Recent work connects those valuation processes to how people create. Creativity requires judging whether a new idea is both original and useful, and those judgments recruit similar neural and computational machinery as aesthetic evaluation. This perspective suggests the forms and choices artists and inventors make carry encoded value signals; viewers and users can read those signals and experience the work’s worth through the same networks that guided its creation.
Thinking of creativity and appreciation as two sides of a shared valuation system shifts how we approach teaching, design, and inclusion. If value is partly computed and partly communicated, then small changes in how a work is presented or in whom we invite to create can broaden whose ideas are seen as valuable. Follow the full article to see how this bridge between aesthetics and creativity could reshape opportunities for people to express talent and for communities to recognize it.
Evidence shows that aesthetic evaluations are underpinned by mechanisms in the reward system that compute value for objects of interest. In turn, recent behavioral, computational, and neuroimaging evidence suggests that creativity involves a similar valuation process, as people generate and evaluate the originality and adequacy of their ideas—two standard criteria of creativity. These findings suggest that creativity and aesthetic evaluation may be supported by a domain-general mechanism for computing subjective value. We offer a proposal in which creators’ value computations are conveyed by the structure and content of their works and recovered during aesthetic evaluation through shared reward-system mechanisms and associated processes. On this view, creating and appreciating are two related expressions of a shared value-based process.
