14th Symposium - 2024

Research on creativity over the past century has evolved to focus increasingly on the brain as the epicenter of original thinking. However, a broader perspective developed in this presentation suggests that creativity is not only happening inside a person's head. Creativity is a contextualized phenomenon that goes beyond an individual with a brain. Indeed, creativity may not require a brain at all. In this regard, insights offered by recent advances in artificial intelligence will be discussed to complete the brief introduction to creativity. 

Mental time travel refers to the subjective experience of recalling the past and imagining the future. It is about projecting the self in time, reflecting on where we have been and where we are going in space and time. Memories are not fixed repositories of the past but move in flexible ways because they evolved with the future in mind. We will explore these concepts scientifically and artistically through our joint interest in choreography, the ways in which we explore the movement and musicality of wordless thoughts in humans and in other animals with whom we share the planet and its implications for creativity.

There is a collection of neural, perceptual, and cognitive attributes that contribute to both creativity and tendencies toward a range of exceptional experiences (ExE), including ostensible psi phenomena. These attributes reflect a plastic, connected (disinhibited) nervous system (mind and body) and cognitive style which translates to being psychologically and physically sensitive to a range of internal and external stimuli and sources of information. In addition, this type of system often tends toward syncretic tendencies that enable tangible representations of ideas, stimuli, and information that may not usually be consciously available. Intriguingly, there seems to be an interplay between individual differences, states of consciousness, and other factors in terms of creativity and exceptional experiences. Variables of interest include synesthesia, transliminality, Hartmann’s boundary thinness, positive schizotypy, interoception, and ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response). In this paper and presentation, I will explore how systems in which one can dip in and out of connected states may result in more genuinely creative outputs and the availability of ostensible psi phenomena. These systems may relate to systems that are rich in fractal signatures and exhibit metacognitive traits and cognitive organization.

This talk discusses what it could mean to take a systems view of creativity within education, based on developmental systems perspectives, sociocultural systems principles, distributed cognition theory, and Gregory Bateson’s model of deuterolearning. These are the basic principles of the participatory creativity framework, which has been developed specifically with education in mind. The methods, objectives, and evaluations of such an approach end up being different than individualist approaches in a number of ways. As someone who has done research in education and taught teacher for over 20 years, I also believe that the systems view of creative work is also a much better fit with the objectives of effective education overall than individualist approaches.
We will start by discussing some of the educational methods and objectives that are part of such an approach. Then I will review data from studies that have inspired and also illuminate this approach can look like in practice: a 5-year study of an intensive theater-based program targeted primarily to at-risk youth; a study of the methods and outcomes of an elementary school art program in New York City run by the Guggenheim museum; a study of role profiles in Maker Space collaborations; and Gregory Bateson’s well known study of the learning patterns of dolphins from the 1960s.

There are many mysteries in the universe. One of the most significant, often considered the final frontier in science, is understanding how our subjective experience, or consciousness, emerges from the collective action of neurons in biological systems. While substantial progress has been made over the past decades, a unified and widely accepted explanation of the neural mechanisms underpinning consciousness remains elusive. The field is rife with theories that frequently provide contradictory explanations of the phenomenon. To accelerate progress, we have adopted a new model of science: adversarial collaboration in team science. Our goal is to test theories of consciousness in an adversarial setting. Adversarial collaboration offers a unique way to bolster creativity and rigor in scientific research by merging the expertise of teams with diverse viewpoints. Ideally, we aim to harness collective intelligence, embracing various perspectives, to expedite the uncovering of scientific truths. In this talk, I will highlight the effectiveness (and challenges) of this approach using selected case studies, showcasing its potential to counter biases, challenge traditional viewpoints, and foster innovative thought. Through the joint design of experiments, teams incorporate a competitive aspect, ensuring a comprehensive exploration of problems. This method underscores the importance of structured conflict and diversity in propelling scientific advancement and innovation.

