Neuroscience of ideation?

What is going on in our brains when we are creating? This is a question that has long intrigued designers, both in practice and education, because creative thinking involves the discovery of novel connections which is intimately tied to learning. More specifically, in neuroscience, most reserchers agree that two elements are central to creativity. First and foremost, it reflects our capacity to generate ideas that are original, unusual or novel in some way. The second element is that these ideas also need to be satisfying, appropriate or suited to the context in question. However, many of the empirical findings in relation to creativity are not in relation to originality but to associated factors like fluency and flexibility. These facts challenge a single definition that can be applied across all manifestations of creativity regardless of whether the "object" being judged is a work of art or a scientific theory. Scott Barry Kaufman, a US humanistic psychologist, says that what happens in the brain when we engage in a creative mode versus an uncreative mode remains uncertain, and notably in the explorative-generative cycle that is in place during the creative mode. Temporal factors also pose stumbling blocks in studying the brain basis of creativity. This is so because while neuroscientific methods are great at capturing the workings of the brain in short-term present, the creation of an original work of art or a novel scientific theory all transpire over extended periods of time. What is clear, however, according to Dr Kaufman, is that much of what triggers a creative mode as opposed to an uncreative mode is situational. That is, the creative mode is called for in contexts that are unclear, vague and open-ended. For example, so called "wicked problems", where there is no single solution to the problem, a situation or context that is familiar to many designers.