Location:
BioX/Clark Center, Room S360,
Title: "Cerebral Circuits for
Creativity: Bootstrapping Coherence using a Darwin Machine"
William Calvin
Affiliate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Abstact:
The problem with creativity is not in putting together
novel mixtures - a little confusion may suffice - but in managing the
incoherence. Things often don't hang together properly - as in our night-time
dreams, full of people, places, and occasions that don't fit together very
well. What sort of on-the-fly process does it take to convert such an
incoherent mix into a coherent compound, whether it be
an on-target movement program or a novel sentence to speak aloud? The
bootstrapping of new ideas works much like the immune response or the evolution
of a new animal species - except that the neocortical brain circuitry can turn
the Darwinian crank a lot faster, on the time scale of thought and action. Thalmocortical connections are surely in the business of
regulating the on-the-fly cortical process. Few proposals achieve a Perfect Ten
when judged against our memories, but we can subconsciously try out variations,
using this Darwin Machine for copying competitions among cerebral codes.
Eventually, as quality improves, we become conscious of our new invention. It's probably the source of our fascination
with discovering hidden order, with imagining how things hang together, seen in
getting the joke or doing science.