The study

This research is part of a broader area of study called “personality neuroscience,” which is essentially the study of links between brain structure and certain personality traits. Rather than measure creativity directly, researchers scored 185 participants on two traits that have been associated with creativity: their openness and their intellect. Normally, these traits are bundled together and studied as one part of what is known as the “Big Five” personality model. But by focusing on openness and intellect specifically, this study provides a much more nuanced look at creativity and brain structure.

“We had this idea that, if we go to the brain and we look at which regions are correlating individually with intellect and openness, as opposed to the overall factor, there might be something interesting to see there,” said researcher Oshin Vartanian. The study was a collaboration between his team at Defence Research and Development Canada and neuropsychologist Rex Jung’s laboratory at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

Participants were given questionnaires that assessed their intellect and openness separately, and researchers took MRI scans of the participants’ brains. Then, the researchers looked for correlations between these personality traits and the thickness of the cerebral cortex (which plays an important part in memory and cognitive control) across the entire brain, known as “cortical thickness.” Researchers hypothesized that they would see a positive correlation between intellect and cortical thickness in regions of the brain associated with intelligence. After all, previous studies have linked intellect—the personality trait—with tangible performance on intelligence measures, like IQ tests. For openness, the researchers expected to find a positive correlation between openness scores and the cortical thickness of regions of the brain associated with creativity.



