Emergences: Towards a Cognitive-Affective Model for Creativity in the Arts

Abstract

In this chapter I develop a model for the creative processes involved in the generation of novel metaphors and images with semiotic and emotional resonance. These processes are often discussed in the creativity literature as producing emergent solutions to ‘ill-defined problems’, where there is no clear path to a solution, or clear idea what a solution might look like (Amabile. Creativity in context. Westview, Oxford, 1996; Csikszentmihalyi. Creativity: flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. Harper, New York, 1996). Such problems are particularly relevant to creative artists, since the questions that creative arts are designed to address are complex, ill-defined, and often emerge, or are clarified, in the act of creation of the artefact. Neuroscience has begun to investigate what happens during these creative processes. Several studies point to the importance of the frontal lobes in the performance of creative tasks, and indicates involvement in controlling access to concepts and experiences stored in other areas of the brain and making these available to working memory (Carlsson et al. Neuropsychologia 38: 873–885, 2000; Jung and Haier, Behav Brain Sci 30(2): 135–187, 2007; Heilman et al. Neurocase 9(5): 369–379, 2003; Dietrich 2004 a, b), while other work has examined how arrays of neurons may produce novel and emergent connections outside directed thought (Martindale. A neural-network theory of beauty. In: Martindale C, Locher P, Petrov VM (eds) Evolutionary and neurocognitive approaches to aesthetics, creativity and the arts. Baywood Publishing Company, Amityville, pp. 181–194, 2007; Gabora and Ranjan, How insight emerges in a distributed, content-addressable memory. In: Vartanian O, Bristol AS, Kaufman JC (eds) Neuroscience of creativity. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 19–44, 2013). Conceptual Blending Theory (Fauconnier and Turner, The way we think: conceptual blending and the mind’s hidden complexities. Basic Books, New York, 2002) is a useful way to understand mappings between mental spaces in conceptual phenomena such as metaphors, jokes or counterfactual ideas. These mental spaces may include perceived or imagined situations, which may be in the future, the past or the present, are envisaged as temporary representational structures that allow emergences of novel structure and connections. In this way, mental spaces are conceptually resonant with the ideas on overlapping neuronal arrays, and the ways in which connections between them may function. This chapter draws on the literature from neuroscience and creativity, and I use Fauconnier and Turner’s (The way we think: conceptual blending and the mind’s hidden complexities. Basic Books, New York, 2002) model of Blending Theory, and its development by Brandt and Brandt (Annu Rev Cogn Linguist 3: 216–249, 2005), as a way to understand and explain how the cognitive and affective mental spaces involved in the creative process relate to each other and how they may combine to produce novel emergent structures that can function as metaphors and signs.