Chapter 10: Creative Thinking – the Ninth Sense

 

 

What is the mechanism behind creative thinking (the ninth sense)? Firstly, I believe that creative thinking and consciousness are the same thing and have been with us since (practically) the beginning because if there were no creative thinking (or consciousness) why would an organism move out of the niche that it found itself in, and that is counter- heritable. Every organism (to my mind) eats a little of a new food to ascertain if it is poisonous and ‘register’ it as a source of nutrition and required chemicals (eighth sense). It is heritable that an organism satisfy its nutrient requirements in the most efficient manner, and as an example, it is common knowledge that pregnant women get cravings for unusual foods.

 

What is the mechanism behind creative thinking? I can think of three contenders, (A) ‘induction’, where existing memories start similar memories running by inducing action potentials, (B) a filing system that stores memories in the cortex in blocks that are of similar composition, such as hearing, sight etc and (C) ‘cascade’, where the action potential generates other action potentials that are part of the ‘subconscious’, and have sufficient neurotransmitters to generate a ‘somewhat random’ thought from past, unused memories. Creative thinking has to be kept under control, for the vast majority of time the animal just has to function in it’s normal manner. However, when the whole of the animal’s world changes, another form of creative thinking, called the ‘seventh sense’ (D) comes into play!

 

(A) ‘One of the most startling consequences of de Broglie’s wave hypothesis and Schrodinger’s equation was the discovery that quantum objects can ‘tunnel’ through potential energy barriers that classical particles are forbidden to penetrate…. Roughly speaking, we can ‘borrow’ an energy deltaE to get over the barrier so long as we repay it within a time deltat = h/deltaE…. Although both waves on a string and water waves can be made to exhibit ‘wave tunneling’, probably the most familiar example involves light in its wavelike guise…. How is all this connected with quantum tunneling? Well, although no light rays penetrate the air beyond the glass, when the light arrives at the glass surface at an angle larger than the critical angle, there is none the less some sort of wave disturbance generated in the air. This is not a wave that carries energy, like ordinary ‘traveling’ waves, but a ‘standing’ wave pattern that does not transmit any light energy.’ (The New Quantum Universe, Tony Hey and Patrick Walters, pp 73-75) From above, E is energy, t is time and h is Planck’s constant.

 

‘The type of standing wave involved here – a so-called ‘evanescent’ wave – is special because the wave disturbance dies away very rapidly the further away we go from the surface. The connection with tunneling comes about if we place another block of glass parallel to the first one. As we move the two blocks towards each other so that the evanescent wave disturbance begins to penetrate the second block, a transmitted ray of light appears! The closer the two blocks are brought together, the more light energy that reappears as a transmitted ray.’ (Pp 75-76)

 

‘Fig. 5.5 Tunneling with water waves. (a) The speed of water waves depends on the depth of water.’ (P 78) To put the generality of this effect into perspective, Tsunami waves also travel at a speed dependent on the ocean’s depth at that point. The relationship is c = square root of gH, where c is the speed of the wave, g is the acceleration due to gravity and H is the depth of water.’ (Australian Government, Bureau of Meteorology, http://www.bom.gov.au/tsunami/info, The physics of a tsunami)

 

‘(b) This photograph shows the same scene but with the width of the forbidden region much decreased. One can now clearly see that the water wave can ‘jump the gap’ and appear on the other side. This is a well understood wave phenomenon and is the basis for tunneling in quantum mechanics.’ (P 78)

 

The evanescent wave is the result of a purely energy wave, and the de Broglie wave is that of charged and uncharged particles. ‘Matter waves were first experimentally confirmed to occur in the Davisson-Germer experiment for electrons, and the de Broglie hypothesis has been confirmed for other elementary particles. Furthermore, neutral atoms and even molecules have been shown to be wave-like. (Wikipedia, Matter Wave, Experimental confirmation)

 

postscript: ‘an evanescent is a near-field wave with an intensity that exhibits exponential decay without absorption as a function of the distance from the boundary at which the wave was formed. Evanescent waves are solutions of wave-equations, and can in principle occur in any context to which a wave equation applies. They are formed at this boundary between two media with different wave motion properties, and are most intense within one third of a wavelength from the surface of formation. In particular, evanescent waves can occur in the contexts of optics, and other forms of electromagnetic radiation, acoustics, quantum mechanics and “waves on strings”.’ (Wikipedia, Evanescent waves)

 

‘The action potential is the movement of fluids. It is only like an electrical signal in certain respects.’   (JOB’S BODY, A Handbook for Bodywork, Deane Juhan, p 158) Whilst electrical charges are moved, they are part of the ions that are formed in solution and are the simplest components for the body to move around. In other words, the action potential is an energy wave and has effects at a distance. The unshielded neurons would be held apart by the positive charge on the surface.

