Finally, the theory presented here suggests that creativity must be 

 related to the ability to explore novel linkages of elementary move- 

 ments. This might sound like an impoverished view of that faculty. 

 It might seem to be applicable to sports people and ballet dancers, 

 but what about creativity in the other arts and in the sciences'? The 

 answer lies in the fact, so easy to forget, that our only output is 

 movement, and that all mental processes ultimately must be related 

 to those activities in the brain that dictate the contraction of our 

 muscles. The logical conclusion is that candidate novel schemata 

 must vie with each other, while being checked for fulfilment of the 

 constraints mentioned earlier. And it is natural to assume that the 

 muscle-directing region must be intimately involved in this fitting 

 process. This will probably manifest itself in individual neuronal 

 activities racing each other toward a threshold level, as envisaged 

 by Roger Carpenter (1999). But there must be other factors at play, 

 because a race will produce only familiar winners in the absence of 

 new runners. What is the origin of the latter? Perhaps it lies in the 

 ability of the circuit to capture novel correlations between neural 

 signals, by dint of the feedback routes known to exist within the 

 cerebral cortex (Felleman and Van Essen, 1991), as opposed to the 

 feedback loops involving subcortical components, as discussed 

 above. Claus Nielsen and I briefly discussed the possibility of "re- 

 verse-projection learning" (Cotterill and Nielsen. 1991). and the sit- 

 uation was subjected to a more thorough analysis by Wolf Singer 

 (1995). It might be particularly significant, in this respect, that Semir 

 Zeki and Stewart Shipp (1988) found a greater spread among the 

 cortical reverse projections than they did among the forward pro- 

 jections. This is suggestive of the system unwittingly capturing un- 

 suspected correlations between its input signals, and subsequently 

 being able to act upon what the system has discovered. Perhaps this 

 is why we are often oblivious of the origin of our bright ideas. And 

 given what was stated earlier regarding schemata consolidation dur- 

 ing sleep, this might explain why it is that we sometimes wake with 

 the solution of a problem that we went to bed with. 



Before closing, and because I have been speaking in a museum 

 that concerns itself with many different species, I feel that I ought 

 to make a guess as to which of these possess consciousness. Mindful 



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