Researchers Show that Suppressing the Brain’s “Filter” Can Improve Performance in Creative Tasks

The brain’s prefrontal cortex is thought to be the seat of cognitive control, working as a kind of filter that keeps irrelevant thoughts, perceptions and memories from interfering with a task at hand.

Now, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have shown that inhibiting this filter can boost performance for tasks in which unfiltered, creative thoughts present an advantage.

The research was conducted by Sharon Thompson-Schill, the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology and director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and Evangelia Chrysikou, a member of her lab who is now an assistant professor at the University of Kansas. They collaborated with Roy Hamilton and H. Branch Coslett of the Department of Neurology at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine and Abhishek Datta and Marom Bikson of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the City College of New York.

Their work was published in the journal Cognitive Neuroscience.