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The intersection of neuroscience and creativity has emerged as one of the most fascinating frontiers in cognitive science. As researchers continue to unlock the mysteries of how our brains generate innovative ideas and solve complex problems, we’re gaining unprecedented insights into the neural mechanisms that underlie human ingenuity. This knowledge isn’t just academically interesting—it has profound implications for education, personal development, workplace innovation, and therapeutic interventions. Understanding how the brain supports creative thinking and problem-solving can help us develop more effective strategies to enhance these critical cognitive abilities throughout our lives.
Understanding the Neural Architecture of Creativity
Creativity does not reside in a single brain region; instead, this complex process relies on collaboration between various areas and networks. The brain’s approach to creative thinking involves a sophisticated interplay of multiple neural systems, each contributing unique functions to the creative process. Recent advances in neuroimaging technology, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG), have allowed scientists to observe the brain in action during creative tasks, revealing patterns that were previously invisible to researchers.
Research findings reveal that divergent thinking neural patterns span brain regions associated with diverse cognitive functions, with positive weights in the default mode and frontoparietal control networks and negative weights in the visual network. This complex pattern suggests that creativity involves both the generation of ideas through spontaneous thought processes and the evaluation and refinement of those ideas through controlled cognitive mechanisms.
The Prefrontal Cortex: The Executive Director of Creative Thought
The prefrontal cortex plays a multifaceted role in creative cognition. The preparation stage of creative thought tends to be reliant on the brain’s executive control network, largely driven by the prefrontal cortex. This region is essential for planning, abstract thinking, and the strategic organization of information—all critical components of the creative process.
The left lateral prefrontal cortex is associated with the controlled retrieval of long-term representations including semantic and episodic memories, manipulation of temporarily stored information, and the selection of goal-relevant ideas amongst competing ideas and distractors. This means that when you’re trying to come up with creative solutions, your prefrontal cortex is actively working to access relevant memories, hold multiple ideas in mind simultaneously, and filter out unhelpful thoughts to focus on the most promising concepts.
The prefrontal cortex doesn’t work in isolation during creative thinking. It maintains dynamic connections with other brain regions, coordinating their activities to support the complex cognitive demands of innovation. This executive function is particularly important when creativity requires not just free-flowing ideation but also the practical evaluation and implementation of novel ideas.
The Temporal Lobes and Associative Thinking
The temporal lobes contribute significantly to creativity through their role in semantic memory and conceptual associations. These brain regions help us connect disparate ideas, recognize patterns, and draw unexpected parallels between seemingly unrelated concepts. This associative capacity is fundamental to creative insights, allowing us to see connections that others might miss and to combine existing knowledge in novel ways.
When we experience those “aha!” moments of creative insight, the temporal lobes are often heavily involved, facilitating the sudden recognition of relationships between ideas that weren’t previously apparent. This ability to form remote associations—connecting concepts that are distantly related rather than obviously linked—is a hallmark of highly creative thinking.
The Default Mode Network: The Brain’s Creative Engine
The brain’s default mode network (DMN) is increasingly recognized as key to creative thinking, emerging as one of the most relevant players in the neuroscience of creativity. This discovery has fundamentally changed how scientists understand the brain’s “resting” state and its relationship to creative cognition.
What Is the Default Mode Network?
The Default Mode Network is a brain network that becomes active when the brain is at rest and is crucial for processes like self-reflection, emotional processing, social interaction, and mental exploration. The DMN includes several key brain regions: the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), and the inferior parietal lobule (IPL), among others. These regions work together as a coordinated system, showing synchronized activity patterns during certain types of mental processes.
Contrary to early assumptions that the brain was simply “idling” during rest, we now know that the DMN is highly active during internally-focused mental states. When a person is at rest or involved in tasks that do not require external attention, the DMN becomes active, allowing the mind to wander and explore different mental scenarios, aiding reflection on past experiences and the construction of mental narratives about the future.
The DMN’s Role in Creative Thinking
The creative imagination hypothesis suggests that the DMN is involved in facilitating creativity and generating original ideas, with DMN activity during periods of creative imagination promoting the association of seemingly disconnected concepts, leading to insights and innovative solutions, playing a fundamental role in the human creative process.
