Creativity is generally thought to be the production of things that are novel and valuable. Humans are unique in the extent of their creativity, which plays a central role in innovation and problem solving, as well as in the arts. But what are the cognitive sources of novelty? More particularly, what are the cognitive sources of stochasticity in creative production? I will argue that they belong to two broad categories. One is associative, enabling the selection of goal-relevant ideas that have (...) become activated by happenstance in an unrelated context. The other relies on selection processes that leverage stochastic fluctuations in neural activity. At the same time, I will address a central puzzle, which is to understand how the outputs of stochastic processes can nevertheless generally fall within task constraints. While the components appealed to in the accounts that I offer are well established, the ways in which I combine them together are new. (shrink)

This is an empirical phenomenological inquiry into everyday experiences of daydreaming. The theoretical literature was found to be deficient in accounting for the ambiguity inherent to the phenomenon and lacking in concrete empirical descriptions. This study's phenomenological method was implemented in response to a body of natural scientific studies utilizing methods that were found to be inadequate to the task of comprehending and understanding the lived subjective experience of the phenomenon. From five subject interviews and their subsequent analysis via the (...) phenomenological method, the researcher was able to derive a general structural description of the experience of daydreaming. It was found that daydreaming is essentially the representation/enactment of a mood, the understanding of which is inseparable from the situated biographical project of the individual. As an act of consciousness it was described as a passive movement into two, distinct subject-world relationships, sustained by a directing-spectator position that is both detached and interfused with these two world relations. Details of these findings and their implications are discussed. (shrink)

In the field theories in physics, any particular region of the presumed space-time continuum and all interactions between elementary objects therein can be objectively measured and/or accounted for mathematically. Since this does not apply to any of thefield theories, or any other neural theory, of consciousness, their explanatory power is limited. As discussed in detail herein, the matter is complicated further by the facts than any scientifically operational definition of consciousness is inevitably partial, and that the phenomenon has no spatial (...) dimensionality. Under the light of insights from research on meditation and expanded consciousness, chronic pain syndrome, healthy aging, and eudaimonic well being, we may conceive consciousness as a source of potential energy that has no clearly defined spatial dimensionality, but can produce significant changes in others and in the world, observable in terms of changes in time. It is argued that consciousness may have evolved to enable the human species to generate such changes in order to cope with unprecedented and/or unpredictable adversity. Such coping could, ultimately, include the conscious planning of our own extinction when survival on the planet is no longer an acceptable option. (shrink)

It is the central hypothesis of this paper that the mental states commonly referred to as altered states of consciousness are principally due to transient prefrontal cortex deregulation. Supportive evidence from psychological and neuroscientific studies of dreaming, endurance running, meditation, daydreaming, hypnosis, and various drug-induced states is presented and integrated. It is proposed that transient hypofrontality is the unifying feature of all altered states and that the phenomenological uniqueness of each state is the result of the differential viability of various (...) frontal circuits. Using an evolutionary approach, consciousness is conceptualized as hierarchically ordered cognitive function. Higher-order structures perform increasingly integrative functions and thus contribute more sophisticated content. Although this implies a holistic approach to consciousness, such a functional hierarchy localizes the most sophisticated layers of consciousness in the zenithal higher-order structure: the prefrontal cortex. The hallmark of altered states of consciousness is the subtle modification of behavioral and cognitive functions that are typically ascribed to the prefrontal cortex. The theoretical framework presented yields a number of testable hypotheses. (shrink)