by Adele Gregory

Created on: December 01, 2009

Inspiration seems to shoot straight from the ether into our unsuspecting heads. In more poetic times, we might have thought ourselves privy to the gentle whispers of muses, or in the path of an alchemical bolt from the blue that turned base metals in our brains into gold. In today's understanding of neural anatomy and chemical messengers we might be able to point to the parts of the brain which light up when someone's having an idea, but we're still at a loss to explain why that particular idea arrived at that particular time in that particular form.

To start with, you have to consider whether it's really possible to conjure up something out of nothing. Supernatural explanations for creativity don't have to deal with this question because they have ideas coming from somewhere else. Left to your own devices, however, you're stuck with the contents of your head. So creative ideas either spring forth from nothingness, or they're built from what's already in your brain.

The coming-from-nowhere side faces a bit of an uphill climb because it's so hard to prove. It's almost impossible to be sure that you've never had contact with anything like this idea before that could have subconsciously influenced your inspiration, let alone prove it. It's much easier to cite cases of creative ideas which come from bits and pieces of known things organized in a new way. Amongst Medieval monsters, for example, were people with dog heads and men with faces in their chests. But even these creatures were assembled from the familiar elements of men, dogs, and chests.

So creativity probably uses ingredients from the mental fridge to cook up a new and exciting dish. But where the thought of THAT new dish comes from is still a mystery. One factor might be association. It's a well-used device in crime fiction. Walking past an amusement park, the detective spies a Ferris Wheel. That's it!, he cries, the murderer climbed up and over the roof!. He saw a parallel between the vertical rotation of the Ferris Wheel and how someone might enter an upstairs window without leaving traces. He made a novel connection.

Some of the elements are now in place to attempt a theory of where our inspired ideas come from. Imagine the space between our ears is a little universe filled with thought-atoms. When we're actively thinking or learning, we pick out selected ones to see if they fit together and many do. But when we're not so focused, the various thoughts can swirl around more freely. For much

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