CANADA: Secret to stimulating creativity may be to literally motivate brain. In a new study, scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill were able to measurably increase creativity by altering electrical activity in the brain — a finding that may have significant implications for the treatment of depression.
The researchers stimulated the brains of 20 healthy individuals with a low dose of electric currents, transmitted safely and non-invasively through electrodes attached to the scalp. Afterward, the participants performed an average of 7.4 percent better on a test of creative thinking.
The electric currents administered were designed to enhance alpha wave oscillations, naturally occurring electrical patterns that oscillate at a frequency of 8 to 12 hertz (cycles per second). When you’re daydreaming or in another restful waking state, there’s a good chance that your brain is in alpha mode.
“[An alpha wave pattern] essentially decouples you from the environment,” Dr. Flavio Frohlich, assistant professor of psychiatry, cell biology and physiology, and biomedical engineering at the University of North Carolina and the study’s lead author, told The Huffington Post. “The brain at any given moment in time has to decide, ‘How much energy do I spend on processing incoming input through the sensory modalities, and how much time do I spend on processing and reprocessing internally stored previous information?'”
Previous research has shown that highly creative people tend to exhibit more alpha activity, Frohlich said, and the new findings suggest these alpha waves may indeed be a critical part of the creative process.
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