How Emotional Expression affects One’s Creativity
How the brain process creative thinking is something that fascinated neuroscientists over the past decades. And a number of studies have shown that certain parts of the neural circuit operates across various domains of creativity.
But according to new research, creativity cannot be fully explained in terms of activation and deactivation of fixed network of brain regions. It suggests that when creative acts engage brain areas involved in emotional expression, activity in these regions strongly influences which parts of the brain’s creativity network are activated, and to what extent.
"It can’t just be a binary situation in which your brain is one way when you’re being creative and another way when you’re not. Instead, there are greater and lesser degrees of creative states, and different versions. And emotion plays a crucially important role in these differences." says senior author Charles Limb.
In their previous study, the researchers found that creative acts deactivate a brain region known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), which is involved in planning and monitoring behaviour. This DLPFC deactivation has been taken to be a neural signature of the "flow state" artists may enter to free up creative impulses.
But in the current study, which involved a group of jazz pianists, they found that improvisations targeted at expressing the emotion in the negative image were associated with greater activation of the brain’s reward regions, which reinforce behaviours that lead to pleasurable outcomes, and a greater connectivity of these regions to the DLPFC.
"There’s more deactivation of the DLPFC during happy improvisations, perhaps indicating that people are getting into more of a ’groove’ or ’zone,’ but during sad improvisations there’s more recruitment of areas of the brain related to reward," said Malinda McPherson, the lead author of the study. "This indicates there may be different mechanisms for why it’s pleasurable to create happy versus sad music."
"The notion that we can study complex creativity in artists and musicians from a neuroscientific perspective is an audacious one, but it’s one that we’re increasingly comfortable with," Limb said. "Not that we’re going to answer all the questions, but that we have the right to ask them and to design experiments that try to shed some light on this fascinating human process."
The new findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports.
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