  We begin this chapter with the bold claim that it provides a neuroscientific
explanation of the magic of creativity. Creativity presents a formidable
challenge for neuroscience. Neuroscience generally involves studying what
happens in the brain when someone engages in a task that involves responding to
a stimulus, or retrieving information from memory and using it the right way,
or at the right time. If the relevant information is not already encoded in
memory, the task generally requires that the individual make systematic use of
information that is encoded in memory. But creativity is different. It
paradoxically involves studying how someone pulls out of their brain something
that was never put into it! Moreover, it must be something both new and useful,
or appropriate to the task at hand. The ability to pull out of memory something
new and appropriate that was never stored there in the first place is what we
refer to as the magic of creativity. Even if we are so fortunate as to
determine which areas of the brain are active and how these areas interact
during creative thought, we will not have an answer to the question of how the
brain comes up with solutions and artworks that are new and appropriate. On the
other hand, since the representational capacity of neurons emerges at a level
that is higher than that of the individual neurons themselves, the inner
workings of neurons is too low a level to explain the magic of creativity. Thus
we look to a level that is midway between gross brain regions and neurons.
Since creativity generally involves combining concepts from different domains,
or seeing old ideas from new perspectives, we focus our efforts on the neural
mechanisms underlying the representation of concepts and ideas. Thus we ask
questions about the brain at the level that accounts for its representational
capacity, i.e. at the level of distributed aggregates of neurons.
