Incubated cognition and creativity

Journal of Consciousness Studies 14 (3):83-100 (2007)
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Abstract

Many traditional theories of creativity put heavy emphasis on an incubation stage in creative cognitive processes. The basic phenomenon is a familiar one: we are working on a task or problem, we leave it aside for some period of time, and when we return attention to the task we have some new insight that services completion of the task. This feature, combined with other ostensibly mysterious features of creativity, has discouraged naturalists from theorizing creativity. This avoidance is misguided: we can maintain unconscious incubated cognition as (sometimes) part of the creative process and we can explain it in scientifically responsible ways. This paper, focusing on the effects of attention on the functional networking of the brain, attempts just such an explanation. It also serves to assuage the naturalist's scepticism about other features of creative cognition. The broad upshot, one would hope, is that philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists return some attention to the long neglected topic of creativity.

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Dustin Stokes
University of Utah

Citations of this work

Intelligence Socialism.Carlotta Pavese - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind.
Minimally Creative Thought.Dustin Stokes - 2011 - Metaphilosophy 42 (5):658-681.
Mechanisms for constrained stochasticity.Peter Carruthers - 2020 - Synthese 197 (10):4455-4473.

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On a confusion about a function of consciousness.Ned Block - 1995 - Brain and Behavioral Sciences 18 (2):227-–247.
The Principles of Psychology.William James - 1890 - Les Etudes Philosophiques 11 (3):506-507.
What is it like to be a bat?Thomas Nagel - 2004 - In Tim Crane & Katalin Farkas (eds.), Metaphysics: A Guide and Anthology. Oxford University Press.
Deciding to believe.Bernard Williams - 1973 - In Problems of the Self. Cambridge University Press. pp. 136--51.

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