The words used for the word association task consist

of nouns and verbs; they were selected from a list of the 5000 most commonly used words in English. Subjects look at the see more screen and silently say the first word that comes to mind; the control task consists of looking at a two-digit number on the screen and silently saying it. For both tasks subjects signal that they have responded with a button press. Within a run seven blocks of words (12 words each) alternate with eight blocks of numbers (10 numbers per block). Each word/number is on the screen for 1850 ms, followed by 150 ms of blank screen. For image analysis, scans are corrected for motion using the AFNI algorithm Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical to align each scan to the first image of the first functional scan. Motion is estimated for each subject as the average maximal displacement of subsequent images from the

Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical reference image across the six functional scans corresponding to the six runs of the task. Once aligned, the data are normalized by scaling the whole-brain signal intensity to a fixed value of 1000. Functional images are aligned to a 3D structural image. Following spatial normalization, individual functional images are averaged together for each of the two groups using a random effects model. To date we have studied four artists Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical and three scientists using this design. The artists included three writers and one writer/film-maker who also pioneered the use of digital imaging. The scientists included one neuroscientist and two molecular biologists. Their imaging data for the Word Association Task appears in (Figure 1). Since this is a verbal task, one might expect to see different activity Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical in the artists than in the scientists. However, the images indicate that the generation of word associations Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical recruits similar brain regions in both the artist and the scientist groups. At a basic level, it indicates that creative processing may involve the interactions of several regions between both hemispheres, laying to rest the notion that creativity resides primarily

in the right hemisphere.20 While the left hemisphere appears to have larger swathes of more intense activation, this may be attributed to the possibility that a verbal task is likely to recruit more of the left (language) hemisphere. It also appears that the association cortices are heavily recruited in this task in both groups, involving components that perform isothipendyl a variety of specialized associations. Thus, on the anterior portions of the brain, both groups show increased intensity in the left pre- and middle central gyri (Brodmann Area [BA] 6), a region that is central to the supplementary/association motor cortex. This region of activation extends down to the left inferior frontal gyrus. Both regions have been implicated in semantic and phonological processing and “theory of mind ”/perspective.