<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"The ability of humans to create art, think rationally or invent new tools has long interested scientists, and a new study reveals how the brain achieves these imaginative feats.\nHuman imagination stems from a widespread network of brain areas that collectively manipulate ideas, images and symbols, the study finds. This \"mental workspace\" had been theorized before, but this study provides new empirical evidence, the researchers say.\nCreativity in art, science, music and other fields requires the ability to combine different mental representations to form new ones. [Creative Genius: The World's Greatest Minds]\nFor example, if a person is asked to imagine a banana spinning around quickly and getting bigger or smaller, he can do so effortlessly, said study researcher Alex Schlegel, a cognitive neuroscientist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H.\n\"When you start to look at more complex cognitive process[es] like imagination or creative thinking, it's not just isolated [brain] areas that are responsible, but communication of the entire brain that's required,\" Schlegel told LiveScience.\nIn the study, the researchers focused on visual forms of imagination.\nSchlegel and his colleagues asked participants to imagine certain shapes and sometimes manipulate them by either combining them with other shapes or mentally breaking the shapes apart. They put people in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner to measure their brain activity during the task.\nThe scans showed that a broad network of brain areas were involved in the imagination task, and they appeared to be working in concert. In particular, manipulating the images involved a network of four core brain areas \u2014 the occipital cortex, the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), the posterior precuneus and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) \u2014 which are involved in visual processing, attention and executive functions.\nIn addition, several other brain regions were active during the task, suggesting the brain's mental workspace involves a more extended network.\nPrevious studies suggested the brain's visual processing areas are also involved in creating imagery. But the new study looked at not only how the brain forms images, but also how it modifies them.\nThe imagination experiment was somewhat unrealistic compared with creative tasks in everyday life. \"It would be great if we could stick someone in an MRI machine and say 'create some art,'\" Schlegel said. But for a scientific study, the task must be more uniform, he added.\nUnderstanding imagination reveals what makes humans unique among animals, Schlegel said.\nThe findings could ultimately help improve artificial intelligence. Computers are good at a lot of things, but are less adept at seeing patterns or thinking creatively. \"The more we understand how the human brain does this, the better we can design machines,\" Schlegel said.\nThe study was detailed this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.\nImage: Flickr, A Health Blog"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2013/09/17/creativity-found-in-brain/>