Towards Circuit Mechanisms of the Creative Process

Creativity stands as one of the most intriguing aspects of cognition, attracting cross-disciplinary investigation due to its multifaceted nature and profound implications. While significant progress has been made in identifying the cognitive correlates of creativity, there remains a substantial gap in our mechanistic understanding of the creative process at the level of neuronal circuits in the brain. Unlike many complex behaviors whose neural implementations are studied systematically, a major challenge in generating a circuit-level understanding of creativity is the conceptual difficulty of deconstructing creativity into experimentally accessible components, which in turn hinders the operationalization of creativity for comparative and translational studies. To distinguish distinct components of the creative process, thus facilitating experimental accessibility, we leverage Marr’s three levels of analysis. These levels describe the computational, algorithmic, and implementational underpinnings of the creative process. Surveying recent neuroscientific literature, we discuss key circuit mechanisms and candidate brain structures that could be involved in creative ideation in biological systems. With this systematic description, we provide new perspectives on creativity and raise specific hypotheses for future studies to expand the understanding of the neural underpinnings of creativity.