The neuropsychological aspects of musical creativity

Abstract

Creativity emerges from the individual or collective intellect, in order to unfold the conundrum of life and give rise to meaningful deliberations for the attainment of a flourishing life. More specifically, creativity is commonly defined, within the framework of psychology, as an act or product that shall fulfill three main criteria: originality, unexpectedness, and usefulness. The cognitive science approach to creativity investigates the intellectual processes and representations concerned with the creative thinking. The methodologies of cognitive science, derived from the technological advancements of the past sixty years, have begun to adopt a more definitive and systemic perspective. Neuroscience has emerged, under this context, as the scientific study dedicated to explore the biological substrates of the nervous system, by utilizing a multitude of techniques such as neuroimaging. Cognitive neuroscience, in particular, studies the neural correlates of mental processes, and it constitutes the central approach herein adopted to examine musical creativity as a product of the human mind. In the present section, a definition plus historical evolvement of creativity are firstly provided together with an overview of its developments in psychometry. Secondly, a comprehensive description regarding the scientific advances about the topic, and within the field of cognitive neuroscience, is described according to: (1) the model on the four types of creativity and (2) the main categories of experimental designs implemented so far. Lastly, the latest advancements on the study of musical creativity, in particular musical improvisation, will be addressed under the neuroimaging framework.