The neural basis of creative thought: An activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis involving over 17,000 participants

Humans can create impressive art, make major scientific breakthroughs, and generate creative solutions that solve everyday life problems. But how are these creative activities supported by the brain? This question is of great scientific interest but remains unanswered. New hypotheses, grounded in converging evidence from cognitive neuroscience, are needed to guide breakthroughs in understanding the neural basis of creative thought. It has long been suggested that creativity is a distinct mental function. However, converging clinical-cognitive neuroscience evidence is starting to suggest that creative thought is not functionally distinct but, instead, might arise from general purpose cognitive mechanisms supporting semantic cognition, controlled episodic memory retrieval, and executive mechanisms (i.e., Cognitive Cornerstones Hypothesis ; Chan et al., 2023). Results from this large-scale activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis, based on 787 experiments with 10,357 foci from 17,228 healthy adult participants, showed that the brain regions implicated in creativity tasks heavily overlap with the brain regions implicated in the cognitive cornerstones of creative thought (i.e., pre-existing knowledge and executive mechanisms). These striking results suggest that innovative insights will arise from considering the roles of these fundamental cognitive functions and their interactions in supporting creative thought.