Summary

This volume offers a comprehensive overview of the latest neuroscientific approaches to the scientific study of creativity. In chapters that progress logically from neurobiological fundamentals to systems neuroscience and neuroimaging, leading scholars describe the latest theoretical, genetic, structural, clinical, functional, and applied research on the neural bases of creativity. The treatment is both broad and in depth, offering a range of neuroscientific perspectives with detailed coverage by experts in each area. The contributors discuss such issues as the heritability of creativity; creativity in patients with brain damage, neurodegenerative conditions, and mental illness; clinical interventions and the relationship between psychopathology and creativity; neuroimaging studies of intelligence and creativity; the neuroscientific basis of creativity-enhancing methodologies; and the information-processing challenges of viewing visual art.

Contributors Baptiste Barbot, Mathias Benedek, David Q. Beversdorf, Aaron P. Blaisdell, Margaret A. Boden, Dorret I. Boomsma, Adam S. Bristol, Shelley Carson, Marleen H. M. de Moor, Andreas Fink, Liane Gabora, Dennis Garlick, Elena L. Grigorenko, Richard J. Haier, Rex E. Jung, James C. Kaufman, Helmut Leder, Kenneth J. Leising, Bruce L. Miller, Apara Ranjan, Mark P. Roeling, W. David Stahlman, Mei Tan, Pablo P. L. Tinio, Oshin Vartanian, Indre V. Viskontas, Dahlia W. Zaidel

Choice Review

Creativity, defined as the ability to produce something that is both novel and valuable in some context, has often been considered magical and thus beyond the grasp of scientific exploration. These essays, written by established scholars based mainly in North America and Europe, introduce the reader to a wide range of neuroscientific approaches to studying creativity, including investigations of its heritability, underlying neural networks, and relationships to other cognitive abilities or deficits. Highlights include an essay on "how insight emerges," which hypothesizes that creative thoughts can emerge from overlapping activation of different ensembles of neurons; an essays titled "There Is Room for Conditioning in the Creative Process," which demonstrates how nonhuman animals can be trained to generate creative behaviors using operant conditioning; and a discussion of "art and dementia," which describes how frontal cortex-related dementias can result in enhanced artistic and musical creativity in humans. This study makes it clear that the neuroscientific study of creativity is still nascent and at times hindered by a lack of standardized testing techniques and ambiguity between creativity and related concepts such as talent, skill, and intelligence. The collection will be valuable for those in neuroscience, psychology, or cognitive science. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. K. G. Akers University of Michigan