Here's a recent study on visual creativity by Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, Sook-Lei Liew and Francesco Dandekar, who found some interesting results:
Although creativity has been called the most important of all human resources, its neural basis is still unclear. In the current study, we used fMRI to measure neural activity in participants solving a visuospatial creativity problem that involves divergent thinking. [...]
Participants completed two different tasks, a visual creativity task and a control task. The creative task involved presenting participants with three distinct shapes (e.g. a circle, an ‘8’ and a ‘C’), and then asking them to assemble the shapes into a namable composite image [B]. The control task involved presenting participants with an ordinary shape (square, triangle and rectangle) that had been trisected into three pieces which were rotated apart from each other, with the three pieces hinging around shared vertices [A]. Participants were asked to mentally rotate the constituent pieces around these hinge points to reconstruct and name the original shape.
To find brain regions that were more active specifically during visual creative processing, we compared activity in the creative task to activity in the control task. Significant regions of activation were found in the medial prefrontal cortex, the left superior frontal gyrus [with peaks in the SMA, pars orbitalis and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC)], the premotor cortex, the left lateral occipital cortex, the left inferior parietal lobule and the left posterior middle temporal gyrus [below].
Activation pattern for the contrast ‘Creative > Control’. Left: SMA and left superior frontal gyrus are active. Middle: SMA and mPFC are active. Right: left IFG, left parietal cortex and left middle temporal gyrus are active. Images were thresholded using clusters determined by Z > 2.3 and a (corrected) cluster significance threshold of P = 0.05.
In summary, our results demonstrate that even in a task that is specialized to the right hemisphere (visuospatial processing), robust parallel activity in the left hemisphere supports creative processing. This novel finding suggests that creative processing recruits both hemispheres, including the one that is less dominant for that task. In particular, while in this study we find that visual creativity more strongly recruits left hemisphere activation despite being a right hemisphere task, previous reports show that creative tasks involving language also commonly find activity in the hemisphere nondominant for the task (right hemisphere activity, when it is a left hemisphere task). Furthermore, our results support the notion that higher motor planning may be a general component of creative improvisation (visual, verbal or auditory) and that such goal-directed planning of novel solutions may be organized top-down by the left DLPFC and by working memory processing in the mPFC. Thus, it may be that this pattern of activation is not only important for visual creativity but creativity in various domains.
