Community structure of the creative brain at rest

Yoed N. Kenett, Richard F. Betzel, Roger E. Beaty

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

24 Scopus citations

Abstract

Recent studies have provided insight into inter-individual differences in creative thinking, focusing on characterizations of distributed large-scale brain networks both at the local level of regions and their pairwise interactions and at the global level of the brain as a whole. However, it remains unclear how creative thinking relates to mesoscale network features, e.g. community and hub organization. We applied a data-driven approach to examine community and hub structure in resting-state functional imaging data from a large sample of participants, and how they relate to individual differences in creative thinking. First, we computed for every participant the co-assignment probability of brain regions to the same community. We found that greater capacity for creative thinking was related to increased and decreased co-assignment of medial-temporal and subcortical regions to the same community, respectively, suggesting that creative capacity may be reflected in inter-individual differences in the meso-scale organization of brain networks. We then used participant-specific communities to identify network hubs—nodes whose connections form bridges across the boundaries of different communities—quantified based on their participation coefficients. We found that increased hubness of DMN and medial-temporal regions were positively and negatively related with creative ability, respectively. These findings suggest that creative capacity may be reflected in inter-individual differences in community interactions of DMN and medial-temporal structures. Collectively, these results demonstrate the fruitfulness of investigating mesoscale brain network features in relation to creative thinking.

Original languageEnglish
Article number116578
JournalNeuroImage
Volume210
DOIs
StatePublished - 15 Apr 2020
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020

Funding

This research was supported by grant RFP-15-12 from the Imagination Institute ( www.imagination-institute.org ), funded by the John Templeton Foundation . The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the Imagination Institute or the John Templeton Foundation. This research was supported by grant RFP-15-12 from the Imagination Institute (www.imagination-institute.org), funded by the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the Imagination Institute or the John Templeton Foundation.

FundersFunder number
Imagination Institute or the John Templeton Foundation
John Templeton Foundation
Imagination Institute

    Keywords

    • Community structure
    • Creativity
    • Default mode network
    • Divergent thinking
    • Resting-state

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