Personal Meaning and Solving Creative Tasks: Contemporary Neurocognitive Studies

Abstract

In this paper we discuss the contemporary research on brain information processing in the connection with a subject's personality, first of all, with the semantics of personal meaning. The processes that are performed under relative rest, the basic state of our consciousness, play a critical role. The same processes in resting-state neural networks are involved in solving creative tasks, which are of particular interest for works in the field of artificial intelligence and the development of biosimilar architectures for robotic systems. We have considered the novel studies in the area of neurosemantics in detail, which indicate a distributed representation of word meanings, as well as possible connection of such representations with the asymmetry of the most ancient brain structures, namely with the asymmetry of effective (cause and effect) connections of hippocampal formation. When discussing mechanisms for solving creative tasks, we consider the role of interaction of resting-state networks to explain the incubation and insight phenomena. We describe new experimental data that indicate that insight-type solutions are associated with inhibition of networks that perform functions of focal attention with activation of structural–functional mechanisms involved in attribution of special motivating value or, in other words, personal meaning, to a task.