Recent research has provided compelling evidence for the DMN’s causal role in creativity. Causal manipulations of DMN regions using direct cortical stimulation preferentially decreased the originality of responses in the alternative uses task, without affecting fluency or mind wandering, suggesting that DMN activity is flexibly modulated as a function of specific cognitive processes and supports its causal role in divergent thinking. This finding demonstrates that the DMN isn’t just correlated with creativity—it’s actually necessary for generating original ideas.
Research revealed increased functional connectivity between seed regions in inferior prefrontal cortex and the DMN associated with greater divergent thinking ability, demonstrating that discrete brain regions commonly linked with divergent thinking are more strongly functionally connected in highly creative individuals, suggesting that divergent thinking ability involves greater cooperation between brain regions associated with controlled and spontaneous cognitive processes.
Enhancing DMN Activity for Greater Creativity
Understanding the DMN’s role in creativity opens up practical possibilities for enhancing creative potential. Activities that engage the DMN can potentially boost creative thinking abilities. Mind-wandering, daydreaming, and allowing periods of mental rest can all activate the DMN and facilitate creative insights.
Mindfulness meditation and contemplative practices have been shown to influence DMN activity in beneficial ways. These practices can help individuals become more aware of their spontaneous thought processes while also developing the ability to guide those thoughts productively. The key is finding a balance between allowing free-flowing associations and maintaining enough cognitive control to evaluate and develop promising ideas.
Creating environments and schedules that allow for both focused work and periods of mental rest can support optimal DMN function. This might mean taking regular breaks during problem-solving tasks, engaging in activities that promote mind-wandering like walking or showering, or simply allowing time for unstructured thinking without the pressure of immediate productivity.
The Interplay Between Brain Networks in Creative Problem-Solving
While individual brain regions and networks play important roles in creativity, the magic really happens in the interactions between different neural systems. Creativity is hypothesized to arise from a mental state which balances spontaneous thought and cognitive control, corresponding to functional connectivity between the brain’s Default Mode and Executive Control Networks, with growing evidence suggesting that creative thought emerges from the interaction between spontaneous associations and deliberate cognitive control processes, with greater creative thinking linked to the coupling of the DMN and the Executive Control Network.
Dynamic Network Switching and Creative Ability
One of the most exciting recent discoveries in creativity neuroscience involves the dynamic switching between brain networks. Divergent thinking exhibited a more unified pattern of activity between networks, with theories of creativity proposing the critical importance of both associative and executive processes to develop original ideas, requiring individuals to search within semantic spaces to form connections among seemingly remote concepts while executing controlled top-down cognition to parse through inappropriate associations and select for useful, novel thoughts.
This dynamic switching ability—the capacity to flexibly move between spontaneous, associative thinking and controlled, evaluative thinking—appears to be a key characteristic of highly creative individuals. Rather than being stuck in one mode of thinking, creative people can fluidly transition between generating wild, unconventional ideas and critically assessing which of those ideas have genuine merit.
The Role of Executive Control in Creativity
Effective creativity entails much more than uninhibited ideation, requiring the capacity to filter out irrelevant information, maintain optimal attentional tuning, and strategically regulate and refine innovative outputs, with a robust and adaptive executive control network operating in concert with attentional networks being essential for creativity.
This challenges earlier assumptions that creativity was primarily about “letting go” of cognitive control. While spontaneous, unfiltered thinking certainly plays a role in generating novel ideas, the ability to evaluate, refine, and implement those ideas requires substantial executive function. The most creative individuals aren’t those who simply generate the most ideas, but those who can generate many ideas and then effectively identify and develop the most promising ones.
Neuroplasticity: The Brain’s Capacity for Creative Growth
One of the most encouraging findings from neuroscience is that the brain’s capacity for creativity and problem-solving isn’t fixed. Neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life—means that we can actively develop and enhance our creative abilities through practice and targeted activities.
How Neuroplasticity Supports Skill Development
Every time we engage in creative thinking or problem-solving, we’re strengthening the neural pathways involved in those processes. Regularly practicing complex tasks, such as puzzles, strategic games, artistic endeavors, or tackling novel problems, can strengthen neural connections associated with creative and analytical thinking. This adaptability is especially vital for lifelong learning and maintaining cognitive flexibility as we age.
