Neuroimage special issue: Creativity and the Brain

A special issue of NeuroImage on “Creativity and the Brain” was developed in partnership with SfNC and guest-edited by SfNC Executive Committee members. The motivations for this special issue reflect the goals of SfNC. SfNC was formed with the charter to foster interdisciplinary research on neural and cognitive bases of creativity and related processes, and to provide an inclusive forum for communicating this research so that it has maximal impacts for education, health, innovation, and artistic performance.

SfNC seeks to achieve a force-multiplier effect by combining the energy sources surrounding creativity neuroscience so that they can inform each other toward advancing the field. The NeuroImage special issue brings together both expository and new empirical work from creativity neuroscience labs across the globe.

We hope that this special issue can contribute to 1) mapping the diversity of creativity neuroscience to increase mutual awareness within the field and increase awareness of creativity neuroscience in the broader cognitive neuroscience community, and 2) highlighting promising research directions toward stronger coalescence around methods and questions that have potential to catalyze basic understanding of how creativity happens in the brain and how to enhance it.

We were excited to receive far more manuscripts submitted for the special issue than we anticipated. The extraordinarily high quality of these manuscripts made for many difficult editorial decisions (a good problem to have). Forty-one papers were ultimately accepted for publication, representing the diversity of creativity neuroscience, and the current and emerging directions in our field.

SfNC Ontology Project

• A priority for the advancement of creativity research is to develop greater precision and consistency in the terms we use for creativity-related constructs and, especially, in the tasks we use to measure these constructs.

• SfNC is seeking to advance the ontological development of creativity research along multiple convergent lines.

• The first published work from this research began at SfNC 2019 in San Francisco by asking our members (THANK YOU!) about the meaning and measurement of creativity-related constructs (Kenett, et al., 2020, NeuroImage).