How Creativity Happens in the Brain

A three-pound pile of electrified biochemistry, better known as a brain, can create beautiful art, discover the laws of nature, invent kitesurfing and think of space rockets. How can it manage to be so outrageously creative? How Creativity Happens In The Brain is a concise affair with a sharp focus: to stick exclusively to sound, mechanistic explanations and convey what we can, and cannot, say about how brains give rise to creative ideas. The book examines previous theories which have dominated neuroscience before presenting alternative suggestions as to how the field can develop. These include variation-selection algorithms, the newly emerging prediction system, the brain's dual information-processing platform (explicit vs. implicit) as well as basic concepts from cognitive psychology, such as connectionist networks, task set, task-set inertia, and speed of processing.

Arne Dietrich is Professor of Psychology at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. He is responsible for two, entirely new mechanistic explanations for the effects of exercise on brain function, the transient hypofrontality theory and the endocannabinoid hypothesis.

1. A Sneak preview of the Journey Ahead

2. A Disciplined Demolition Project

3. You're Gonna Need a Bigger Boat

4. The Cogwheels of Culture

5. The Mind's New Tricks

6. Prophets of Design Space

7. The Brain's Design Studio

8. Flow Experiences: From Mystery to Mechanisms

9. In Search of the Artificer