I’ve been reading through Robert Weisberg’s (1986) Creativity: Genius and Other Myths and it occured to me that “the artistic process,” “the scientific process,” and “the writing process,” all follow the same process of creative problem solving, whereby there is an “ill-defined problem” that takes modification of past experience and knowledge to solve.

Weisberg intially provides the simple example of “the candle problem” where a subject is prosented with a box of tacks, matches and a candle, with the instruction to attach the candle to the wall, with the candle able to burn properly. Using verbal protocol, where subjects speak their thoughts aloud rather than describe what they’re doing, he found that most individuals start with directly attaching the candle to the wall with the tacks or by melting the base of the candle, and the more knowledable folk who can see that there are problems to that solution begin to reason the next best alternative to fix the problem in the problem, which is to tac the box to the wall as a stand.

Another example of creative problem solving is presenting in this type of riddle:

“Dan comes home one night after work, as usual. He opens the door and steps into the living room. On the floor he sees Charlie lying dead. There is water on the floor, as well as some pieces of glass. Tom is also in the room. Dan takes one quick glance at the scene and immediately knows what happened. How did Charlie die?”

The audience or subjects then try to guess the answer by asking yes or no answers, refining their questions to elicite the information needed to understand the riddle. Those who are good at these games have experience with problems of this sort.

Both of these are ill-defined problems because they are missing information. In non-creative problem solving, the answer is straightforward from the instructutions. Creativity is involved in answering ill-defined problems such as how well the wax sticks to the wall, or how strong are the tacks, or how old Charlie is, or how to model DNA or make sense of the natural world, or how to string a tune, or what connections to draw while writing a poem, what words to choose, or what happens next in a plot, or where the light falls in composing a painting.

Despite self-reports of an “Aha!” moment, or seemingly unconscious processes, Weisburg presents evidence for how the subjective experience is not the most reliable means for determining how the creative process actually works. The main reason is that artists and scientists often make such reports after the experience has long passed and memory can be faulty as one was more attuned to the task at hand than observing the whole situation. People will also (consciously or not) lie about their creative process, for “One can be influenced by a stimulus without being able to report it” (Weisburg 1986:29). The pleasure one gets from “Aha!” may just be relsease from consiously working on a hard problem for a long time, which is physically exhausting. Despite taking a break, creative people often engage in what Olton calles “creative worrying,” which is mulling over the problem even while not working on it, not an unconsious process. Breaks may also help the brain rest before having the energy to go at it again.

Genius looks like a divine gift from nowhere if one cannot see the small steps which it evolved from. This type of divine creativity coming forth perfected at once was never observed in laboratory settings, and careful examination of biographies, notes, sketches and drafts show that it takes hard work and at least ten years of training for the skill to contribute anything of value to that given field. A creative person draws from their exeperience, from the physical and cultural world around them. There are no correllations to be found in personality traits shared by all creative people. Creative people are also not creative in every field, nor is everything they produce a piece of genius. Weisburg writes, “Since the sensibilities of societies change, so do its judgements of genius… then looking at the characteristics of an individual, in order to determine the basis for genius, must be doomed to failure.”” (Weisburg 1986:88).

Master chess-players memorize thousands of chess positions (or approx. 50 000 patterns). Mozart’s later work is more popular to his early work; he too had to learn to compose. Picasso had sketches upon sketches of plans and edits of paintings, as do poets and composers who write pieces and try to fit them together, manipulating elements to solve a problem, to engage in critical anaylsis of their work. Great artistry does not come from a vaccum or perfected in the first coming-into-being. I think this is rather like how people viewed biology before evolution and genetics.

In any case, he is not saying the romantic view should be demolished, because it really does feel like an “Aha!” or something beyond your consciousness putting the pieces together. Objectively speaking however, the genius is a myth.

The romantic view, Weisburg defines, is the genius view that creativity comes through great leaps of imagination through communication with God or inspirational Muses. The behaviourist view is that creativity is nothing special because creative products are accidental combinations of old notions or knowledge.

