First, let’s define what being creative means. According to the Scientific American, being creative is often defined as en defined as having the ability to come up with new, unique, and useful ideas.
So can everyone be creative?
Everyone has the ability to be creative to some extent. What is difficult to define though, is why some people can be more creative than others.
The amount of creativity someone can range from everyday activities (most commonly known as little-C) to more complex creativity, such as song writing or painting (Big-C).
A study carried out in 2013, tried to figure out why some people were more creative than others. Here’s what they found:
- People who demonstrated more creative ideas in the study, usually had creative hobbies.
- People with stronger brain connections came up with better ideas. Three specific brain regions belong to the “high-creative” network.
- The default network is activated for spontaneous thinking such as daydreaming. It can play a key role in brainstorming.
- The executive control network activates when you need to focus or control the thought process, for example when evaluating whether ideas from a brainstorm will actually work for the selected goal.
- The salience network acts as a mechanism that connects the default and the executive network. It may be important when alternating between idea generation and evaluation.
- Normally the three networks do not work simultaneously, the results showed that creative people are better at activating these networks at the same time when normally they work separately.
The Creative 
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