You’re gonna need a bigger boat

Abstract

Creative ideas, even complex ones, can be assembled unconsciously and enter the conscious mind in a fully finished form. But there is nothing mystical or sacrosanct about the mechanisms giving rise to this mental phenomenon. Progress on the neuroscience of creativity can only occur if we fully expose Cartesian muses for what they are: teddy bears for grownups. This is not to say that neuroscientists understand yet what happens in the innards of the machine when we are creative, but I hope to show here where we are and where we are going on this matter. The aim of this article is not so much to persuade readers of a naturalistic explanation of creativity but to help with conceivability; that is, help them envision what a scientific account could, possibly, look like. Without a path towards such an ersatz explanation, we have little hope to lift the dense fog enveloping our beliefs in the specialness of the creative process, the instinctive tug we feel that the creative spark comes from on high. This article plants a seed of how such a seemingly magical event can be reverse engineered.