Connectome-based evidence for creative thinking as an emergent property of ordinary cognitive operations

Highlights

• The high versus low creative thinking abilities link to distinct whole-brain connectivity patterns from resting-state fMRI.

• The high-creative pattern is composed of integrative modules, the structure of which is perturbed in the low-creative pattern.

• The high-creative pattern encodes connectivity features which concurrently explain individual variability across multiple cognitive abilities.

• The modules in high-creative pattern are dominated by separable hubs in charge of sensorimotor processing, executive control functions, and memory-based processing.

• The high-creative pattern enhances the global functional integration through specific information transfer paths.

Abstract

Creative thinking is a hallmark of human cognition, which enables us to generate novel and useful ideas. Nevertheless, its emergence within the macro-scale neurocognitive circuitry remains largely unknown. Using resting-state fMRI data from two large population samples (SWU: n = 931; HCP: n = 1001) and a novel “travelling pattern prediction analysis”, here we identified the modularized functional connectivity patterns linked to creative thinking ability, which concurrently explained individual variability across ordinary cognitive abilities such as episodic memory, working memory and relational processing. Further interrogation of this neural pattern with graph theoretical tools revealed both hub-like brain structures and globally-efficient information transfer paths that together may facilitate higher creative thinking ability through the convergence of distinct cognitive operations. Collectively, our results provide reliable evidence for the hypothesized emergence of creative thinking from core cognitive components through neural integration, and thus allude to a significant theoretical advancement in the study of creativity.