科學揭祕:藝術家爲何都"腦殘"

To better pinpoint the areas involved in creative thinking, Simone Shamay-Tsoory, from the University of Haifa, Israel, and her team compared 40 people with damage in the brain, and a group without any damage.

爲了明確大腦哪些區域跟創造性思維有密切聯繫，來自以色列海法大學的Simone Shamay-Tsoory和她的研究小組進行了一項研究，他們將40個大腦有損傷的人編爲一組，和另外大腦沒有損傷的一組人進行比較。As well as having their brains scanned, the two groups were shown 30 identicAl circles on a piece of paper and given five minutes to draw as many different pictures of meaningful objects as they could, each of which had to include at least one circle.

研究人員對這兩組人分別進行大腦掃描，另外，再給他們一張印有30個相同圓圈的紙觀察，讓他們在五分鐘內儘可能畫出有不同涵義的物體，而且每個物體至少得包括一個圓圈。

Although they were unable to check volunteers' levels of creativity before brain damage, the results suggest that levels of originality directly relate to where in the brain the damage has happened. Those who scored significantly higher than healthy volunteers in originality had more damage to the left side of the brain, in areas responsible for processing Language. Those with the lowest scores tended to have more damage to the right side of the brain, in an area involved in planning and decision-making.

研究人員雖然無法判斷志願者在大腦受損前的創造性水平。但是研究結果表明，創造性水平跟大腦受損區域有直接聯繫。左腦受損的人們明顯要比大腦沒有受損的人們得分高，左腦主要負責幫助人們理解語言。右腦受損的人們一般得分較低，右腦主要幫助人們規劃和決策制定。

"（Language）regions may compete with the right hemisphere's ability to produce creative ideas," Shamay-Tsoory says. This would explain why, when these language areas are damaged, originality seems to increase.

Shamay-Tsoory 說：“大腦（語言）區域可能要與右半腦競爭，抑制右腦產生創造性思維”。這樣以來，就可以解釋，當人們大腦語言區域受損時，他們的創造性思維似乎有所增加。