The principle of neuroplasticity suggests that creativity is a skill that can be cultivated rather than a fixed trait. Just as musicians develop stronger connections in brain regions associated with auditory processing and motor control, individuals who regularly engage in creative activities develop more robust and efficient neural networks supporting creative cognition.
Practical Applications of Neuroplasticity
Understanding neuroplasticity has important implications for how we approach skill development. Rather than viewing creative ability as something you either have or don’t have, we can recognize it as something that develops through consistent practice and challenge. This growth mindset toward creativity can be particularly empowering for students and professionals who may have previously believed they weren’t “creative people.”
The key to leveraging neuroplasticity for creative development is engaging in activities that are challenging but achievable—operating in what psychologists call the “zone of proximal development.” Tasks that are too easy don’t stimulate sufficient neural adaptation, while tasks that are overwhelmingly difficult can lead to frustration and disengagement. Finding the right level of challenge, with appropriate support and scaffolding, creates optimal conditions for neural growth.
Neuroscience-Based Strategies for Enhancing Problem-Solving Skills
Effective problem-solving involves multiple cognitive processes, including critical thinking, working memory, cognitive flexibility, and pattern recognition. Neuroscience research has identified several evidence-based strategies for enhancing these capabilities.
Working Memory Training
Working memory—the ability to hold and manipulate information in mind over short periods—is crucial for problem-solving. Exercises that challenge working memory, such as mental arithmetic, memory games, or learning new complex skills, can strengthen the neural circuits supporting this capacity. Enhanced working memory allows individuals to consider more variables simultaneously when solving problems, leading to more sophisticated and effective solutions.
Cognitive Flexibility Exercises
Cognitive flexibility—the ability to switch between different concepts or perspectives—is essential for creative problem-solving. Activities that promote cognitive flexibility include learning new languages, practicing improvisation, engaging with diverse perspectives, and deliberately approaching familiar problems from novel angles. These practices strengthen the brain’s ability to break out of habitual thinking patterns and consider alternative approaches.
Pattern Recognition and Analogical Thinking
Many breakthrough solutions come from recognizing patterns or applying solutions from one domain to problems in another domain. Engaging with diverse fields of knowledge, studying case studies from different industries, and practicing analogical thinking can enhance this capacity. The brain’s ability to identify deep structural similarities between superficially different situations is a powerful tool for creative problem-solving.
The Neuroscience of Insight and “Aha!” Moments
One of the most intriguing aspects of creative problem-solving is the sudden insight or “aha!” moment when a solution seems to appear out of nowhere. Neuroscience research has begun to unravel what happens in the brain during these moments of illumination.
Research using network mapping found that brain regions activated by creativity tasks mapped to a human brain circuit centered on the right frontal pole, with damage to this circuit aligning with both decreases and paradoxical increases in creativity observed across multiple different brain diseases. This suggests that specific neural circuits are critically involved in creative insights.
Insights often occur after a period of impasse, when conscious problem-solving efforts have stalled. During this time, the brain continues to work on the problem unconsciously, with the DMN playing a key role in making novel connections between concepts. When a promising solution emerges into consciousness, it’s often accompanied by a burst of neural activity and a feeling of certainty about the solution’s correctness.
Creating conditions conducive to insight involves alternating between focused problem-solving efforts and periods of mental relaxation. The incubation effect—where stepping away from a problem leads to sudden insights—is well-documented in both psychological research and anecdotal reports from creative professionals. Understanding the neural basis of this phenomenon validates the importance of taking breaks and allowing the mind to wander when facing difficult problems.
Educational Implications: Teaching for Creativity and Problem-Solving
Neuroscience insights into creativity and problem-solving have profound implications for education. Traditional educational approaches often emphasize rote learning and convergent thinking, potentially neglecting the development of creative capacities. A neuroscience-informed approach to education would look quite different.
Creating Brain-Friendly Learning Environments
Educational environments that support optimal brain function for creativity include spaces that allow for both focused concentration and relaxed exploration. This might mean incorporating quiet areas for deep work alongside collaborative spaces for brainstorming and discussion. Lighting, acoustics, and even the presence of natural elements can influence brain function and creative capacity.
