The Neuroscience of Creativity with DR. BEN SHOFTY

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Where do creative thoughts come from? How can we harness our stream of consciousness and spontaneity to express ourselves? How are mind-wandering, meditation, and the arts good for our creativity and physical and mental well-being?

Dr. Ben Shofty is a functional neurosurgeon affiliated with the University of Utah. He graduated from the Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Medicine, received his PhD in neurosurgical training from the Israeli Institute of Technology, and completed his training at the Tel Aviv Medical Center and Baylor University. He was also an Israeli national rugby player. His practice specializes in neuromodulation and exploring treatments for disorders such as OCD, depression, and epilepsy, among others, while also seeking to understand the science behind creativity, mind-wandering, and the many complexities of the brain.

“When you think about the evolution of the human brain–just like other animals that have specialized in speed or keeping warm or gathering food–I feel our brain sort of specialized being creative and flexible and being able to generate different solutions to a given problem. To me, this is probably the most fascinating thought process that happens in the human brain. And what I do in neurosurgery–and my subspecialty is called functional neurosurgery–we don't deal with disorders in which there's an anatomical abnormality inside the brain. We deal with disorders in which there is an abnormal connection or abnormal circuitry inside the brain when there's an issue with the way the brain functions. There's no tumor. There are no abnormal blood vessels or anything like that. And that gives us an amazing opportunity to really investigate how different circuits and different areas inside the brain work.

In terms of the more elusive processes like creativity or high-order cognitive functions, we don't really know or understand where they are inside the brain. As you said, there's no creativity cortex, like we have a motor cortex, sensory cortex, or visual cortex.

When we started with this series of projects, we tried to think, if this function just like other higher cognitive functions, cannot be explained by a specific area inside the brain, then what happens? Where does the magic happen? And the answer was that it's a network-dependent function. It doesn't originate from a specific area inside the brain, but it originates from multiple brain networks sort of all of a sudden synchronizing to generate that unexpected function.”

https://healthcare.utah.edu/find-a-doctor/ben-shofty
https://academic.oup.com/brain/advance-article/doi/10.1093/brain/awae199/7695856

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