The brain's prefrontal cortex is
thought to be the seat of cognitive control, working as a kind of
filter that keeps irrelevant thoughts, perceptions and memories from
interfering with a task at hand.
Now, researchers at the University of
Pennsylvania have shown that inhibiting this filter can boost
performance for tasks in which unfiltered, creative thoughts present
an advantage.
The slow development of the prefrontal cortex is one reason children fail at many attention-based tasks but excel at imaginative ones. It may also aid children in rapidly acquiring new knowledge.
"There are things that are important to not filter, in particular when you are learning," Thompson-Schill said. "If you throw out information about your environment as being irrelevant, you miss opportunities to learn about those things."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130314144356.htm
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If you paint or sculpt, you may think of yourself as right-brained. The right hemisphere of your brain often is thought to be the creative half, while the left is thought to be the rational, logical side.
But a new study from a team led by Aziz-Zadeh demonstrated that while the right half of your brain performs the bulk of the heavy lifting when you're being creative, it does call for help from the left half of your noggin.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120305132438.htm
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As humans, we spend about a third of our lives asleep. So there must be a point to it, right? Scientists have found that sleep helps consolidate memories, fixing them in the brain so we can retrieve them later. Now, new research is showing that sleep also seems to reorganize memories, picking out the emotional details and reconfiguring the memories to help you produce new and creative ideas
They have also measured brain activity during sleep and found that regions of the brain involved with emotion and memory consolidation are active.
"In our fast-paced society, one of the first things to go is our sleep," Payne says. "I think that's based on a profound misunderstanding that the sleeping brain isn't doing anything." The brain is busy. It's not just consolidating memories, it's organizing them and picking out the most salient information. She thinks this is what makes it possible for people to come up with creative, new ideas.
"I give myself an eight-hour sleep opportunity every night. I never used to do that -- until I started seeing my data," she says. People who say they'll sleep when they're dead are sacrificing their ability to have good thoughts now, she says. "We can get away with less sleep, but it has a profound effect on our cognitive abilities."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101113165441.htm
