"And now there came both mist and snow
And it grew wondrous cold;
And ice, mast high, came floating by
As green as emerald."
ABSTRACT: Empirical results suggest that defocusing attention results in primary process or associative thought, conducive to finding unusual connections, while focusing attention results in secondary process or analytic thought, conducive to rule-based operations.
Creativity appears to involve both. It is widely believed that it is possible to escape mental fixation by spontaneously and temporarily engaging in a more divergent or associative mode of thought. The resulting insight (if found) may be refined in a more analytic mode of thought.
The question addressed here is: how does the architecture of memory support these two modes of thought, and what is happening at the neural level when one shifts between them? Recent advances in neuroscience shed light on this. It was demonstrated that activated cell assemblies are composed of multiple ‘neural cliques’, groups of neurons that respond differentially to general or context-specific aspects of a situation. I refer to neural cliques that would not be included in the assembly if one were in an analytic mode, but would be if one were in an associative mode, as ‘neurds’.
It is posited that the shift to a more associative mode of thought conducive to insight is accomplished by recruiting neurds that respond to abstract or atypical subsymbolic microfeatures of the problem or situation. Since memory is distributed and content-addressable this fosters remindings and the forging of creative connections to potentially relevant items previously encoded in those neurons. Thus it is proposed that creative thought involves neither randomness, nor search through a space of predefined alternatives, but emerges naturally through the recruitment of neurds.
It is suggested this occurs when there is a need to resolve conceptual gaps in ones’ internal model of the world, and resolution involves context-driven actualization of the potentiality afforded by its fine-grained associative structure.
"Now this has been standing here for centuries. The premier work of man perhaps in the whole western world; and it's without a signature.
Chartres.
A celebration to God’s glory and to the dignity of man. All that’s left, most artists seem to feel these days, is man. Naked, poor, forked radish. There aren’t any celebrations.
Ours, the scientists keep telling us, is a universe which is disposable. You know it might be just this one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all our cities are dust; to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish.
Our works in stone, in paint, in print are spared, some of them for a few decades, or a millennium or two, but everything must fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash: the triumphs and the frauds, the treasures and the fakes.
A fact of life... we're going to die. 'Be of good heart,' cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced - but what of it? Go on singing.
Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much."
Strip your Louis Quatorze of his king gear, and there is left nothing but a poor forked radish with a head fantastically carved.
"Man is the animal that has professionalized exploration. It is the juvenile of most animal species who do the exploring...before settling down on a limited geographical range from which as adults they hardly stir. Modern man...follows a similar pattern of juvenile exploration--of the waterholes and sacred places of the desert or of the sights and experiences of touring Europe or backpacking in the Sierras--before settling down to the routine of adult life. Yet some adults do not give up their exploratory bent and in fact they make a career of it..."
"Ethologist Konrad Lorenz...notes how humans retain a range of juvenile behavioral traits into adulthood...at least some of us retain our childhood curiosity into maturity."
