Abstract
Creativity is generally thought to be the production of things that are novel and valuable (whether physical artefacts, actions, or ideas). Humans are unique in the extent of their creativity, which plays a central role in innovation and problem solving, as well as in the arts. But what are the cognitive sources of novelty? More particularly, what are the cognitive sources of stochasticity in creative production? I will argue that they belong to two broad categories. One is associative, enabling the selection of goal-relevant ideas that have become activated by happenstance in an unrelated context. The other relies on selection processes that leverage stochastic fluctuations in neural activity. At the same time, I will address a central puzzle, which is to understand how the outputs of stochastic processes can nevertheless generally fall within task constraints. While the components appealed to in the accounts that I offer are well established, the ways in which I combine them together are new.
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Notes
An important precursor for the present paper is Stokes (2007), which focuses on the unconscious incubation phase that sometimes precedes creative productions. It offers an account in terms of forms of Hebbian learning and neural reorganization that can continue unconsciously while one’s attention is directed elsewhere, which is consistent with some of the ideas presented here.
An anonymous referee points out that Poincaré (1921), too, emphasizes the unconscious sources of novelty in ideas. The same referee likewise notes a number of connections between Poincaré’s work and the claims outlined in the present paper. These historical parallels will not be pursued further here.
Moreover, and despite appearances to the contrary, it is consistent with Gaut’s (2012) claim that creativity is fundamentally rational. For this has to do, not with the psychological process of initial creation itself, but rather with the later evaluation and modification of the products that result.
Simonton’s more recent work (2013, 2016) generalizes the BVSR model, providing a framework that can describe the full range of behavior, creative and non-creative. The degree of creativity, c, of an idea or behavior is defined as: (1 − p)u(1 − v), where p is the initial probability, u is the utility, and v the prior knowledge of the utility before generating the idea or behavior (where all three parameters range from 0 to 1). Then (1 − p) represents the degree of originality and (1 − v) represents the degree of surprise, or the amount of novelty added after an idea or response is evaluated. In this framework habitual (low-creative) but still valuable behavior can be defined as cases where the values of all three of p, u, and v approach 1. My own focus in this paper is much narrower, as explained in the text: it is to elucidate the mechanisms enabling stochastic productions that are nevertheless relevant to task constraints.
The initial pioneering work on mind-wandering and its potential creative benefits was done by Singer (1966, 1975). See McMillan et al. (2013) for a recent overview. Moreover, Jung et al. (2013), in their review of studies of the brain-correlates of creativity, emphasize extensive overlap with the default-mode network.
More specifically, the attentional network links dorsolateral prefrontal cortex with the frontal eye-fields and the intraparietal sulcus bilaterally. The frontal eye-fields, guided by goals, initiate shifts in the attentional signals that emanate from the intraparietal sulcus, boosting and sharpening some representations while suppressing others. Note that I assume throughout what Mole (2010) calls a “process-type” model of attention, rather than a “process-manner” one. This is the standard notion of attention employed within cognitive science. Talk of an attentional “network” in the brain would make no sense, for example, if attention were really just a manner in which various cognitive activities could be conducted.
The relevance network links together regions of ventral parietal cortex with ventral prefrontal cortex and the anterior insula (especially in the right hemisphere), interacting with evaluative systems in the basal ganglia, and influencing the top-down network via anterior cingulate (whose function is often said to be conflict monitoring; note that the interactions between the relevance network and the attentional network are competitive ones). Jung et al. (2013) note that increased activity in anterior cingulate, in particular, seems to be associated with creativity, suggesting that unconscious monitoring of potential ideas or solutions might play a critical role in the creative process.
There are, of course, many hotly-debated issues concerning consciousness. But most of these aren’t relevant to our topic. There are debates about whether there is any real distinction between phenomenal consciousness, for example, and so-called access-consciousness (Block 2011; Cohen et al. 2016). There are debates about whether access-conscious concepts and ideas make a constitutive contribution to the phenomenal properties of our lives, or merely causal ones (Siewert 2011; Tye and Wright 2011; Chudnoff 2015). And then there are, of course, debates about whether phenomenal consciousness itself does, or does not, admit of reductive explanation in functional and representational terms (Tye 1995; Chalmers 1996). None of these disputes is relevant to our topic, which is how stochastically-generated new ideas can emerge in a way that makes them available to be considered, evaluated, and acted upon. This requires only access-consciousness, and there is widespread agreement that this is enabled by some sort of global broadcasting mechanism that makes the contents in question available to frontally-located planning and decision-making systems (Dehaene 2014).
On the role of memory—and medial temporal cortex more specifically—in creative cognition, see Ellamil et al. (2012).
Notice that this seems to be the inverse of the phenomenon of “leaky attention”, discussed in Sect. 2. Indeed, whereas offline creativity seems to be a function of “leaky attention”, online kinds of creativity depend on efficient attentional suppression (Beaty et al. 2016; Zabelina et al. 2016). Moreover, only the leaky-attention kind seems to be correlated with real-world creative achievement (Zabelina et al. 2015, 2016). What, then, is online creativity for? One possibility is that it has a social function, specifically for social display. There is no denying that this is how online forms of creativity are now employed: jazz musicians and other online performers are revered, as are those who can speak creatively and/or amusingly. (Think here of freestyle rap and improv comedy, as well as more mundane kinds of witty conversation.) They will thereby accrue many of the benefits that come with prestige (Henrich and Gil-White 2001). Or it may be that the benefits of such displays are more specific, having to do with their efficacy in attracting mates (Miller 2000). If either of these suggestions is correct, then one might predict that people who do especially well on tests of divergent thinking (which require online creativity) might be more socially-successful, whereas (as we have seen) those who score highly on tests of “leaky attention” will do better on standard measures of overall creative career-achievement (where it seems likely that offline forms of creativity are more important).
Unsurprisingly, Bashwiner et al. (2016) find that musical creativity is correlated with activity in premotor and supplementary-motor cortex. Somewhat more surprisingly—given that online forms of creativity correlate with capacities for focused attention rather than the sort of “leaky attention” that underlies mindwandering (Beaty et al. 2016; Zabelina et al. 2016)—they find that musical creativity correlates with activity in the default-mode network. However, their measure of creativity involved both online (e.g. improvisation) and offline (e.g. musical composition) components, so it is hard to know how to interpret this result.
For example, they perform quite poorly in the Stroop test. This test requires participants to name the colors of a set of color-words as swiftly as possible. In one condition the words and their colors are consistent. (e.g. the word “red” will be printed in red.) In the other condition the words and their colors are inconsistent, requiring one to suppress the well-rehearsed tendency to read the word, and state the name of the color instead. (e.g. the word “red” might be printed in green, requiring one to say “green”.)
I am grateful to the anonymous referees for their extensive comments, criticisms, and advice.
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Carruthers, P. Mechanisms for constrained stochasticity. Synthese 197, 4455–4473 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-01933-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-01933-9