“Depending on what you are creating — the stimulus, the content — and what stage of the creative process you are in, different brain areas are recruited to help solve the task.”

Cognitive psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman unravels some of creativity’s mysterious origins with the help of brain scanning equipment.

From Is Your Child Ungifted? by Barry Scott Kaufman on Scientific American Blog:

“Maybe your child doesn’t display high ability in any of the areas I just mentioned yet, but exhibits extreme passion and dedication. After researching eminent creators across a variety of fields, Joseph Renzulli concluded that those who achieve greatness in any field tend to not only display high ability in a particular domain and high levels of creative-productive giftedness (as opposed to “schoolhouse giftedness”), but they also tend to have extremely high task commitment. According to Renzulli’s model of giftedness, a gifted child can compensate for lower levels of ability with higher levels of creative-productive giftedness and task commitment. In other words, passion and task commitment are gifts just as much as cognitive ability and creativity.”