Remember that old story about creative people using the right side of their brain? Well it's wrong.

But, it does seem that there is a distinct and rather complex pattern in the brain of people who are more creative.

Asked about a creative person, most of us will think of an artist or author, someone who is capable of conjuring imaginative and original creative works.

But in psychology and neuroscience, creativity is defined simply as the ability to come up with novel and useful ideas.

"It's the ability to come up with something new that hasn't been introduced or existed on a large scale before, that also solves some sort of problem," said Roger Beaty, the director of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Creativity Lab at Penn State University.

That simple framing allows neuroscientists to quantify an individual's creativity through a series of tests or tasks.

These types of tasks are currently being used in the Aha! Challenge to test people's creative brains and insight.

They include alternative use tasks — providing new and unusual uses for an everyday object, such as a sock. (Less creative answer: to warm a foot. More creative answer: a water filtration device).

Other tasks are more akin to what most of us would call riddles or brain teasers.

Dr Beaty has used these tests in combination with functional MRI scans of brain activity in order to understand the differences in the brains of creative and less creative people.

What's going on in the brain?

What's happening in the brain when we have an original idea? ( Getty: japatino )

Our brains are incredibly complex. While there is no evidence to justify the "right brain is creative, left brain is logical" myth, there is documented evidence for complex patterns or networks of activity in the brain associated with different mental processes.

Three of these distinct brain networks — the default mode, the executive control network and the salience network — have been identified by Dr Beaty and colleagues as being associated with creativity.

The default mode network is activated when people are relaxed and their mind is wandering to different topics or experiences.

"It's associated with remembering past experiences, thinking about possible future experiences, daydreaming and so forth," Dr Beaty said.

The executive control network comes into play when you need to pay close attention and focus on something in the environment.

"It comes online when we have to focus our attention and cognitive resources on more demanding tasks that require us to hone our attention and manage multiple things in our mind at one time, directing the content of our thoughts."

The salience network plays a significant role in detecting and filtering important — or salient — information.

"It's called salience because it helps us to pick up on salient information in the environment or internally," Dr Beaty said.

Interestingly, the default mode and the executive control networks don't typically work together — when one network is activated, the other tends to be deactivated.

"One thing that we think the salience network might be doing is switching between an idea-generation mode, which is more of a default process, and the idea-evaluation mode, which is more of a control way of thinking."

Dr Beaty and colleagues found that more creative people tended to have more network connections.

"We found that across the many different brain regions that were within these three networks, those who were better able to coactivate or exchange information between these networks produced more original ideas."

They were able to predict with relative accuracy who was more creative, and also who was less creative, based on the patterns in the fMRI scan of their brain when they were answering the question, Dr Beaty said.

"But there is still a lot more to learn, " he added.

The high-creative network uses both sides of the brain. More creative people tended to have more connections between the default mode, executive and salient brain networks. ( Supplied: Beaty et al )

Creative blocks

The process of insight — where a solution pops into your brain after a period of frustration or creative block — is often associated with creativity.

But creativity is also a slow, gradual process.

"Moments of insight are definite drivers towards something that you might be doing," said Margaret Webb, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Melbourne's School of Psychological Science and one of the researchers behind the Aha! Challenge.

"You might have this moment of insight, for example, and you're like, 'Oh, I know exactly what I want to create'."

But then you have to sit down and work in a concentrated and incremental fashion towards the rest of your goal, she added.

"So it might be that moment of insight that gives you the drive to create this thing but you still need both of those capabilities to create a masterpiece," Dr Webb said.

The role of memory

Dr Beaty is also investigating how memory plays a part in creativity … and it's complicated.

On the one hand, memory is absolutely critical for creativity.

"To become an expert in anything, you have to spend years studying the rules of your trade, getting a sense for what has already been done, building up this big database of information that you can draw upon when you're coming up with new ideas," Dr Beaty said.

On the other hand, he said, laboratory studies provide evidence that memory can also constrain creativity.

"Creativity requires, by definition, the generation of something new, and memory is the representation of something that is old and already known."

Sorry, this audio has expired Creativity and the A-ha moment

"If you are too fixated on what you already know or what's the current state of the problem you're working on, then that can interfere with the ability to move forward and come up with new ideas."

What may be important is how memories are structured and accessed.

"There's some evidence to suggest that the way the concepts are stored in our memory play a role in how we can piece them together in new ways," he said.

His latest research looks at the role of episodic or autobiographical memory — memory for personal experiences — in how we imagine new future experiences.

How does creativity change as we get older?

The role of memory and experience plays into how creativity changes with age, but the evidence is mixed, Dr Beaty said.

"Some studies have shown that older adults show lower performance on creative thinking tasks, some have shown the opposite and some have shown no differences."

"It's a very early stage … but I think we could make different predictions about why older adults might actually be more creative because they have access to more information, more wisdom and more experiences to draw on."