Everyday Creativity is Associated with Increased Frontal Electroencephalography Alpha Activity During Creative Ideation

Abstract

Everyday creativity is the basic ability of human survival and penetrates every aspect of life. Nevertheless, the neural mechanisms underlying everyday creativity was largely unexplored. In this study, seventy-five participants completed the creative behaviour inventory, a tool for assessing creative behaviour in daily life. The participants also completed the alternate uses task (AUT) during an electroencephalography (EEG) assessment to evaluate creative thinking. Alpha power was used to quantify neural oscillations during the creative process, while alpha coherence was used to quantify information communication between frontal regions and other sites during creative ideation. Moreover, these two task-related quantitative measures were combined to investigate the relationship between individual differences in everyday creativity and EEG alpha activity during creative idea generation. Compared with the reference period, increased alpha power was observed in the frontal cortex of the right hemisphere and increased functional coupling was observed between frontal and parietal/temporal regions during the activation period. Interestingly, individual differences in everyday creativity were associated with distinct patterns of EEG alpha activity. Specifically, individuals with higher everyday creativity had increased alpha power in the frontal cortex, and increased changes in coherence in frontal-temporal regions of the right hemisphere while performing the AUT. It might indicate that individuals with higher everyday creativity had an enhanced ability to focus on internal information processing and control bottom-up stimuli, as well as better selection of novel semantic information when performing creative ideation tasks.