SfNC2026: Liberty to Create
Over the past ten years, our field has focused on measuring creativity to study innovation, problem-solving, and creative thinking. Somewhere along the way, the creative arts were pushed out to the fringe. Liberty to Create invites us to revisit that imbalance.
After ten years, SfNC is ready to be emotional, expressive, and unapologetically engaged with the arts. We can ask how art is produced and experienced in the brain without stripping it of its vitality. We can balance our need for empirical clarity with the desire to be provoked and delighted. Our science will advance not by minimizing this tension but by confronting it.
This is an invitation to reconnect with expression; to remember that art is not only a means to an end, not only important because it improves health or well-being or contributes to economic growth, but because it is essential to what it means to be human.
Art moves us, unsettles us, and speaks when words fail. It satirizes, resists, and tells the truth when the truth is hard to say. We should allow ourselves to revel in its subversive pleasures because in creative expression, we find freedom. This isn’t secondary to creativity’s “real” value – this is the real value.
Liberty to Create, the theme of SfNC 2026, is a space to explore both joy and tension. It will be a forum for rigorous scientific conversation and a living performance to experience and participate in. SfNC2026 is where the study of creativity finds its way back to the creative act itself, because we need the arts now more than ever.
