  Creativity is perhaps what most differentiates humans from other species. It
involves the capacity to shift between divergent and convergent modes of
thought in response to task demands. Divergent thought has been characterized
as the kind of thinking needed to generate multiple solutions, while convergent
thought has been characterized as the kind of thinking needed for tasks in with
one solution. Divergent thought has been conceived of as reflecting on the task
from unconventional perspectives, while convergent thought has been conceived
of as reflecting on it from conventional perspectives. Personality traits
correlated with creativity include openness to experience, tolerance of
ambiguity, and self-confidence. Evidence that creativity is linked with
affective disorders is mixed. Neuroscientific research using
electroencephalography (EEG) or functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
suggests that creativity is associated with a loosening of cognitive control
and decreased arousal. The distributed, content-addressable structure of
associative memory is conducive to bringing task-relevant items to mind without
the need for explicit search. Human creativity dates back to the earliest stone
tools over three million years ago, with the Paleolithic marking the onset of
art, science, and religion. Areas of controversy concern the relative
contributions of expertise, chance, and intuition, the importance of process
versus product, whether creativity is domain-specific versus domain-general,
the extent to which creativity is correlated with affective disorders, and
whether divergent thought entails the generation of multiple ideas or the
honing of a single initially ambiguous mental representation that may manifest
as different external outputs. Areas for further research include computational
modeling, the biological basis of creativity, and studies that track ideation
processes over time.

Neurons and Cognition