  There is cognitive, neurological, and computational support for the
hypothesis that defocusing attention results in divergent or associative
thought, conducive to insight and finding unusual connections, while focusing
attention results in convergent or analytic thought, conducive to rule-based
operations. Creativity appears to involve both. It is widely believed that it
is possible to escape mental fixation by spontaneously and temporarily engaging
in a more associative mode of thought. The resulting insight (if found) may be
refined in a more analytic mode of thought. The questions addressed here are:
(1) how does the architecture of memory support these two modes of thought, and
(2) what is happening at the neural level when one shifts between them? Recent
advances in neuroscience shed light on this. Activated cell assemblies are
composed of multiple neural cliques, groups of neurons that respond
differentially to general or context-specific aspects of a situation. I refer
to neural cliques that would not be included in the assembly if one were in an
analytic mode, but would be if one were in an associative mode, as neurds. It
is posited that the shift to a more associative mode of thought is accomplished
by recruiting neurds that respond to abstract or atypical microfeatures of the
problem or task. Since memory is distributed and content-addressable, this
fosters the forging of associations to potentially relevant items previously
encoded in those neurons. Thus it is proposed that creative thought not by
searching a space of predefined alternatives and blindly tweaking those that
hold promise, but by evoking remotely associated items through the recruitment
of neurds in a distributed, content-addressable memory.
