Project description
Thinking about the neural mechanisms of creative search
The human brain is capable of finding solutions to complex questions by searching through vast mental spaces of thought. As creative thinking becomes increasingly important, understanding the relationship between people’s search strategies and their brain structure, activity, and connectivity is crucial. Unfortunately, there are currently no established computational principles to integrate behavioural, computational, and neurobiological findings into a comprehensive understanding of creative search. The EU-funded CreativeBrain project will use scale-invariant sensing and Pareto optimality computational principles and analysis methods inspired by biology. The findings will advance our understanding of the neural basis of creativity and have important implications for fields such as neuroscience and artificial intelligence.
Objective
The human brain efficiently searches enormous mental spaces of thought for solutions to a given question. How is this done? The growing importance of creative search has sparked a surge of interest in mapping the relations between people’s creative search strategies and the structure, activity, and connectivity of their brain. Yet to date there are no coherent computational principles to bind behavioral, computational, and neurobiological findings together into a mechanistic understanding of creative search. CreativeBrain uses two such computational principles: scale-invariant sensing and Pareto optimality. Scale-invariant sensing is essential for a robust search in environments with signals that span many orders of magnitude like in creative search. Pareto optimality asserts that individual differences stem from different balancing between competing tasks that need to be optimized and thus explains the utility of these individual differences. CreativeBrain will employ state-of-the-art computational and analysis methods from systems biology to infer the neural mechanism of creative search on the levels of function, computations and neural implementation. This will be the first comprehensive research effort that ties these findings to a mechanistic theory of creative search that also explains the utility of neural individual differences. The project will result in a breakthrough in our understanding of how the human brain can efficiently search in vast spaces of thought. On a broader scale, CreativeBrain will open a new front in the interdisciplinary studies of the mind and brain, offering a principled way to unite neurobiological, behavioral, and computational aspects into one holistic and mechanistic view. By doing so it will contribute significantly to the promise of computational modeling for connecting different levels of inquiry of a higher cognitive function in the brain and can thus be extended to other cognitive processes and systems.
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
91904 Jerusalem
Israel