Secrets of Creativity: What Neuroscience, the Arts, and Our Minds Reveal draws on insights from leading neuroscientists and scholars in the humanities and the arts to probe creativity in its many contexts, in the everyday mind, the exceptional mind, the scientific mind, the artistic mind, and the pathological mind. Components of creativity are specified with respect to types of memory, forms of intelligence, modes of experience, and kinds of emotion. Authors in this volume take on the challenge of showing how creativity can be characterized behaviorally, cognitively, and neurophysiologically. The complementary perspectives of the authors add to the richness of these findings. Neuroscientists describe the functioning of the brain and its circuitry in creative acts of scientific discovery or aesthetic production. Humanists from the fields of literature, art, and music give analyses of creativity in major literary works, musical compositions, and works of visual art.

Introduction by Suzanne Nalbantian, "The Twists and Turns of Creativity: An Overview from Neuroscience and the Arts"Part I: Theories of Creativity1. Jean-Pierre Changeux, "Artistic Creativity: A Neuronal Hypothesis"2. Oshin Vartanian, "Fluid Intelligence, Working Memory and Creativity: A Componential View"3. Robert J. Sternberg, "The Psychology of Creativity"4. Charlotte Stagg and Geraint A. Wiggins, "Clues to Human Creativity: From Neurons to Computation"Part II: Creativity and the Brain5. Marcus Raichle, "Creativity and the Brain's Default Network"6. Robert Stickgold, "Creativity of the Dream and Sleep State"7. Paul M. Matthews, "Creativity: Lessons from Disease, Drugs and Neuroimaging"8. Nancy C. Andreasen, "Using Neuroscience to Image the Creative Brain"Part III: Mechanisms of Creativity9. Alcino J. Silva and John Bickle, "Memory Linking and Creativity: Underlying Molecular, Cellular and Circuit Mechanisms"10. Jaak Panksepp, "Emotional Foundations of Creativity: The Brain's SEEKING System"11. Liane Gabora, "Creativity and the Self-Made World View"Part IV: Literary Creativity in Context12. Peter Schneck, "Henry James and the Creative Process: The Stewpot of the Imagination"13. John Burt Foster, "Contrasting Modes of Creativity: Artist Counterparts in Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Nabokov"14. Suzette Henke, "Twentieth-Century Pathological Writers and Their Creativity: Joyce, Woolf and D. H. Lawrence"15. Donald R. Wehrs, "Conceptual Blending and Genre Invention from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes and Shakespeare"Part V: Aesthetics and Creativity16. Suzanne Nalbantian, "Creativity in Modernist Literary Writers: Acts of Mental Transformation"17. Mark Hussey, "Significant Form and Aesthetic Emotion: Bloomsbury Theorizes Modern Art's 'Mysterious Laws' of Creativity"18. John Onians, "The Distinctive Creativity of Leonardo and Michelangelo: A Perspective from Neuroarthistory"19. Bruce Adolphe, "The Musical Imagination: Mystery and Method in Musical Composition"Part VI: An Interview with Richard Powers: Creativity and the Contemporary NovelistBios of Contributors