I had to laugh this morning while reading the Ottawa Citizen when I
saw a crafty yet bafflingly incompetent vandal described as "He's got a full six
pack, but the plastic thingy that holds them together is missing". It's a
spin-off of the saying "He's one can short of a full six pack", which itself is
a Canadianized version of "He's lost a few marbles" or "He's not playing with a
full deck". Not only does the newspaper description beautifully exemplify one of
the main issues of this chapter-the interplay of variation and continuity as a
creative insight is adapted from one context or circumstance to another. But
content-wise, it's a pithy summary of another, related issue dealt with here: in
order to adapt the idea to a new context, in order to evolve it in
new directions, it must originally have been stored in memory in a way that
implicitly identifies its relationships to other ideas. In other words,
when it comes to creativity, how your 'beer cans' are connected together is as
important as how many of them there are.
This chapter explores the cognitive mechanisms underlying the emergence and
evolution of cultural novelty. Section Two summarizes the rationale for viewing
the process by which the fruits of the mind take shape as they spread from one
individual to another as a form of evolution, and briefly discusses a
computer model of this process. Section Three presents theoretical and empirical
evidence that the sudden proliferation of human culture approximately two
million years ago began with the capacity for creativity—that is, the ability to
generate novelty strategically and contextually. The next two sections take a
closer look at the creative process. Section Four examines the mechanisms
underlying the fluid, associative thought that constitutes the inspirational
component of creativity. Section Five explores how that initial flicker of
inspiration crystallizes into a solid, workable idea as it gets mulled over in
light of the various constraints and affordances of the world into which it will
be born. Finally, Section Six wraps things up with a few speculative thoughts
about the overall unfolding of this evolutionary process.
