Community structure of the creative brain at rest

Abstract

Recent studies have provided insight into inter-individual differences in creative thinking, focusing on characterizations of distributed large-scale brain networks both at the local level of regions and their pairwise interactions and at the global level of the brain as a whole. However, it remains unclear how creative thinking relates to mesoscale network features, e.g. community and hub organization. We applied a data-driven approach to examine community and hub structure in resting-state functional imaging data from a large sample of participants, and how they relate to individual differences in creative thinking. First, we computed for every participant the co-assignment probability of brain regions to the same community. We found that greater capacity for creative thinking was related to increased and decreased co-assignment of medial-temporal and subcortical regions to the same community, respectively, suggesting that creative capacity may be reflected in inter-individual differences in the meso-scale organization of brain networks. We then used participant-specific communities to identify network hubs—nodes whose connections form bridges across the boundaries of different communities—quantified based on their participation coefficients. We found that increased hubness of DMN and medial-temporal regions were positively and negatively related with creative ability, respectively. These findings suggest that creative capacity may be reflected in inter-individual differences in community interactions of DMN and medial-temporal structures. Collectively, these results demonstrate the fruitfulness of investigating mesoscale brain network features in relation to creative thinking.

Keywords

• Creativity
• Resting-state
• Community structure
• Divergent thinking
• Default mode network