Creativity

…mathematical research, and what proof, creativity, understanding and storytelling contribute to the discipline. The recording took place on 26 July 2026; Quanta published the episode on 3 September 2026.

…challenges familiar accounts of human creativity, originality and consciousness. They discuss whether machine creativity differs fundamentally from human creativity and what evidence could bear on the possibility of subjective experience in AI systems. The conversation also considers Bostrom’s concerns about systems that recognise when they are being evaluated and change their behaviour, and the resulting difficulty of assessing alignment. It then turns to a hypothetical future in which automation removes m

…then explores insight and creativity across ordinary problem-solving and altered experiences.

…intelligence and human knowledge and creativity.

…memory retrieval, dream recall, creativity) [1,2]. Here, we probe the role of the DMN in divergent thinking through intracranial recordings in 8 patients with electrodes implanted for epilepsy monitoring. Subjects performed a creativity-requiring alternate uses task (AUT) and two control tasks (Fig. 1a)—a basic arithmetic task (BAT) and an object characterization task (OCT). The originality of subjects’ AUT responses was automatically scored u

There are many mysteries in the universe. One of the most significant, often considered the final frontier in science, is understanding how our subjective experience, or consciousness, emerges from the collective action of neurons in biological systems. While substantial progress has been made over the past decades, a unified and widely accepted explanation of the neural mechanisms underpinning consciousness remains elusive. The field is rife with theories that frequently provide contradictory explanations of the phenomenon. To accelerate progress, we have adopted a new model of science: adver

…Kenji will discuss the creativity and science of the culinary arts with Indre Viskontas.

Semantic cognition brings meaning to our world – it allows us to make sense of what we see and hear, and to produce adaptive thoughts and behaviour. Since we have a wealth of information about any given concept, our store of knowledge is not sufficient for successful semantic cognition; we also need mechanisms that can steer the information that we retrieve so it suits the context or our current goals. This talk traces the neural networks that underpin this flexibility in semantic cognition. It draws on evidence from multiple methods (neuropsychology, neuroimaging, neural stimulation) to show

…analogical stimuli) on the students' creativity at different design levels. Through an empirical study, we explored the differences in the e

Join us for a conversation on the science of uncertainty, mind wandering and creativity!

Hilde Østby discusses creativity, how new ideas emerge and what brain research can tell us about imaginative thinking. Conversation in Norwegian.

…or 'REM', and Non-REM sleep facilitate creativity in different ways. Memory replay mechanisms in Non-REM can abstract rules from corpuses of learned information, while replay in REM may promote novel associations. I propose that the iterative interleaving of REM and Non-REM across a night boosts the formation of complex knowledge fr