Weisburg’s position lies somewhere inbetween. Small steps  rather than great leaps are the rule; here I quote:

“Harlow’s work indicates that insightful solutions of even seemingly simple problems depend on much experience with problems of that sort. Problems that appear to be trivially simple may only seem so because of the knowledge one brings to them. As Harlow’s work demonstrates, one should not underestimate the difficulties an inexperience problem solver confronts in a problem situation… Though someone else may solve a problem from what you consider a ‘fresh viewpoint,’ it does not mean the viewpoint was fresh from their point of view. If so, then trying to make oneself find that fresh point of view may be essentially impossible because it really means that one must transform oneself into another person, with that person’s knowledge, before one can bring a new approach to the problem. But then the viewpoint would not be fresh because one had acquired all that knowledge” (Weisburg 1986:48-69).

Creativity is ordinary, he argues, because the world changes. For example, if it was not Watson and Crick in that setting or scientific community, with that background or educational experience, working on that problem deemed to be a very important problem, and any one of those factors were changed, someone else would have discovered the two-stranded DNA helix, for they were not the only ones working on the problem. No environmental situation, perception of the situation and response to the situation will be exactly the same. Therefore it is a mistake to assume creativity is something humans do not engage with on an ordinary day-to-day basis. What we must explain then, is ordinary non-creative behaviour, when people engage in generalization and go through problem solving in a standard repetitive manner.

To summarize, Weisburg thinks creative individuals possess no extraordinary characteristics, “they do what we are all capable of doing. Because everyone can modify habitual responses to deal with novel situations, no further extraordinary capacities should be needed. Though in a given case the work and individual produces may be extraordinary, extraordinary work is not necessarily the product of extraordinary practices or the results of extraordinary personal characteristics” (Weisburg 1986:12). I think this speaks to the process of evolution being alive and well when we “create” culture, which appears extraordinary.

To reiterate what was said on Tuesday:

CONS (to be fixed in hypothetical future run course)

1. Cover evolutionary biology, linguistics and culture at the beginning of class rather than make a sudden switch of topics halfway through the term

2. Begin broad so everyone has the same outline in their head, having a sense of purpose, with specifics explained later so the gaps can be filled while we WANT to know why.

3. First point allow us to come up with research topics, then second point helps with the research.

4. More direction to blog posts. Have a question to answer or bullet points to meet, such as “Informal midterm course eval — what was good, what could have been better, suggests for a [hypothetical] future run of this course, etc.”

5. Come up with questions for our speakers as a class beforehand.

PROS (what works now)

1. Cover biology first, then linguistics, then culture.

2. Guest lectures are awesome.

3. MURC is awesome, especially for Arts students. (I’d much rather be presenting on this kind of material than go up and explain my webcomic, really, even though Sonja said that was okay when we talked to her first year)

4. Class size. I can’t see this working for a larger class, especially given our coordinators are not specialists in all three disciplines.

5. Blog posts. I think these are an asset to the course, especially for the links Greg and others post to potentially help with our research topics and areas of interest. It’s also handy to have a place to share comments, such as on our MURC proposals.

Some researchers have proposed that a culture is made up of smaller units called memes, akin to how an organism is composed of genes. Because researchers have not yet agreed on a working definition of what a meme is, the definition I will be using is: memes are patterns in neural networks, akin to how genes are patterns in DNA. Other definitions have included vague references to information and ideas stored in brains, which must replicate, but these definitions do not point to any observable physical matter that can be tested empirically and assume if a meme exists, it must replicate in a similar manner to genes.

Before genetics, researchers thought hereditary traits were blended in offspring through some vague, overarching mechanism—like culture is thought of at present. Researchers define a sequence of DNA as a gene when they knock it out and observe an effect in its absence. While it would be more difficult to knock out a meme from someone’s brain, I argue using literary review that we can postulate the process of memetic replication by explaining how memes blend (recombine) for imaginative and creative purposes within one person’s head, and mutate between heads during communication errors—which is the opposite of how genes recombine (between organisms) and mutate (within an organism).

