The need for habit becomes obvious if we think a bit about the human brain. It is a rather ugly three pounds of meat. It consists of many neurons (100.000.000.000, which is a very large number, but not infinite. In fact, now that we are used to computers, it is no longer all that impressive—100 giganeurons. not even a teraneuron). It is also limited in speed, capacity, and channels. My now venerable book Conceptual Blockbusting has several small tasks in the first chapter that demonstrate the first two, and as for the last, if you have invested a lot in multi-tasking stock, you should be considering lightening up. Experiments are showing that multi tasking is thinking with a background noise of rote activities.
So how does this mass of cells control our body, scan and sort our sensory inputs, record and recall information, maintain our consciousness, and still have the ability to deal with the unknowns of daily living? Although we are in the midst of great breakthroughs in the mechanics of the brain through sophisticated instruments such as fMRI and PET scanners, we still don’t know. Our brain wisely does not linger on how it works. One of my favorite somewhat facetious models for vision is that including the homunculus. We all know about the optics of the eye—the lens, retina, rods, cones, optic nerves). Signals travel through this system into the brain, of course. But then what happens to create our visual images? My favorite model simply replaces all that by hooking the optic nerves directly to a very small TV set viewed by a tiny person - the homunculous. Sometimes models are to escape dealing with reality.
Look up Visual Cortex on Wikipedia, and you will see many words with which you can impress your friends. But for thinking generally about creativity, we don’t need to know about such things as Brodmann areas 17, 18, and 19. Nor do we need to know where the oxygen goes when we are being creative. We do need to realize that our thinking is dependent on past experience and information we have acquired, real-time signals from the senses, and a large amount of inherited programming concerning how to stay well, compete for resources, and spread our gene pool. Our mental cake is constructed of habit built from what we have learned in our past, and on evolution. Creativity is the frosting, albeit an extremely important one. But unlike a real cake, our mental cake does not like to be modified. To belabor the metaphor, our frosting and our cake are often in conflict.
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