Loui Co-Authors Article on Human Creativity and the Brain

Psyche Loui, assistant professor of psychology, assistant professor of neuroscience and behavior, assistant professor of integrative sciences, co-authored a new article published in the December 2017 issue of Brain and Cognition.

The paper is titled, “Jazz Musicians Reveal Role of Expectancy in Human Creativity.” Loui and her colleagues found that within one second of hearing an unexpected chord, there is a world of differences in brain responses between classical and jazz musicians.

“These differences are related to performance in a domain-general creativity test,” she explained. “Results show that creativity is tied to how our brains process expectancy. I think it’s an instrumental step towards understanding what creativity means, and how we can encourage it more in the classroom.”