Myths/Truths of the Creative Brain

Is the right hemisphere the seat of the creative brain? Do psychedelic drugs enhance creativity? Does mental illness accompany creativity? These are some of the many exciting questions about creativity that have long been of interest to researchers and the general public alike. In our attempt to understand how creative minds operate, we favor explanations that are eccentric. It is as though any explanation for creativity, this seemingly magical phenomenon, must itself bear some inherent peculiarities to be convincing. When these notions come to be widespread and held as fact by many, academics often present them as pure myths that need to be debunked. Nonetheless, despite all the pronouncements and evidence to the contrary, creativity "myths" tend to persist. The question is why? In this lecture, Professor Anna Abraham explores dominant notions that abound about the creative brain and how they come about. In doing so, she unravels their roots and their truths.

 Anna Abraham is the E. Paul Torrance Professor and Director of the Torrance Center for Creativity at the University of Georgia (UGA), USA. She investigates the psychological and neurophysiological mechanisms underlying creativity and other aspects of the human imagination, including the reality-fiction distinction, mental time travel, social and self-referential cognition, aesthetic experience, and mental state reasoning. Her educational and professional training has been within the disciplines of psychology and neuroscience, and she has worked across a diverse range of academic departments and institutions the world over, all of which have informed her cross-cultural and multidisciplinary focus. She is the Founding Editor of the Cambridge Elements in Creativity and Imagination - an academic short book series. She has penned numerous publications including the 2018 book, The Neuroscience of Creativity (Cambridge University Press), and 2020 edited volume, The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination. Her latest book is The Creative Brain: Myths and Truths (2024, MIT Press). 

Zoom link will be emailed a week before the webinar.