UPCOMING SPECIAL EVENT— e28: Enhancing Creativity with Neurofeedback
Thursday, May 15th, 2025
18:30-20:00 GMT (London, UK) • 1:30-3:00pm EST (North America, Eastern)
Join us for a special edition of the Creative Minds Reading Club on Thursday, May 15th.
This session, “Enhancing Creativity with Neurofeedback,” will feature an inspiring presentation, and we are delighted to welcome a special guest:
🔬 Simone Luchini
Simone Luchini is a PhD student at the Pennsylvania State University working under the supervision of Dr. Roger Beaty. His research combines techniques from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and natural language processing to explore the nature of creativity in humans and AI. Simone has been awarded the Frank X. Barron award for superior contributions to the psychology of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts by students. He has published his work in several peer-reviewed journals, such as Cerebral Cortex, Thinking Skills and Creativity, and the Journal of Intelligence.
🔗 Find out more about Simone work here: Website | Publications
Together with Simone, we will discuss how recent advancements in neuroscience have revealed causal evidence that strengthening communication between the brain’s default mode network (DMN) and executive control network (ECN) enhances creative thinking.
📄 Luchini, Zhang, White, Lührs, Ramot, & Beaty (2025)
Enhancing creativity with covert neurofeedback: causal evidence for default-executive network coupling in creative thinking. Cerebral Cortex, 2025, 35.
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Creativity neuroscience has consistently reported increased functional connectivity between the default mode network and the executive control network supports creative cognition, potentially ref lecting coordination of generative and evaluative cognitive processes. However, evidence has been purely correlational—no causal demonstrations show that default mode network–executive control network interaction specifically drives creative performance. We sought causal evidence for default mode network–executive control network coupling in creative thinking using functional near-infrared spectroscopy–brain connectivity neurofeedback, which can endogenously modify functional connectivity through reinforcement learning. Importantly, we employed covert neurofeedback, where participants were unaware of the specific brain activity being trained, allowing for unbiased evaluation of cognitive and neural impacts. In a default-executive neurofeedback condition (n = 15), we entrained coupling between the medial prefrontal cortex and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, hubs of the default mode network and executive control network, respectively. We compared this with a default-motor condition (n = 15), entraining coupling between the medial prefrontal cortex and the supplementary motor area. Approximately 24 h later, default-executive neurofeedback led to increased coupling between the default mode network and the executive control network during a creative thinking task (generating creative object uses), extending to broader default mode network regions. Behaviorally, we observed a double dissociation: The default–executive condition increased idea originality, while the default- motor condition improved go/no-go reaction times. We thus provide the first evidence that default mode network–executive control network coupling causally enhances creative performance.
👋🏼 Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you need a pdf of the article.