 

I believe that the evanescent waves of nerves are the major physical effect that underlies creativity within the brain, by inducing a ‘local influx of sodium ions (Na+) enters into the midst of a negatively charged environment just inside the membrane, they are naturally pulled to the sides, thus spreading the internal positive charge, opening more and more adjacent sodium gates, and spreading the depolarization across the whole membrane.’ (6-13, p 153) The action potentials that are generated or induced, move in both directions to synapses and only the synapse in the correct direction is affected.

 

(B) Also, creativity is enhanced through the thalamus allocating the various parts (from different sensors) of a memory to the appropriate lobe of the brain. When creative thinking (induction of neurons) occurs, it would occur in related areas to the current thinking because the thalamus stores the memories of like occurrence in the same lobe. However, the stimulated neuron is linked to different parts of the brain as the memory is followed through the lobes.

 

Throughout evolution, inputs to the brain have been emotional because that is the only avenue that is available to the brain via the amygdala, which provides the level indicating the importance of memory input into the hippocampus and ultimately the cortex. Animals, and us, use emotion because that is determined by fear of predation, attraction to sexual partners, confrontation of competitors etc. The seventh sense (see later) uses chemicals to change the way the brain thinks, but only after the emotion has dictated the memories that have been retained in the hippocampus or have been up loaded to the cortex. Rational thought would use the facts that have to be retained because we must, in studying, hold in our mind to ‘remember this’, which is an emotive tag.

 

However, ‘forgetting’ is paramount in the functioning of the brain, from the emotional labels selecting memories in the hippocampus to the reduction of importance of stored memories in the cortex. Consider the reverse. ‘What does living with a near-absolute memory mean…. Sherashevsky’s mental life bordered on the pathological. His mind must have resembled the state of consciousness we sometimes experience when we fall asleep: a quick, associative series of pictures, the fleeting impressions of a chaotically edited film’ (Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older, Douwe Draaisma, p 69) This would describe the contents of the hippocampus. The cortex holds memories that have been processed into the lobes.

 

A second effect is the downgrading of memories in the cortex that occur as a weakening of the neurotransmitters through lack of use over time. ‘If a neuron is repeatedly excited, it releases chemicals (like nitric oxide, NO), which drift back to the presynaptic neurons that were exciting it, and this causes those neurons to increase the available amount of neurotransmitter for future transmission. This will ensure that the next time a signal travels down one of these channels its effect will be amplified.’ (Memory and Dreams, George Christos, p 18) Consider ‘Nietzsche’s dictum in Human, All Too Human: ‘many do not become thinkers because their memory is too good.’‘ ’ (Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older, Douwe Draaisma, p 70)

 

(C) I believe that (long-term) memories are never completely forgotten. They may be down-graded and not able to be remembered, but the essential part still contributes to our creative thinking. Logically, memories that are not used often, should be relegated to a ‘sub-conscience’ simply because they are not called upon often and accessing them would slow-down the decision-making. Indeed, this is the definition of the ‘sub-conscious’ in that we cannot access it but it brings the most important (emotionally charged) memories from the past into the calculation of the present situation. The more that a problem is accessed by thinking about it, the stronger the neurotransmitters in the ‘forgotten’ memories become, and eventually this brings the downgraded axons and their ‘net’ of memories more and more into the calculation as time goes on. This is in line with common experience, where the sub-conscious provides the answer after sleeping or the passage of time etc.

 

The cost of keeping a ‘memory’ in the cortex is not high because the diameter of an axon is only about one millionth of a metre, whereas setting up a ‘permanent’ memory is costly as shown below. ‘Fully three-quarters of the cell bodies in the human central nervous system are contained in the cortex. And the horizontal interconnections between these cells are far more dense than those in the cord or the lower brain. Schematically, it resembles a ball of cotton fuzz much more than it resembles even the most complex man-made electrical circuitry’ (JOB’S BODY, A Handbook for Bodywork, Deane Juhan, p 174)

 

This cotton fuzz picture is in line with common thinking that the more learned the person, the more likely that they are to think creatively. Simply, the more facts that the brain has to hold, the more axons, the denser the cotton fuzz and the more opportunity for induction to occur between the axons. ‘Henri Poincare, a nineteenth-century French mathematician and physicist, talked about hidden combinations of unconscious ideas and described a mental process …. Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination.’ (Future Minds, Richard Watson, p 67)

 

The larger animals, such as the elephant, tend to be long-lived, as one would expect with so many resources invested in them, and they tend to be lead by a ‘matriarch’ or the oldest members. The older the animal, the more it has experienced, and with the variability of climate over the years, the more important it is that the directions to water-holes, salt-licks, pastures and other food sources commensurate with the weather conditions are remembered.

