How do people come up with new and useful ideas? In this talk I will discuss a series of behavioral and neuroimaging experiments on creative thinking. The talk will focus on research examining the contributions of fundamental cognitive processes (e.g., memory retrieval and cognitive control) to performance on various creative tasks involving idea generation, such as divergent thinking and novel metaphor production. I will also highlight research exploring the roles of large-scale functional brain networks and their dynamic interactions during creative task performance, with a focus on mapping these network dynamics to specific cognitive processes. The talk will conclude with some potential future directions to further isolate cognitive and neural systems that support creative thinking in the arts, sciences, and everyday life.