Adam Green (neuroscientist)

Adam E. Green
Born	Greensboro, North Carolina, U.S.
Alma mater	Johns Hopkins University (B.A.) Dartmouth College (Ph.D.)
Known for	Research on creativity, reasoning, and brain function
Title	Professor of Psychology
Scientific career
Fields	Cognitive neuroscience
Institutions	Georgetown University
Doctoral advisor	Kevin N. Dunbar

Adam E. Green is an American cognitive neuroscientist and academic known for his research on creativity, analogical reasoning, and the neural mechanisms underlying learning and problem-solving. He is Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University and Editor-in-Chief of the Creativity Research Journal .

Early life and education

Green was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, and attended Northwest Guilford High School. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University in 2001 and a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from Dartmouth College in 2007. From 2007 to 2010, he conducted postdoctoral research at Yale University ^[1]

Career

Green joined the faculty of Georgetown University in 2010 as assistant professor of Psychology and was promoted to associate professor in 2017, serving as the university's Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor from 2020 to 2023. He became Professor of Psychology in 2023. ^[2] Green is also affiliated with the Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience at the Georgetown University Medical Center. ^[3]

Green is a founder of the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity, where he served as president from 2019 to 2021 and has been a member of the executive committee since 2015. ^[4] In 2022, he became Editor-in-Chief of the Creativity Research Journal , having previously been Senior Associate Editor. ^[5]

Research

Green's research examines the cognitive and neural mechanisms of creativity and reasoning. His work integrates behavioral and neuroimaging methods to study how the brain supports creative thought and analogical reasoning. ^[6]

At Georgetown, Green teaches courses on neurophilosophy and cognitive neuroscience, exploring how philosophical questions about human thought can be addressed through brain-based research. ^[7]

One focus of Green's work is the study of "semantic distance," a measure of conceptual similarity used to quantify creativity in reasoning. ^{[8] [9]} His studies have explored how creative thinking can vary as a dynamic state, rather than a fixed trait, and how neural activity in the frontopolar cortex supports conscious augmentation of creative thought. ^{[10] [11] [12] [13]}

Green has also studied "creativity anxiety," a form of anxiety that arises when people are asked to generate creative ideas. ^{[14] [15]}

References

1. "Adam E. Green – Faculty Profile". Georgetown University.
2. "Lab for Relational Cognition – Adam Green, Ph.D." Georgetown University.
3. "The Creative Spark". Georgetown Today. 16 April 2018.
4. "About – Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity". Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity.
5. "Creativity Research Journal – About This Journal". Taylor & Francis.
6. Sleek, Scott (31 October 2022). "Charging up the Creative Battery". APS Observer.
7. Frye, Hayden (10 August 2022). "Taking Neuroscience to School: Brain Scans Reveal the Hidden Shape of Thinking and Predict Students' Learning Better Than Test Scores". Georgetown University.
8. Green, A. E. (2016). "Creativity, within reason: Semantic distance and dynamic state creativity in relational thinking and reasoning". Current Directions in Psychological Science. 25: 28–35. doi:10.1177/0963721415618485.
9. Green, Adam E.; Kraemer, David J. M.; Fugelsang, Jonathan A.; Gray, Jeremy R.; Dunbar, Kevin N. (March 2012). "Neural correlates of creativity in analogical reasoning". Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition. 38 (2): 264–272. doi:10.1037/a0025764. ISSN   1939-1285. PMID   22103784.
10. "NSF grant to fund research on brain activity and scientific creative thinking | Penn State University". Psu.edu.
11. Green, A. E.; Cohen, M. S.; Raab, H. A.; Yedibalian, C. G.; Gray, J. R. (2015). "Frontopolar activity and connectivity support conscious augmentation of creative state". Human Brain Mapping. 36 (3): 923–934. doi:10.1002/hbm.22676. PMC   6869232 . PMID   25394198.
12. Weinberger, A. B.; Iyer, H.; Green, A. E. (2016). "Conscious augmentation of creative state enhances "real" creativity in open-ended analogical reasoning". PLOS ONE. 11 (3) e0150773. Bibcode:2016PLoSO..1150773W. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0150773 . PMC   4784911 . PMID   26959821.
13. Green, Adam E.; Spiegel, Katherine A.; Giangrande, Evan J.; Weinberger, Adam B.; Gallagher, Natalie M.; Turkeltaub, Peter E. (1 April 2017). "Thinking Cap Plus Thinking Zap: tDCS of Frontopolar Cortex Improves Creative Analogical Reasoning and Facilitates Conscious Augmentation of State Creativity in Verb Generation". Cerebral Cortex (New York, N.Y.: 1991). 27 (4): 2628–2639. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhw080. ISSN   1460-2199. PMC   6361291 . PMID   27075035.
14. Daker, Richard J.; Cortes, Robert A.; Lyons, Ian M.; Green, Adam E. (January 2020). "Creativity anxiety: Evidence for anxiety that is specific to creative thinking, from STEM to the arts". Journal of Experimental Psychology. General. 149 (1): 42–57. doi: 10.1037/xge0000630 . ISSN   1939-2222. PMID   31219299.
15. "The anxiety that limits your creative genius". BBC. 19 May 2021.