Publishing their results in the journal Cortex, a team from the University of North Carolina in the US used a low dose of electrical current to enhance brain waves called alpha oscillations, which naturally occur when someone is day-dreaming.
"We've provided the first evidence that specifically enhancing alpha oscillations is a causal trigger of a specific and complex behaviour - in this case, creativity. But our goal is to use this approach to help people with neurological and psychiatric illnesses." Specifically, there's already strong evidence that people with depression have impaired alpha oscillations.
Alpha oscillations occur within the low range between 8 and 12 Hertz, and are most prominent when we close our eyes and meditate or get lost in our own thoughts, which led scientists to associate them with creativity.
As soon as we have more pressing tasks to attend to, higher frequencies such as gamma oscillations take over.
These electrical currents were either placebo stimulations, that let participants feel a little tingle but didn't do much else, or 10-Hertz currents, designed to work in unison to trigger alpha oscillations.
The independently graded results showed that those who had received the alpha oscillation stimulation performed far better than those who hadn't.
To make sure that the alpha oscillations were really causing this creativity boost, the team repeated the experiment using 40-Hertz electrical stimulation, which boosted the activity of gamma oscillations instead. This had no benefit on creativity.
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