As a form of creative art, Cinema presents a unique construction of reality. By combining narrative and visual storytelling techniques, movies create a rich sensory experience, enabling spectators to feel, see, and emotionally connect with the cinematic content. This perspective allows the audience to immerse in the narrative's highs and lows firsthand, transcending mere observation. The true beauty of Cinema resides in its ability to evoke sensory experience transformation and resonance as if the spectators were part of an ongoing fictional world. I will begin my presentation by explaining the neuronal mechanisms considered relevant for image representation, drawing from our experimental data in the visual system, including the retina, the lateral geniculate nucleus, and the visual cortex. In particular, I will focus on the debate of enhanced neuronal activity versus temporal coding as the critical mechanism for visual binding and attention. I will then explore how movies disrupt and challenge conventional perspectives on image representation, revealing the constructive nature of perception. As an illustration, I will showcase examples from collaborative artwork with Rivane Neuenschwander and highlight the documentary and fictional contributions of Cao Guimarães. Through these insights, I aim to establish a basis for discussing how our internal perceptual organization drives creativity in various artistic endeavors.

Musical improvisation is an enduring art with a rich history of creative output and provides a model for the study of the neuroscience of creativity. Anecdotal evidence and some recent empirical evidences has suggested that psychedelic drugs may be powerful modulators (possibly enhancers) of creativity. We will explore evidence for psychedelic alteration of creativity and propose an approach to combined use of music and psychedelics as tools for the investigation of the neural basis of creativity.

Will a machine ever compose a symphony, write a prize-winning novel, paint a masterpiece or prove a mathematical theorem? And if so, would we be able to tell the difference? Based on his book The Creativity Code, Marcus du Sautoy explores the new developments in AI that are shaking up the status quo and asks how long it might be before machines come up with something creative, and whether they might jolt us into being more imaginative in turn.

Scientific study of creativity has so far been carried on almost entirely, whether explicitly or implicitly, within a context provided by the worldview known as “physicalism,” which represents current majority opinion among mainstream workers in areas such as biology, neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, psychology and the behavioral sciences, and which currently constitutes the received wisdom of “opinion elites” more generally in most sectors of modern societies worldwide. This worldview essentially pictures reality as consisting at bottom of tiny bits of some sort of insentient material “stuff” moving around in fields of force in accordance with mathematical laws, and everything else that exists as necessarily emerging somehow from that most-basic stuff. We ourselves are nothing more than immensely complicated biological machines, operating deterministically, so there can be no such thing as free will. Our minds and consciousness are manufactured entirely by neurophysiological processes occurring in our brains, so there can also be no such thing as postmortem survival. On a more cosmic scale we see no sign of final causes or any sort of transcendent order. On the contrary, the overall scheme of nature appears in the end to be utterly devoid of meaning or purpose. This bleak and arguably destructive worldview purports to be justified by the findings of modern science, but it is more accurately characterized as a philosophical doctrine grounded in the highly developed classical physics of the late 19th century. Moreover, recent developments in areas including physics itself, the psychobiology of mind and consciousness, and philosophy of mind have collectively undermined its empirical basis and exposed the need to replace it with an expanded science-based worldview which is consistent with the revolutionary advances of more recent physics, and which can potentially accommodate a variety of poorly-understood but significant realities of human experience, including in particular extreme forms of creativity, mystical experiences of various types, and paranormal or “psi” phenomena, which appear deeply interconnected both psychologically and historically. The general picture of reality currently emerging as an alternative to the prevailing physicalism amounts philosophically to its virtual opposite - some form of realist idealism which takes consciousness as fundamental and derives all else from that. My talk will briefly summarize these developments and sketch some ways in which they can impact future scientific work on creativity, ameliorating present defects and difficulties and leading toward both deeper understanding and increased availability for empirical study and application.

In this closing event moderated by Axel Cleeremans we will once again return to the central question of the symposium: What is the process of creativity? Speakers from different backgrounds will exchange ideas and offer their own perspective on the issue. Nicola Clayton, Mark Baldwin, Marilyn Schlitz and Sergio Neuenschwander will be joined by the Portuguese artist Pedro Abrunhosa to debate, interact with the public, and perform in an informal, engaging atmosphere intended to promote … creativity!