✨ Proud of this collaboration with
@agreco.bsky.social , Chiara Finocchiaro, Gabriele Penazzi, Christoph Braun & Nicola De Pisapia
📄 Read the full paper:
www.nature.com/articles/s42...

💡In sum, our results highlight the neural mechanisms underlying the regulation of semantic exploration during naturalistic narrative production and contribute to a deeper understanding of the neural mechanisms
underlying the role of semantic control in generative storytelling.

#creativityscience

⏳ Remarkably, we also found greater temporal irreversibility during creative ideation between visual and high-level areas, suggesting the enhanced hierarchical structure of causal interactions as a neural signature of creative storytelling.

🧠 Moreover, creative narratives showed unique (between and within) functional interactions across the default mode, salience, and control networks.

🧠 Next, we also applied Connectome Harmonic Decomposition (CHD) to neural dynamics into connectome harmonic modes and found specific spatial frequency patterns underlying the modulation of semantic control during story generation.

🧠 Using decoding analysis, we showed that creative stories were neurally distinct, differentiated from ordinary stories in frontal regions, and from random ones in fronto-temporo-parietal areas.
Crucially, the same brain regions encoded the semantic features that behaviorally defined creativity.

🧠 At the neural level, linguistic and visual areas exhibited neural synchrony across participants regardless of the semantic control level, with parietal and frontal regions being more synchronized during random ideation.

🗣️To quantify creativity and task adherence, we used word2vec to compute semantic distance (novelty) and BERT to estimate surprise (appropriateness). Creative stories fell between ordinary and random ones on both dimensions.

🧠 We isolated the ideation phase from the reporting phase, letting us track brain dynamics during silent story generation. No motion, no speech artifacts.

🎯 We recorded fMRI activity while participants generated 3 types of stories:
✔️ Ordinary (appropriate)
✔️ Random (novel)
✔️ Creative (balanced in novelty & appropriateness)

📖 Storytelling is central to human experience, but how do we regulate semantic exploration during narrative generation?
We used fMRI and deep language models to find out.