مورفولوژی قشر خلاقیت بصری

Background and objective The volume of cortical tissue devoted to a function often influences the quality of a person's ability to perform that function. Up to now only white matter correlates of creativity have been reported, and we wanted to learn if the creative visuospatial performance on the figural Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) is associated with measurements of cerebral gray matter volume in the regions of the brain that are thought to be important in divergent reasoning and visuospatial processing. Methods Eighteen healthy college educated men (mean age = 40.78; 15 right-handers) were recruited (via advertisement) as participants. High-resolution MRI scans were acquired on a 1.5 T MRI scanner. Voxel-based morphometry regression analyses of TTCT to cortical volume were restrained within the anatomic regions identified. Results One significant positive focus of association with TTCT emerged within the right parietal lobe gray matter (MNI coordinates: 44, −24, 63; 276 voxels). Conclusions Based on theories of parietal lobe function and the requirements of the TTCT, the area observed may be related due to its dominant role in global aspects of attention and visuospatial processing including the capacity for manipulating spatial representations.

1.1. Definition of creativity and its relation to divergent thinking There have been many definitions of creativity. Bronowski (1972) defined creativity as the ability to find unity in what appears to be diversity or finding the thread that unites. This definition does not mention novelty-originality and thus Heilman (2005) defined creativity as “the ability to understand, develop and express in a systematic fashion, novel orderly relationships”. Novelty-originality requires divergent thinking, which is often considered an important and measurable component of creativity (Guilford, 1967, Kim, 2008 and Ryder et al., 2002). Creativity is considered to be an adaptive mental trait. Whereas there are thresholds of intelligence required for specific forms of creativity, once that threshold is reached, creativity has little or no relationship to intelligence (Runco, 2007). Early considerations in measuring divergent thinking included Grant and Berg's (1948) development of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) for assessing the establishment of mental set as well as switching/disengaging from a strategy when it no longer was acceptable and finding an alternative sorting strategy (divergent thinking). Later, Guilford (1967) refined the notion of divergent thinking so as to be measured by the capacity to generate as many original and creative responses to a presented stimulus as possible. Though Guilford proposed both divergent thinking and convergent thinking were relevant to creativity, strong support has been found primarily for the association of divergent thinking and creativity (Kim, 2008 and Ryder et al., 2002). Zangwill (1966) suggested that frontal lobe dysfunction could disrupt disengagement and divergent thinking. Subsequently Milner and Petrides (1984) demonstrated that patients who had frontal resections of epileptic foci for the treatment of medically intractable epilepsy were impaired on the WCST, providing empirical support for Zangwill's hypothesis that the frontal lobes are critical for disengagement with divergent thinking. Additional support for that hypothesis comes from functional imaging studies which demonstrate that when normal participants are performing the WCST they activate their frontal lobes (Weinberger, Berman, & Zec, 1986).