbal, working memory, and reward processing.