Creativity, Comprehension, Conversation and the Hippocampal Region: New Data and Theory.

Donald G. MacKay,Rutherford Goldstein,1 Psychology Department, University Of California, Los Angeles, Ca 90095-1563

doi:10.3934/neuroscience.2016.1.105

Donald G. MacKay, Rutherford Goldstein

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3934/neuroscience.2016.1.105

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Abstract

Present findings indicate that hippocampal region (HR) damage impairs aspects of everyday language comprehension and production that require creativity ___ defined as the ability to form new internal representations that satisfy relevant constraints for being useful or valuable in the real world. In two studies, seventeen people participated in extensive face-to-face interviews: sixteen normal individuals and H.M., an amnesic with cerebellar and HR damage but virtually no neocortical damage. Study 1 demonstrated deficits in H.M.'s comprehension of creative but not routine aspects of the interviews ___ extending to the real world twelve prior demonstrations that H.M. understands routine but not novel aspects of experimentally constructed sentences, deficits that reflected his HR damage, but not his cerebellar damage, his explicit or declarative memory problems, inability to comprehend or recall the instructions, forgetting, poor visual acuity, motoric slowing, time pressure, deficits in visual scanning or attentional allocation, lack of motivation, and excessive memory load in the tasks. Study 2 demonstrated similar deficits in H.M.'s ability to produce creative but not routine aspects of conversational discourse, extending findings in five prior sentence production experiments to real-world creativity. We discuss conceptual frameworks for explaining relations between new-and-useful creativity and the HR.

Highlights

The importance of the hippocampal brain region (HR) for learning and memory has been well established, e.g., [1]
The results indicated that hippocampal region (HR) damage impairs aspects of everyday language comprehension and production that require creativity—defined as the ability to form new internal representations that satisfy relevant constraints for being useful or valuable in the real world
H.M. and the normal interviewees did not differ in overall inquisitiveness

Summary

Introduction

The importance of the hippocampal brain region (HR) for learning and memory has been well established, e.g., [1]. Understanding the relevance of this focus to creativity and the brain is not straight-forward. It requires a close look at the ongoing debates surrounding the definition of creativity. Other definitions are under-inclusive, e.g., the idea that Concepts are only creative if nobody has ever formulated them before (see the discussion of Big C creativity in [4]). This novel-in-the-world criterion calls for historical analyses of creative ideas that are notoriously controversial (Did Leibnitz and Newton simultaneously and independently invent calculus, or not?), unstable over time (see [5]) and irrelevant from a psychological perspective

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