Brain and dopamine

Author Name: Daniel Z. Lieberman - Michael E. Long

Ochen Vartanen, a researcher at York University in Toronto, wanted to know which part of the brain was most active when people came up with novel solutions to problems, so he scanned people's brains while they solved a problem requiring creativity. He found that when they discovered the answer to a problem, the right front of their brains became activated. He wondered if this part of the brain was involved in paradigm-breaking. In a second experiment, he asked participants not to solve the problem, but to use only their imaginations. First, he asked them to imagine real things, such as "a flower that is a rose." He then asked them to imagine non-existent things—things that didn't fit into the conventional model of reality, such as "a living thing like an airplane." Scanning the volunteers, he found that the same part of the brain showed activity as before, but only when the subjects thought about non-existent things. When they imagined reality itself, this area remained dark. Brain scans of people with schizophrenia show changes in the same area, the right side of the frontal cortex. Perhaps this is because when we're creative, we act a bit like a person with schizophrenia. We stop inhibiting aspects of reality that we previously deemed unimportant, and add salience to things we once thought were irrelevant.