1 3 Exp Brain Res (2013) 228:437–443 DOI 10.1007/s00221-013-3575-4 RESEARCH ARTICLE Brain mechanisms of valuable scientific problem finding inspired by heuristic knowledge Tong Dandan · Li Wenfu · Dai Tianen · Howard C. Nusbaum · Qiu Jiang · Zhang Qinglin Received: 12 September 2012 / Accepted: 17 April 2013 / Published online: 29 May 2013 © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013 related heuristic knowledge. The authors assumed that the regions in the brain significantly activated by the finding scientific problems with related heuristic knowledge condi- tion compared with the finding normal problems without related heuristic knowledge condition are relevant to the brain mechanisms of scientific problem finding inspired by heuris- tic knowledge. The first scenario more significantly activated the left precuneus and left angular gyrus than did the second scenario. These findings suggest that the precuneus is relevant to the successful storage and retrieval of heuristic knowledge and that the left angular gyrus is involved in the formation of novel associations between heuristic knowledge and problem situations for finding scientific problems. Keywords Scientific problem finding · Heuristic knowledge · Event-related fMRI · Precuneus · Angular gyrus Introduction Creativity is the foundation of human civilization and depends on the human ability to break from existing think- ing patterns and build something new (Dietrich and Kanso 2010). Throughout the history of human civilization, crea- tive behavior appears to occur when inspired by some heuristic knowledge in real-life scientific innovations. For example, Newton obtained insights into the law of univer- sal gravitation after observing a ripe apple drop from the tree under which he was sitting. Most previous studies investigated creativity through insightful problem solving (Dietrich and Kanso 2010). The development of creative problem solving has attracted considerable research attention, especially the issue of brain mechanisms that take place during creative problem Abstract Heuristics through the application of heuristic knowledge to the creation of imitation devices may be one of the most common processes in scientific innovation. In particular, heuristics suggests that innovation includes the automatic activation of heuristic knowledge and formation of novel associations between heuristic knowledge and problem situations. In this study, 76 scientific innovation problem situ- ations were selected as materials. Among these, 36 contain related heuristic knowledge and 40 have no such information. Through functional magnetic resonance imaging, the learn- ing–testing paradigm was used to explore the brain mecha- nisms of scientific problem finding inspired by heuristic knowledge. Participants were asked to find a problem on the basis of a given innovation problem situation. Two scenarios were presented: finding scientific problems with related heu- ristic knowledge and finding conventional problems without Tong Dandan and Li Wenfu contributed equally to this work. Li Wenfu is co-first author T. Dandan · L. Wenfu · D. Tianen · Q. Jiang (*) · Z. Qinglin (*) Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality, Southwest University, Ministry of Education, Chongqing 400715, China e-mail: qiuj318@swu.edu.cn Z. Qinglin e-mail: zhangql@swu.edu.cn T. Dandan e-mail: tddtongdandan@163.com T. Dandan · L. Wenfu · D. Tianen · Q. Jiang · Z. Qinglin School of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China H. C. Nusbaum Department of Psychology, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA