Types of creativity

Imagine the impact if we were to understand, and thus could reliably enhance, something – anything – about how creativity works in the brain. The fact that this prospect is not anywhere in sight makes it clear that no reliable progress has been made on the mechanisms underlying creativity over the last half century. Indeed, with the divergent thinking paradigm shown to be theoretically incoherent for neuroscience, there currently is no viable experimental approach to tackle the problem. Given that creativity is a complex and multifaceted concept, the obvious way forward is to parse it into subtypes. This paper presents a theoretical framework that divides the concept of creativity into three distinct types: a deliberate mode, a spontaneous mode, and a flow mode. Unlike previous attempts, the three creativity types are explicitly defined and delineated from one another based on established concepts in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Moreover, to maximize the framework’s heuristic value, this is done separately at three different levels of description: (A) neuroanatomy, (B) processes, and (C) evolutionary algorithms (EAs), or, more precisely, different parameters of EAs. This new theoretical framework advances the field in two significant ways. First, by defining the subtypes in terms of concepts that exist in mainstream psychology and neuroscience, they are valid subtypes, as they can be theoretically defended. Second, by providing a solid theoretical rationale to investigate a more circumscribed aspect of the larger problem, the framework provides a more targeted, and realistic, line of attack that will eventually lead to more meaningful data about the neural mechanisms of creativity.