Scheduling is also important. The brain’s creative capacities fluctuate throughout the day, with many people experiencing peak creative thinking during specific times. While individual chronotypes vary, allowing some flexibility in when students tackle different types of tasks can optimize learning and creative output.
Pedagogical Strategies Based on Neuroscience
Teaching methods that align with how the brain supports creativity include:
- Encouraging divergent thinking: Use brainstorming sessions, open-ended questions, and activities that have multiple possible solutions to stimulate different parts of the brain and strengthen neural networks supporting creative thought.
- Incorporating mindfulness and reflection: Practice meditation, journaling, or quiet reflection time to activate the DMN and boost creative potential. These practices help students develop metacognitive awareness of their own thinking processes.
- Using cognitive exercises strategically: Engage students with puzzles, logic games, memory challenges, and other activities that strengthen specific cognitive capacities while making learning engaging and enjoyable.
- Promoting interdisciplinary learning: Connect ideas across fields to foster innovative thinking and help students recognize patterns and principles that transcend individual disciplines. This approach strengthens the brain’s capacity for analogical reasoning and transfer of learning.
- Allowing for productive failure: Create safe environments where students can take intellectual risks, make mistakes, and learn from them. The brain learns powerfully from errors when they occur in supportive contexts.
- Balancing structure and freedom: Provide enough scaffolding to prevent overwhelming cognitive load while allowing sufficient autonomy for students to explore and discover. This balance supports both the executive control and default mode networks.
- Incorporating movement and breaks: Physical activity increases blood flow to the brain and can enhance cognitive function. Regular breaks allow for mental consolidation and can facilitate insights.
- Teaching metacognitive strategies: Help students understand how their own brains work and develop strategies for managing attention, generating ideas, and evaluating solutions. This metacognitive awareness can enhance both creativity and problem-solving effectiveness.
The Role of Neurotransmitters in Creative Thinking
Neurobiological analyses show that divergent thinking patterns are positively correlated with dopamine-related neurotransmitters and genes influencing neurotransmitter release. This finding highlights the biochemical dimension of creativity, suggesting that the brain’s chemical environment plays a crucial role in supporting creative cognition.
Dopamine, often associated with reward and motivation, appears to be particularly important for creative thinking. This neurotransmitter influences cognitive flexibility, working memory, and the ability to make novel associations—all critical components of creativity. Understanding this connection helps explain why mood, motivation, and environmental factors that influence neurotransmitter levels can significantly impact creative capacity.
Other neurotransmitters also contribute to creative cognition. Norepinephrine influences attention and arousal, helping to maintain focus during problem-solving. Serotonin affects mood and may influence the balance between focused and diffuse thinking modes. The complex interplay of these chemical messengers creates the neural environment in which creative thinking occurs.
While we can’t directly control our neurotransmitter levels in everyday life, understanding their role in creativity can inform lifestyle choices that support optimal brain chemistry. Regular exercise, adequate sleep, stress management, social connection, and engaging in enjoyable activities all influence neurotransmitter function and, by extension, creative capacity.
Individual Differences in Creative Brain Function
Not everyone’s brain approaches creativity in exactly the same way. Research has identified meaningful individual differences in how neural networks support creative thinking. Some people show stronger DMN activation during creative tasks, while others rely more heavily on executive control networks. These differences don’t necessarily indicate better or worse creative ability, but rather different cognitive styles and approaches to creative problem-solving.
Understanding these individual differences has important implications for education and professional development. Rather than assuming a one-size-fits-all approach to fostering creativity, we can recognize that different individuals may benefit from different strategies. Some people might thrive with highly structured creative processes, while others produce their best work with minimal constraints. Some may need extended periods of incubation and reflection, while others generate ideas rapidly through active brainstorming.
Personality traits also correlate with patterns of brain activity during creative tasks. Openness to experience, for instance, is associated with particular patterns of functional connectivity between brain networks. Recognizing these connections can help individuals understand their own creative processes and develop personalized strategies for enhancing their creative output.
Technology and Tools for Measuring Creative Brain Activity
Advances in neuroscience technology have revolutionized our ability to study creativity in action. Electroencephalogram (EEG) monitors can provide powerful insight into brain activity, revealing how various visual stimuli engage distinct regions of the brain. These tools allow researchers to observe neural activity with increasing precision, leading to deeper understanding of the mechanisms underlying creative thought.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) provides detailed spatial information about which brain regions are active during different types of creative tasks. While fMRI has excellent spatial resolution, showing precisely where activity occurs, it has relatively poor temporal resolution, capturing changes over seconds rather than milliseconds.
EEG, in contrast, offers excellent temporal resolution, capturing the rapid dynamics of neural activity as creative thinking unfolds. Research on the power spectrum in young adults indicates that significant changes occur during creative tasks, particularly evident in the alpha band across the frontal, parietal-occipital, and right hemispheric regions. These oscillatory patterns provide insights into the coordination of activity across different brain regions.
Emerging technologies like magnetoencephalography (MEG) and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) offer additional ways to study creative brain function. As these tools become more sophisticated and accessible, our understanding of the neural basis of creativity will continue to deepen, potentially leading to new interventions and training methods.
Creativity Across the Lifespan: Developmental Perspectives
The DMN plays a significant role in brain development, especially during childhood and adolescence, where it shapes cognitive and emotional abilities, playing a crucial role in brain development during childhood and adolescence, influencing fundamental cognitive and emotional processes.
Understanding how creative brain networks develop across the lifespan has important implications for education and intervention. In childhood, the brain shows remarkable plasticity, with creative capacities developing rapidly as children explore their environment and learn about the world. Educational experiences during these formative years can have lasting impacts on the development of neural networks supporting creativity.
Adolescence represents another critical period for the development of creative capacities. During this time, the prefrontal cortex undergoes significant maturation, enhancing executive functions that support the evaluation and refinement of creative ideas. The integration of DMN and executive control networks becomes more sophisticated, potentially supporting more complex forms of creative thinking.
Contrary to popular stereotypes about declining creativity with age, research suggests that creative capacity can be maintained and even enhanced throughout adulthood and into older age. While certain aspects of cognitive function may change with aging, the accumulated knowledge and experience of older adults can support different forms of creativity. Maintaining cognitive engagement, learning new skills, and staying intellectually curious can help preserve and develop creative capacities across the lifespan.
Practical Strategies for Individuals Seeking to Enhance Creativity
Based on neuroscience research, individuals can adopt several evidence-based strategies to enhance their creative thinking and problem-solving abilities:
Cultivate Diverse Experiences
Exposing yourself to diverse experiences, perspectives, and knowledge domains strengthens the brain’s capacity for making novel connections. Travel, reading widely, engaging with people from different backgrounds, and exploring unfamiliar subjects all contribute to building a rich mental database that supports creative thinking. The more varied your experiences, the more raw material your brain has to work with when generating creative ideas.
Practice Deliberate Mind-Wandering
While focused attention is important, allowing time for mind-wandering can facilitate creative insights. Take regular breaks during problem-solving sessions, engage in activities that allow your mind to drift (like walking, showering, or doing routine tasks), and resist the urge to fill every moment with structured activity or digital stimulation. These periods of mental rest allow the DMN to make unexpected connections that might not emerge during focused thinking.
Develop Metacognitive Awareness
Pay attention to your own thinking processes. Notice when you’re in a generative, free-flowing state versus when you’re in an evaluative, critical mode. Learn to recognize when you need to switch between these modes and develop strategies for facilitating those transitions. This metacognitive awareness allows you to work with your brain’s natural rhythms rather than against them.
Engage in Regular Physical Exercise
Physical activity enhances brain function in multiple ways, increasing blood flow, promoting neuroplasticity, and influencing neurotransmitter levels. Regular exercise has been linked to improved cognitive flexibility, working memory, and creative thinking. Even moderate physical activity, like walking, can provide cognitive benefits that support creativity.
Prioritize Sleep and Rest
Sleep plays a crucial role in memory consolidation, neural reorganization, and creative problem-solving. Many people report experiencing insights or solutions to problems after a good night’s sleep. Prioritizing adequate, quality sleep supports the brain’s creative capacities and overall cognitive function.
Create Environmental Supports
Design your physical environment to support creative thinking. This might include having spaces for both focused work and relaxed exploration, minimizing distractions during deep work periods, and surrounding yourself with stimuli that inspire creative thought. Even simple changes like adjusting lighting, adding plants, or organizing your workspace can influence cognitive function and creative output.
