Creativity: Place-specific neurology or parallel distributed psychology?
In a collaboration between researchers in design and neuroscience, they set out to search for which brain activity was associated with creativity. The starting point was the following definition of creativity: the ability to create new but appropriate results. The study was criticized for its design. I believe that the definition is too abstract. Another part of the criticism concerned the absence of a network perspective. My own definition of creativity: a mental process in which unrelated knowledge objects, or fragments of them, are combined or fused into new cognitive structures with meaning. Although creativity is an innate ability, it may take a little encouragement to get that type of thinking going, e.g. with dance. In 2012 I was invited to be a keynote speaker at the Science Festival in Gothenburg. There I designed a test where subjects were tasked with combining two letters into symbols that represented something useful. The results showed that those who danced produced 57% mo...