The explanatory power of memes lies beyond reduction; memetics can inform cultural anthropology by the provision of a proximate causation in addition to the ultimate cultural explanation by which anthropologists are already familiar.

NOTE: I didn’t post my proposal earlier because I had already submitted it. I was under the impression the posts were to be edited, and then subsequently forgot to post this anyway until now.

I think all in all it went exceptionally well.

Thanks very much to Greg and Santokh (we enjoyed the chocolate, by the way) and to Sonja and everyone at MURC (for the free food, etc.)!

I’ve been to MURC twice before, courtesy of Yana, and while I thought the improv show was much more hilarious last year, here are my thoughts pertaining to our panel:

Our talks were all well timed in such a manner that we had discussion time left in the panel. Lsi, I think you could’ve used more practice to pinpoint timing, but I enjoyed your presentation nonetheless. It’s too bad MURC happened so soon right after the break, and of course, we procrastinated. *coughtimemanagementcough*

Unfortunately, there were some questions that I wish were asked, but were not, especially given the nature of the material. Topics like mine could have been elaborated so much more, and everyone else’s too. Not everyone got a chance to answer questions. I noticed that people I invited either came in early for the first part and left, or came in late and stayed, thus not seeing all of the talks. If we had more time, or broke up the presentations into two panels, that might have worked better. The people who left may have had questions for the earlier presenters.

But given we were pressed for 8 minute talks, we did the best we could. It was exactly what I signed up for, to actually get up and present, even if for a short time, to an audience (which looked full by the way!). I know that presentation skills are very important, to sell an idea whether it is a science project, a business model, a teaching method, a story, a product or whatever it may be.

I gained a sense of just how much information I can present in 8 minutes, and learned how to cut down a talk. I also learned how to speak without reading off slides, making sure to use visuals as a guide to make concrete abstrat concepts and direct the flow of the talk, especially since you need more words to describe what can just be shown. I also am reminded that Mircosoft Word is crap, because when I copied my proposal into the submission box, the apostrophes got screwed up. NOTE TO SELF: Copy to Notepad first.

Rosie’s lecture got me thinking about my interest in the evolution of imagination, and whether it is useful to postulate ideas or memes as independent of the minds of thier hosts. Bascially, I want to test how far this metaphor can stretch, while remaining critical it might burst.

In genetics, mutations are changes within an individual, like typos in base pairs when DNA polymerase and other repair enzymes fail to spot and fix them. The rate of mutation tends to be very low, a balance between perfect copying and the physiological cost of preventing them.

Recombination of genes happens between (sexual) individuals and no one has yet been able to come up with a good theory of why it occurs when this process does more harm than good in mathematical modelling.

One of the main criticisms of the meme concept is that culture cannot be examined in bits or composed of independent units. But like religion, culture must be made up of something. Even genes do not “work” in isolation, so we should not expect memes to either. Genes used to be fuzzy and invisible too, before we could observe DNA and chromosomes; they are useful theoretical artifacts because when a sequence gets knocked out, it has some observable effect. But can a meme be knocked out and shed light on culture? Not likely.

So what would a meme be, physically? A sequence of neural connections or pattern of activity?

How would a meme mutate or recombine? Does it have fidelity, fecundity, and stability (longetivity)?

In Conceptural Integration Theory (CIT, also known as mental space theory), developed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, a set of activated neuronal assemblies are momentarily marked off in a so called “mental space” (imagine a circle with a realistic painting of a woman as the neural pattern, composed of various parts such as head, neck, torso, color, shape, light, etc. and another circle with an African mask as the pattern, also composed of various parts such as head, shape, light, etc.), and the patterns in each space are run together in a simulated new “blended space” (imagine a new circle with Picasso’s famous painting Ladies of Avignon. This is a very crude example, but you get the idea.) Basically, the this theory looks vaguely like a venn diagram using concept maps. It has been critiqued for being fairly empirically untestable so far.