Practice Creative Constraints
While it might seem counterintuitive, working within constraints can actually enhance creativity by focusing cognitive resources and preventing overwhelming choice. Set specific parameters for creative projects, use time limits to prevent overthinking, or deliberately limit the resources or materials you can use. These constraints can stimulate creative problem-solving by forcing you to think in new ways.
Collaborate and Seek Feedback
Engaging with others can stimulate creative thinking by exposing you to different perspectives and approaches. Collaborative brainstorming, constructive feedback, and dialogue with people who think differently than you do can all enhance creative output. The social dimension of creativity shouldn’t be overlooked—many breakthrough ideas emerge from the intersection of different minds working together.
The Future of Creativity Neuroscience
The field of creativity neuroscience continues to evolve rapidly, with new discoveries emerging regularly. Future research directions include developing more sophisticated models of how different brain networks interact during creative thinking, understanding the genetic and environmental factors that influence creative capacity, and exploring potential interventions to enhance creativity in clinical and educational settings.
Emerging technologies like brain stimulation techniques (such as transcranial magnetic stimulation or transcranial direct current stimulation) are being investigated for their potential to enhance creative thinking. While still in early stages, this research could eventually lead to new tools for supporting creativity in individuals with cognitive impairments or for optimizing creative performance in healthy individuals.
The integration of artificial intelligence and neuroscience is opening new avenues for understanding creativity. By comparing how human brains and AI systems approach creative tasks, researchers can gain insights into the unique aspects of human creativity and potentially develop better computational models of creative cognition.
As our understanding deepens, the practical applications of creativity neuroscience will likely expand. We may see more neuroscience-informed educational curricula, workplace training programs designed to enhance innovation, and therapeutic interventions for conditions that affect creative thinking. The potential for this research to improve human flourishing and problem-solving capacity is immense.
Integrating Neuroscience Insights into Daily Life
By integrating neuroscience insights into educational practices, professional development, and personal growth strategies, we can unlock greater creative and problem-solving potential. Understanding the brain’s mechanisms for generating and evaluating ideas opens new avenues for enhancing these critical capacities.
The key is to move beyond simply knowing about these neuroscience findings to actually applying them in practical ways. This might mean restructuring your daily schedule to include periods of both focused work and mental rest, designing learning experiences that engage multiple brain networks, or developing organizational cultures that support the neural conditions necessary for innovation.
For educators, this knowledge can inform curriculum design, teaching methods, and assessment practices that better align with how the brain supports learning and creativity. For professionals, understanding the neuroscience of creativity can lead to more effective innovation processes, better problem-solving strategies, and enhanced team collaboration.
For individuals, these insights offer a roadmap for personal development, suggesting specific practices and lifestyle choices that can enhance creative capacity. Rather than viewing creativity as a mysterious gift that some people have and others don’t, we can recognize it as a set of cognitive processes supported by specific brain networks—processes that can be understood, practiced, and developed.
The convergence of neuroscience and creativity research represents one of the most exciting frontiers in understanding human cognition. As we continue to unravel the neural basis of creative thinking and problem-solving, we gain not just academic knowledge but practical tools for enhancing these essential human capacities. Whether you’re an educator seeking to inspire students, a professional looking to boost innovation, or an individual wanting to develop your creative potential, the insights from neuroscience offer valuable guidance for this journey.
To learn more about the neuroscience of creativity and related topics, explore resources from organizations like the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity, which brings together researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of neuroscience and creative cognition. Additionally, BrainFacts.org offers accessible information about brain science for general audiences, while Nature Neuroscience publishes cutting-edge research for those interested in diving deeper into the scientific literature. For practical applications in education, the OECD’s work on educational neuroscience provides valuable insights into how brain research can inform teaching and learning practices.
The journey to understanding and enhancing creativity through neuroscience is ongoing, with new discoveries continually refining our knowledge. By staying informed about these developments and thoughtfully applying neuroscience insights to our educational practices, professional endeavors, and personal development, we can cultivate the creative and problem-solving capacities that are increasingly essential in our complex, rapidly changing world. The brain’s remarkable plasticity means that it’s never too late to develop these abilities—every moment offers an opportunity to strengthen the neural networks that support human creativity and innovation.