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.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the scanning technique which allows the mapping of active processes within the brain.

There are six sections to the book with chapters from an expert international team. Part I provides a broad overview of the field and sets the context. Part II describes the physiological and physical background to fMRI, including coverage of the hardware required and pulse sequence selection. Practical issues involving experimental design of the paradigms, psycho-physical stimulus delivery and subject response are covered in Part III, followed by a comprehensive treatment of data analysis in Part IV. Part V deals with practical applications of the technique in the field of neuroscience and in clinical practice. The final section describes how fMRI can be integrated with other neuro-electromagnetic functional mapping techniques.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging: An Introduction to Methods is written to be accessible to a wide-ranging audience of research scientists interested in studying how the normal brain works, and clinicians interested in monitoring disease states and processes.