A research team at University of Utah Health and based in Baylor College of Medicine have discovered the origins of creativity in the brain and how different parts of the organ work together to produce creative thought.

“Unlike motor function or vision, they’re not dependent on one specific location in the brain,” said Dr. Ben Shofty when speaking about why higher cognitive processes like creativity are hard to study.

Shofty, assistant professor of neurosurgery in the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine and senior author on the paper, said there isn’t a creativity cortex, but there is evidence that creativity is a distinct brain function.

The researchers used advanced imaging to watch how different parts of the brain work together to produce creative thought and found these thoughts seemed to originate in the same area of the brain activated during meditation, daydreaming and other internal ways of thinking. This network of brain cells is the default mode network (DMN) because it’s associated with the default patterns of thought happening during the absence of specific mental tasks.

“Unlike most of the functions that we have in the brain, it’s not goal-directed,” he said. “It’s a network that basically operates all the time and maintains our spontaneous stream of consciousness.”

Shofty said DMN is spread out across many dispersed brain regions which make it hard to track its activity in real time, so the researchers used an advanced method of brain imaging commonly used to pinpoint the location of seizures in epilepsy patients. Participants in the study were already involved in the seizure testing, so researchers used the electrodes already connected to the patients to measure activity during creative thinking.

The participants in the study were given different creative tasks such as different uses for a chair, while researchers recorded the activated parts of their brains. The first part of the brain to light up were functions that happen spontaneously without a mental task. This was followed by problem solving and decision-making areas of the brain lighting up.

When researchers used the electrodes to temporarily dampen the activity of certain DMN regions, participants tried to think of uses for the items they saw with less creativity.

“We could see what’s happening within the first few milliseconds of attempting to perform creative thinking,” Shofty said.

The results, Shofty said, could help lead to interventions that help spark creative thought or aid people who have mental illnesses that disrupt these regions of the brain.

“Eventually, the goal would be to understand what happens to the network in such a way that we can potentially drive it toward being more creative,” he said.