Prophets of Design Space

Abstract

The last half century has seen a veritable explosion of knowledge about the mind and how it works. With a pace that would leave anyone gasping for air, the mind sciences have developed solid theoretical foundations for our mental faculties and mountains of data to bear them out. Perhaps the single most glaring exception in this success story is creative thinking. It is hard to think of a mental phenomenon so central to the human condition that we understand so little. Even for consciousness, arguably a bigger problem, we have solid hypotheses — global working space, competing neuronal coalitions, higher-order thought, among rather many else — that have so far survived Popperian falsification. Not so for creativity. At the present moment, we have not a single cognitive or neural mechanism we can rely on for sure to explain the extraordinary creative achievements of a Galileo, Shakespeare, or Steve Jobs.