Brain scanning has confirmed that a strategy for boosting creativity encourages greater activity in an area of the brain associated with creative effort.

Dr Paul Howard-Jones, from the university's Graduate School of Education, scanned the brains of drama students as they created stories from sets of words.

The eight students were asked to make up a story based on three words, which appeared on a computer screen - some words were related whilst others were not.

The aim of the research was to test a theory that random association helps to promote increases in the brain's creative abilities.

The approach was made famous by surrealist artists such as Kurt Schwitters, who created sculptures from objects he found, including the contents of his wife's wastepaper bin.

Dr Howard-Jones said: "When the words were unrelated, the creativity of their stories increased and additional activity was produced in the right frontal medial gyrus.

"This suggests extra higher level control, presumably due to extended filtering of the many and varied ways in which the words can be sensibly combined.

"So, strategies like Schwitters' might sound fairly wild but, when it comes to getting creative value out of them, it may be all about control.

"This is important from an educational point of view because it means these strategies are more likely to promote real increases in creative ability over the longer term."