Creativity and the Self-Made Worldview

Creativity is usefully viewed from the perspective of personal “worldviews.” which describe the mind as experienced subjectively, from the inside. The worldview of an uncreative person reflects what they’ve been told, while the worldview of a creative person reflects what they’ve done with what they’ve been told to create a self-made worldview. The capacity to generate such a self-made worldview arose first with development of the capacity for one thought to trigger another thought. This chaining allows free-association, critical reflection, or complex behavioural thought sequences to be created and recalled for material with high psychological entropy to be restructured to form a new idea or perspective. However, a second capacity important for creative thought also is needed: contextual focus, the ability to adaptively shift between convergent and divergent modes of thought. Whereas chaining allows the connecting of closely related items in memory, contextual focus enables the forging of distant connections for sophisticated creative expression. Chaining is sufficient for “little-c”, everyday creative ideas, but contextual focus is need for the generation of those “big-C” creative ideas that define major conceptual shifts. These phenomena of mind arise at the level of the brain with coordinated activity of groups of collectively co-spiking neurons (neural cliques). Those that respond to more general or abstract aspects of a situation offer a straightforward mechanism for contextual focus, for example; with associative thought, as more aspects of a situation are taken into account, more neural cliques are recruited. Gabora’s global mind perspective highlights the evolutionary significance of creativity: cultural evolution became possible with the emergence of a creative worldviews that are self-organizing, self-mending, communally interacting, and self-propagating.