Revenge of the “Neurds”: Characterizing Creative Thought in Terms of the Structure and Dynamics of Memory

Abstract

There is cognitive, neurological, and computational support for the hypothesis that defocusing attention results in divergent or associative thought, conducive to insight and finding unusual connections, while focusing attention results in convergent 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 associative mode of thought. The resulting insight (if found) may be refined in a more analytic mode of thought. The questions addressed here are: (1) how does the architecture of memory support these two modes of thought, and (2) what is happening at the neural level when one shifts between them? Recent advances in neuroscience shed light on this. 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 is accomplished by recruiting neurds that respond to abstract or atypical microfeatures of the problem or task. Since memory is distributed and content-addressable, this fosters the forging of associations to potentially relevant items previously encoded in those neurons. Thus it is proposed that creative thought not by searching a space of predefined alternatives and blindly tweaking those that hold promise, but by evoking remotely associated items through the recruitment of neurds in a distributed, content-addressable memory. Revenge of the 'Neurds'3 What is happening in the brain when one engages in creative thought? The complex nature of creativity makes the goal of achieving a biological account of it difficult . However, progress has been made. Hoppe and Kyle (1991) studied Sperry's (1966) infamous commissurotomy patients (who underwent surgical bisection of the corpus callosum to inhibit epileptic seizures) and found they lacked the capacity for integrated thought and affect-laden interpretation of experience, which they speculated was related to these patients' "impoverished fantasy life". Their work suggested that interaction between the two hemispheres of the brain is important for creativity. Eysenck (1993) provides evidence that there is a genetic basis to creativity, and that creative individuals are statistically more likely than average to have relatives who are psychotic. Recent studies have found evidence that different kinds of creativity (deliberate versus spontaneous, and emotional versus cognitive) involve different neural circuits (Dietrich, 2004). Despite such accomplishments, a biological account of the creative process still eludes us.This article synthesizes findings that together provide a tentative explanation for what is taking place at the neural level when one puts information together...

An evolutionary framework for cultural change: Selectionism versus communal exchange

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Differential Modulation of Performance in Insight and Divergent Thinking Tasks with tDCS

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“…In other words, while the explicit system draws upon patterns of causation, the implicit system draws upon patterns of correlation. This relevance is not a matter of luck or chance but arises as a natural consequence of the architecture of associative memory; ideas that share features are encoded in overlapping distributed sets of cell assemblies, and therefore able to evoke one another through synchronous neural activation even when previously thought to be quite unrelated (Gabora, 2010). Thus we view the claim that the implicit system can only exhibit blind creativity as an area of disagreement.…”