The Creative Brain

Outline

The Creative Brain (2024) offers a science-based exploration of how creativity emerges from the human brain. Anna Abraham examines common beliefs about creative thinking, including the idea that creativity belongs exclusively to the brain’s right hemisphere, and compares them with findings from psychology and neuroscience. The book explains how intelligence, imagination, memory, attention, and different brain networks work together to generate original ideas and solve problems.

• Creativity comes from the brain working as a whole, not from one side of it alone.
• The belief that creativity lives only in the right hemisphere does not hold up against psychology and neuroscience findings.
• Intelligence, imagination, memory and attention each play a part in producing original ideas.
• Different brain networks work together to generate new ideas and solve problems.
• Because creativity rests on how the brain works, it can be developed and strengthened.

Anna Abraham is a cognitive neuroscientist, psychologist, author, and leading researcher on creativity and imagination. She is the E. Paul Torrance Professor and Director of the Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development at the University of Georgia. She is also the author of The Neuroscience of Creativity and the editor of The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination.