Neural foundations of creativity: a voxel-based meta-analysis of the activations and deactivations underlying creativity across linguistic, musical, and visual domains

The neuroscience of creativity has proposed that shared and domain-specific brain mechanisms underlie creative thinking. However, greater nuance is needed in characterizing these mechanisms, and limited neuroimaging analyses, especially regarding the relationship between the Alternative Uses Task (AUT) and other linguistic tasks, have so far prevented a comprehensive understanding of the neural basis of creativity. This paper offers to fill these gaps with a closer examination of the contributions of the specific domains and the deactivations associated with creativity. We conduct a voxel-based meta-analysis of 43 neuroimaging studies involving 1118 participants. Using Seed-Based d Mapping, we investigate the spatial activity maps in the brain associated with overall creativity and with specific domains. Our findings reveal various domain-general mechanisms related to creativity, including working memory, the ability to connect distantly related concepts, the inhibition of conventional thought, interoception, internal goal orientation, mind wandering, and mental motor simulations. We also identify domain-specific mechanisms of creativity that differ by modality. Linguistic creativity requires inhibiting typical semantic associations, musical creativity involves auditory-motor integration and spontaneous expression, and visual creativity depends on inhibiting habitual visuospatial associations. Additionally, AUT is more effective at capturing novel tool manipulation and ideation rather than elaborative creative processes, which limits its scope. This meta-analysis underscores that creativity depends on multi-component neural circuits and highlights the need for future research to report deactivations, investigate neurofeedback applications, and analyze long-term and collaborative creative processes.