Revenge of the 'Neurds': Characterizing Creative Thought in terms of the Structure and Dynamics of Memory

摘要

There is cognitive, neurological, and computational support for thehypothesis that defocusing attention results in divergent or associativethought, conducive to insight and finding unusual connections, while focusingattention results in convergent or analytic thought, conducive to rule-basedoperations. Creativity appears to involve both. It is widely believed that itis possible to escape mental fixation by spontaneously and temporarily engagingin a more associative mode of thought. The resulting insight (if found) may berefined 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? Recentadvances in neuroscience shed light on this. Activated cell assemblies arecomposed of multiple neural cliques, groups of neurons that responddifferentially to general or context-specific aspects of a situation. I referto neural cliques that would not be included in the assembly if one were in ananalytic mode, but would be if one were in an associative mode, as neurds. Itis posited that the shift to a more associative mode of thought is accomplishedby recruiting neurds that respond to abstract or atypical microfeatures of theproblem or task. Since memory is distributed and content-addressable, thisfosters the forging of associations to potentially relevant items previouslyencoded in those neurons. Thus it is proposed that creative thought not bysearching a space of predefined alternatives and blindly tweaking those thathold promise, but by evoking remotely associated items through the recruitmentof neurds in a distributed, content-addressable memory.