 

The sub-conscious system as described seems to be an ideal system in that current memories are used for current problems and old or less emotive memories are downplayed, but old memories can be strengthened over time as conditions change until they are remembered as part of an integration of past memories. This should not be confused with the seventh sense, in the next chapter. The down-side of this system is that going over half-forgotten memories can strengthen the memory and bring it into current thinking. This can be a problem with post-traumatic stress. Even worse, it can be seen that ‘false’ memories can be generated by concentrating on specific subjects.

 

‘The researchers concluded that some of the techniques used in recovered memory therapy, such as visualization, suggestion and hypnosis, could have been responsible … As we know from the research on imagination inflation, asking people vividly to imagine abuse events is likely to lead to subsequent false claims that the events actually happened.’ (Pieces of Light, Charles Fernyhough, p 164) ‘”The difference between false memories and true ones,” observed the legendary surrealist painter Salvador Dali, “is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.”’ (p 164)

 

Deja vu is the feeling of having experienced something before, such as a place, or a scene, or a person etc. ‘Around two-thirds of people experience ordinary deja vu, which the psychologist Alan S. Brown has described as a “routine memory glitch” with various plausible explanations. One possibility is that we are experiencing a match between a genuinely new experience and an implicit memory for something we have experienced before, but for which we do not have explicit memory: a dream, perhaps, or a familiar context for which we don’t have an autonoetic memory. In line with this interpretation, it proves possible to elicit deja vu experiences in the lab, by showing participants stimuli so briefly that they don’t consciously perceive them, and then presenting them for a longer period.’ (pp 180-181)

 

From the derivation above, it seems more accurate to call deja vu a routine memory function, and not a glitch in memory function, for a number of reasons. Some of which are (1) two-thirds of people is a significant percentage, (2) the subconscious would be a sizeable part of the brain, and would be routinely accessed by induction to produce creative thought, (3) some memories are held in the hippocampus for long periods, but are not important enough to rate cortex space, and not un-important enough to be discarded, (4) some memories in the cortex change over time and are upgraded in the light of current experience.

 

All of the above assumes a ‘level playing field’ when it comes to nutrition, and we assume that nutrition is adequate. The ‘seventh sense’ that is derived in the next chapter 11 is a sense that changes or varies the working of the mind so that it can better function as the weather, and thus the food supply varies. It should be noted that Survival of the Fittest is a principle that applies, at times, when the food supply is stretched in quantity and quality and thus extends to mental ‘fittness’.

 

postscript: I’m going to mention something that is dealt with later in the book, but it is a question of such importance that it needs to be repeated (and expanded) here. The question is: why does everyone see the same thing? The (general) answer is that we all see the same thing because it is ‘real’. However, bees see different colours in the flowers than we do, more into the ultra-violet. Why do we have good colour vision when dogs have poor colour vision? I imagine that we are descended from fruit-eating monkeys that had to be able to tell when fruit was ripe enough to eat, that is, that the plant produced enough sugar in the fruit when the seed was sufficiently mature to sprout. (It is, of course, heritable that plants allow the fruit to be edible when the seed will germinate.) Dogs would not need colour to hunt.

 

The question is thus: what is reality? It is heritable that our bodies produce a continuous and complete picture, at all times, with contrast of colours etc. to allow us to confabulate and pick out a predator from the undergrowth as fast and as far away as possible. If we don’t see the same as other animals, we must see ‘enough’ of the same to be able to co-exist in a predator/prey relationship, and for this to occur, we need a reality that is continuous and complete. In other words, no blank spaces through which a predator can sneak up on us. It helps that we evolved using a brain and other senses that are ‘components’ and have remained unchanged for a very long time and are basically the same for most fish/amphibians/reptiles/animals.

 

Our senses have to ‘mesh’ with every other animal otherwise we would be vulnerable to predation and thus, reality in a global sense is heritable. In other words, if it can hurt us, we need to be able to sense it, and that is heritable. We evolved other defenses for the very small, and that is an immune system. For earthquakes, we stayed out of caves, flash-floods, don’t camp near rivers, evolved ‘jumping back’ at snakes, fear of heights etc.

 

In a quantum mechanical sense, when someone sees or measures an object, it becomes determinant/real/ determined wave-function and because our brains have the same architecture, we see the same thing. (Remember that determination occurs when it is measured and CAN be accessed, not when it IS accessed.) If the speed of light is measured by two observers, that are moving at a velocity relative to each other, it is found that the speed of light is the same to each observer. This is Relativity and is logical, because the speed of light (like quantum mechanics, and every other measurement) is an ACT of measurement between the object measured and the mind doing the measuring.

 

This might seem strange, but only because we use space-time and don’t recognize a fifth dimension (Kaluza and Klein) that is a logical dimension (Half-truth). Current thinking is that we exist, which suggests space-time, but I believe that our universe is a probability space that contains Conservation of Energy (=1), that is the total of a probability field (=1), (plus x, y and z, and time passing). Logic is the dimension of the galaxy, and space-time are the units that we have evolved to create a reality that is suitable for Survival of the Fittest.