Hippocampal amnesia disrupts creative thinking: Creative Thinking and the Hippocampus
Open accessAbstract
Creativity requires the rapid combination and recombination of existing mental representations to create novel ideas and ways of thinking. The hippocampal system, through its interaction with neocortical storage sites, provides a relational database necessary for the creation, updating, maintenance, and juxtaposition of mental representations used in service of declarative memory. Given this functionality, we hypothesized that hippocampus would play a critical role in creative thinking. We examined creative thinking, as measured by verbal and figural forms of the torrance tests of creative thinking (TTCT), in a group of participants with hippocampal damage and severe declarative memory impairment as well as in a group of demographically matched healthy comparison participants. The patients with bilateral hippocampal damage performed significantly worse than comparison participants on both the verbal and figural portions of the TTCT. These findings suggest that hippocampus plays a role critical in creative thinking, adding to a growing body of work pointing to the diverse ways the hallmark processing features of hippocampus serve a variety of behaviors that require flexible cognition.
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Amnesic patients with hippocampal damage and severe episodic memory deficits also perform poorly on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking.
“Amnesic patients with hippocampal damage, who have severe episodic memory deficits, also perform poorly on the widely used Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking [69].”
From Creative Cognition and Brain Network Dynamics (2016) · cites this paper as [69]
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- Authors
- Duff, M. C., Kurczek, J., Rubin, R., Cohen, N. J., & Tranel, D.
- Affiliations
- University of Iowa (US)
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (US)
- Corresponding author
- Duff, Melissa C.
- Venue
- Hippocampus
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2013-10-18
- Volume
- 23
- Issue
- 12
- Pages
- 1143-1149
- ISSN
- 1050-9631 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC4010315
- OpenAlex
- W2133956630
- Cited by
- 170
- References
- 48
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 13 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 11 · 2021: 17 · 2020: 12 · 2019: 13 · 2018: 27 · 2017: 20 · 2016: 14 · 2015: 11 · 2014: 7
- FWCI
- 14.45
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Hippocampus (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- national institute of deafness and other communication disorders (DC008825)
- national institute of neurological disease and stroke (NS19632)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Creativity in Education and Neuroscience
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Memory and Neural Mechanisms
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Memory Processes and Influences
- Keywords
- creative thinking, hippocampal amnesia, declarative memory, Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, mental representation, figural creativity, verbal creativity
- MeSH terms
- Amnesia, Cognition Disorders, Creativity, Female, Hippocampus, Humans, Male, Middle Aged, Neuropsychological Tests, Verbal Learning
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