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

By Liane Gabora. 2010

252 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6cc664e1ee984290b2c5d61b4fa1003590965ab9

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Citations in the corpus

The relation between semantic memory structure, associative abilities, and verbal and figural creativity (2020, background): “…suggesting the role of associative abilities as an important predictor of creative thinking that represents a valid elementary cognitive ability underlying creative thinking (Allen & Thomas, 2011; Barr et al., 2015; Beaty et al., 2014; Gabora, 2010; Kleinmintz et al., 2019; Sowden et al., 2015).”
Linkographic Evidence for Concurrent Divergent and Convergent Thinking in Creative Design (2016, background): “In contrast, analytic thought is rule-based and convergent, and is “conducive to analyzing relationships of cause and effect between items already believed to be related” (Gabora, 2010, p. 3).”
Reasoned connections: A dual-process perspective on creative thought (2015, methodology): “…in various stages of the creative process (Allen & Thomas, 2011), the interplay between associative and analytic thinking at the neural level (Gabora, 2010), the role of intelligence in creativity (Silvia & Beaty, 2012), theories that describe different paths to creativity (de Dreu, Nijstad,…”
Convergent Thinking Moderates the Relationship between Divergent Thinking and Scientific Creativity (2019, background): “This suggested that even if convergent thinking might not act directly on creativity, it might act as a threshold setter, which indicated that convergent thinking was involved in analysis, selection and evaluation in the process of creativity (Gaborra, 2010; Runco, 2004).”
Wallas’ Four-Stage Model of the Creative Process: More Than Meets the Eye? (2015, background): “649236 Gabora, L. (2010). Revenge of the ‘‘neurds’’: Characterizing creative”
The Different Role of Working Memory in Open-Ended Versus Closed-Ended Creative Problem Solving: A Dual-Process Theory Account (2013, background): “Gabora (2010), as noted earlier, explained it in a neurology level by introducing the recruit of neurds, which responded to abstract and atypical microfeatures of the problem, in the memory system.”
The shifting sands of creative thinking: Connections to dual-process theory (2014, background): “efined within a social context”. Thus, their definition acknowledges that creativity arises in response to a confluence of factors both within and external to the individual (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). Gabora (2010a) puts even more emphasis internal rather than external change, claiming that a cogniti”
Evaluative and generative modes of thought during the creative process (2012, background): “Thus, preferential activation of MTL regions during creative generation is consistent with psychological accounts that describe creative generation as enhanced associative processing (Gabora, 2010) and the restructuring of preexisting ideas (Hospers, 1985; Weisberg, 1995).”