Question

What does this mean: :S

arlsson et al. (2 000) used the Creative Functioning Test (CFT; see p. 46) to select a high-creativity and a low-creativity group (each with 12 male right-handed students). Th ey then presented three tasks that were expected to activate the frontal lobes increasingly: the lowest expected activation was for an automatic speech task (count aloud, starting with 1); the next higher activation was a word fl uency task (say all the words you can think of that start with the letter “f” or “a” or “s”); and the fi nal activation was a divergent thinking task (say as many uses as you can think of for a brick). Only the divergent thinking task was expected to activate RH areas associated with creativity. Low creatives had more elevated LH during the word fl uency task; high creatives had more elevated RH during the brick test. (Strangely, the automatic counting task resulted in higher blood fl ow than either of the other two tasks; the researchers don’t know why.) Th e biggest diff erences, when comparing brain activity on the f-a-s task and on the brick task, were elevated anterior PFC in creatives (both hemispheres) and decreased fronto-temporal and anterior PFC activity for low creatives (particularly in the RH). Th ey concluded that high creatives use bilateral prefrontal regions on the brick task, while low creatives used mostly LH. High creatives had more increased activity in these regions, compared to the f-a-s task, than low creatives— w hose brains looked about the same in the f-a-s and the brick tasks.

Th ese studies provide some evidence that in less creative people, the RH is slightly less active. But ultimately, these studies found that high creatives show patterns of bilateral hemispheric activation, consistent with the studies described in Chapter 9. As we’ve seen from other studies in this chapter and in Chapter 9, it’s misleading to say that creativity is “in” the RH (also see Feist, 2010 , p. 118; Kaufman et al., 2010 , p. 221); keep in mind that with all brain imaging studies, the diff erences in neuronal activation reported are never more than 3% above baseline state.

Answer 1

@Vocaloid

Answer 2

so they're studying how "high-creatives" and "low-creatives" differ in brain activity when they're doing certain tasks.

I wrote a simpler explanation on a word document, lemme paste it here

Answer 3

So this group got a bunch of men and tested them with the Creative Functioning Test to sort them into high and low creative groups, based on how they performed. Each group gets 3 tasks that activate the frontal lobe, where the amount of activation increased from task 1, to task 2 to task 3.
Task 1 (lowest activation): automatic speech (speech you can do without really thinking much about it first)
Task 2 (word fluency) or basically how well you know and can recite vocabulary from memory
Task 3 (divergent thinking) or basically starting with a prompt, and coming up with multiple ideas/solutions, in this case, starting with a brick and trying to come up with multiple uses for it
The researcher’s expectation: divergent thinking task (task 3) activated the areas of the right hemisphere that are normally associated w/ creativity.
The results: “Low creatives” had their left hemisphere’s more active during word fluency (task 2)
“High creatives” had their right hemispheres more activated during the brick task (task 3)
The first task elevated higher blood flow compared to tasks 2 and 3, which was not expected.
Comparing tasks 2 and 3: “Creatives” have high prefrontal cortex activity and “low creatives” have less fronto-temporal and anterior pre-frontal cortex activity.
Conclusions: “High creative” use bilateral (so across both hemispheres?) prefrontal regions on task 3 while low creatives mostly used left hemisphere. “Low creatives” have about same areas of brain activation in tasks 2 and 3.

Answer 4

Second paragraph:
Less creative people have less activity in the right hemisphere. High creatives have bilateral hemisphere brain activation. However, creativity is not isolated to the right hemisphere. The differences in brain activity do not differ from baseline activity (so basically, what brain activity is like without these experiments) by more than 3%.

Answer 5

TL;DR highly creative people and less creative people have different patterns of brain activation when they do creative tasks, w/ highly creative people having more bilateral, anterior activity, while less creative people tend to have their activity more localized in the less hemisphere. the authors are careful to say that creative activity doesn't just come from the right hemisphere, though.

Answer 6

hope that makes a bit more sense

Answer 7

it does thank you