The mental spaces are short term, constructed via information stored in longer term memory networks and associations. In the example of the expression “digging one’s own financial grave,” there is the creation of two maps or “mental spaces” for the domains Grave Digging and Financial Failure, respectively. In each space, there are association networks such as Gravedigger, corpse, and death for “Grave Digging” and the unawareness of consequences, suffering, bad decisions for “Financial Failure” which are blended in a new space to make meaning of the metaphor (Slingerland 2008:178, 186). Blending allows us to conceive of “As if” scenarios, and build upon them, ideas upon ideas, memes spawning more memes.

What I want to ask, is whether this blending is similar to recombination or mutation.

A meme would be a neural pattern that codes for something very simple in a larger association network, such as the shape of a head or an eye, or changes in pitch or the identification and categorization of nouns, verbs, etc. A cluster of memes would code for all kinds of stylistic representations, images of familiar symbols, tunes and story plots. Blending creates new memes, which may be selected for or against depending on the frequency of other memes. For example, if my network of memes related to funerals included links to dark colors, grief, pain, images of dull skies, tears were to suddenly encounter links to funeral jokes, laughter, bright skies, and ritual dancing, there would be competition in terms of the strength of those connections, which links I activate more than others (weak links eventually become extinct), and these depend on the strength of the input signals which I recieve from the larger cultural meme pool. In that way, memes can be said to be independent from their hosts.

There is no blending without input into two or more “mental spaces”. Input must come from past experience and stimuli from other minds, from a memetic environment or community (like a gene pool?). These spaces (chromosomes?) “cross over” in some sense, and elements are thrown away in the process, but it is not reassembled between “two individual hosts” but in the same mind, which then can be communicated to another, etc. New ideas are often intentional, not mistakes in copying, so they don’t really “mutate” in the same sense.

Mutation happens when mistakes are made communicating between minds. It takes a long time to learn how to replicate a letter, to teach a child to write, and reproduce recognizable symbols with stability and fidelity. It takes an even longer time to copy a pattern for a fictional character, which includes all the past experiences, thoughts, feelings, actions, associations, friendships, events, yadda, yadda of that charcter (passed orally or textually, and is prone to mistakes, but there is some stability that there is agreement on someone named Anne of Green Gables or Harry Potter). Sounds may be misheard, but there is enough stability that we can trace those shifts most of the time. Instructions may be lost and the product or technology is left behind for reverse engineering. Nevertheless, there appears to be a certain rate of mutation that makes some memes more fit than others when phemotypically expressed in a cultural artefact, like some tunes that we can’t get rid of, or the ubiquitous smily face.

What does it mean for ideas to mutuate, recombine or blend? Is culture like an organism? Is this a useful metaphor?

So to recap last week in a nutshell: we went over Phylogeny and Evolutionary Psychology, as well as Chainmail Bikinis.

Now for some musings:

Wayne Maddison’s talk on the pheneticist’s pessimism that it was impossible to reconstuct the tree of all biodiverity reminded me of a similar pessimism in Anthropology.

This pessimism is what led to “Salvage Anthropology,” the idea of recording all the variance before it “disappeared.” Cultures were static entities that needed saving or else they would go extinct. Now we look back and laugh at the idea of cultures dying, unless you are someone who has suffered from this pessimism and want your culture back.

During the early 20th century, when Social Darwinism and the idea of Unilinear Evolution was at its highest, Frans Boas was critiqued for studying his “Historical Particularism,” which is that not all effects have the same causes–we ought to examine particular case studies and history to understand how a particular society came to be as it is, not assume all societies were at different stages which culminated at Victorian Civilization (and the end of History, or Utopia, if you will).  Boas disliked generalizations (based on cherry-picking evidence to support an already established assumption) but his opposition thought that if you were to study all the case histories in the world, that everyone has their own (proximate?) reasons for doing things, it would be ultimately atheoretical–there was nothing to reveal, no overarching insight to be gained. What was the point of having a large collection of descriptions if you did no comparison work? How does that answer the big questions?

I think you need both generalizations and support from particulars: theory has to be grounded. There is nothing more practical than a good, working theory.