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: (a) How does the architecture of memory support these two modes of thought, and (b) 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 occurs 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.

I would like to thank Kalina Christoff, Jim Davies, Stefan Leijnen, Bruce Mathieson, Apara Ranjan, and Mark Runco for discussion and helpful comments on this article. This research was funded by grants from the GOA Program of the Free University of Brussels, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Notes

¹Note that divergent thought would be of adaptive value only if the capacity for it were to have evolved side-by-side with the capacity to revert to a more analytic mode of thought, if needed (i.e., if some pressing situation were to arise that demanded logical analysis and a quick response). Once the capacity to shift between analytic and associative modes of thought arose as needed, however, the capacity for creativity would be unprecedented. Thus it has been suggested that the explosion of creativity in the Middle/Upper Paleolithic was due to onset of the capacity for contextual focus at this time (Gabora, 2003, 2007).

²The term comes from the physical process of annealing, in which one changes the properties of a metal by slowly lowering its temperature.

³Thus, for example, based on a set of free association norms data collected from 6,000 participants using over 5,000 words, the probability that, given the word PLANET, the first word that comes to mind is EARTH is .61, and the probability that it is MARS is .10 (Nelson, McEvoy, & Schreiber, 2004). Note that there is some empirical support for an alternative to spreading activation as an explanation for this kind of association data, referred to as “spooky activation at a distance” (Nelson, McEvoy & Pointer, 2003).