Flexibility of thought in high creative individuals represented by percolation analysis

Significance Creative thinking requires flexibility, which facilitates the creation of novel and innovative ideas. However, so far its role in creativity has been measured via indirect measures. We propose a quantitative measure of flexibility based on the robustness of semantic memory networks to attack, assuming that the higher robustness, the higher the flexibility of the network. We show how the semantic network of high creative individuals is more robust to attack, thus more flexible. This is a direct computational investigation on flexibility of semantic memory and creativity. Our approach can be applied to more general questions such as high-level cognitive capacities and clinical populations suffering from atypical thought processes.