The roles of the temporal lobe in creative insight: an integrated review

ABSTRACT

Recent studies have revealed that the temporal lobe, a cortical region thought to be in charge of episodic and semantic memory, is involved in creative insight. This work examines the contributions of discrete temporal regions to insight. Activity in the medial temporal regions is indicative of novelty recognition and detection, which is necessary for the formation of novel associations and the “Aha!” experience. The fusiform gyrus mainly affects the formation of gestalt-like representation and perspective taking. The anterior and posterior middle temporal gyri (MTG) are individually associated with extensive semantic processing and inhibiting salient or routine word associations, which are necessary to form non-salient, novel and remote associations. The anterior and posterior superior temporal gyri (STG) are individually responsible for integrating/binding and accessing various types of available conceptual representations. Based on the current knowledge, an integrated model of the temporal lobe's role in insight and some future directions are proposed.

KEYWORDS:

• Medial temporal lobe
• creative thinking
• brain-based insight
• Aha feeling

Acknowledgments

We sincerely thank Prof. Ball and three reviewers for their constructive comments. Also, we thank Dr Lynne and Dr Krysta for their helps in polishing language.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The term “insight” in our work only refers to insights in creativity or problem solving and not to those in psychotherapy and psychosis that usually represent the patients’ self-awareness of their own psychopathology.

² As mentioned previously, insight could be considered a type of creative cognition (Dietrich & Kanso, 2010) or creativity because of their similarities in conceptualisation, measures and processes. First, creativity is broadly conceived as the ability to change existing thoughts or thinking patterns to create something that is useful, novel and generative (Sternberg & Davidson, 1995). This conception is highly congruent with this study's definition of insight and with the concept of insight as “a reorganization of the elements of an individual's mental representation of a stimulus, situation or event to yield a non-obvious or non-dominant interpretation” provided in Kounios and Jung-Beeman (2014). Second, most tasks for measuring insight are also used to study or measure creativity; for example, the RAT developed by Mednick (1968). Third, ample evidence supports a strong correlation between insight performance and creativity test scores (e.g., Schooler & Melcher, 1997; Shen, Yuan, Liu, Yi, & Dou, 2016). Finally, insight is considered a process or stage of creativity in many theoretical models, such as the four-stage model proposed by Wallas (1926). Nonetheless, insight has some characteristics that are unique or distinct from other forms of creativity. On the one hand, insight is not involved in all phases of creative thought (e.g., idea evaluation) and is not a necessary feature of creative thinking; on the other hand, most creativity tasks require divergent thinking, or generating multiple solutions to an open-ended problem (Guilford, 1967); while many insight tasks rely strongly on convergent thinking (finding a single correct solution to a problem) or on a combination of the convergent and divergent thinking (Abraham & Windmann, 2007). Therefore, the formation of novel associations is also an aspect of creativity. Creativity, however, has at least one other way of establishing novel associations; namely constraint-free association or approximately constraint-free association, which encompasses freely extending the relationship between two irrelevant things/constructs or creating new associations between them. To compare, the novel associations that characterise insight are formed by rediscovering infrequent, subdominant or unobvious associations between things/constructs, whereas other types of creative novel association or idea generation can involve extending or creating new associations that did not previously exist, for example, through creative imaging or recombining the obvious features of two constructs/things. The novel association that characterises insight is inherent to the two constructs/things being associated; the novel association that characterises creative efforts other than insight may not be inherent to the original constructs. During the processing stage, the formation of novel associations in insight does not include the idea/association evaluation that is essential to other forms of creativity.

³ Regarding the causal flow related to the “formation” and “recognition” of novel associations, it seems more appropriate to follow a cyclic perspective that the system of novel association recognition and detection can differentiate between old and novel associations. Specifically, the system of novel association recognition and detection can amplify the novelty degree of an association that has passed its criteria and can screen out the routine and old associations. It can then selectively access and further process old associations by recombining or re-chunking them, so that they can have somewhat new characteristics or novel meanings. That is, the detection or recognition of novel association is responsible for detecting associations that were generated “previously” in another system but stored/activated in working memory, on the one hand; on the other hand, novel association detection and recognition can re-detect incoming novel associations, particularly novel meanings that are composed of selectively accessed old/routine contents that failed to pass the initial novelty criteria (which will be discussed later).

⁴ As exhibited in Table 3, the fusiform gyrus seems not to have any right-hemisphere bias for insight. However, this hemispheric difference is undetermined by the scarcity of empirical research reporting the activation of this region during creative insight.

⁵ The formation of novel associations, which typically involves the two key steps of accessing and binding existing associations, may define the creative combination mechanism or combinational creativity (Gonen-Yaacovi et al., 2013) beyond insight. It also should be noted that the combination is not the sole mechanism involved in forming novel associations that are essential for creativity or insight. According to Davidson and Sternberg (1984), there are three ways exist to elicit insight: selective comparison, encoding and combination. Additionally, there are other ways, such as analogising (see Welling, 2007), to trigger insight. These include the formation of novel associations, which are necessary for creativity and insight.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 31500870], [grant number 31671124]; the Fourth 333 High-Level Personnel Training Project in Jiangsu Province; Beijing Municipal Commission of Education [grant number PXXM2016_014203_000027); the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [grant number 2014B15314].