MCCHE Precision Convergence Webinar Series with Liane Gabora
The Conception and Evolution of Creative Ideas
By Liane Gabora
University of British Columbia
Date: February 24, 2025
Time: 8:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Location: Online, and in-person at the
Armstrong Building, room 155a
3420 Rue McTavish, Montr茅al, QC
Abstract
The creative process fuels the evolution of culture. Central to the honing theory of creativity is the concept of a worldview: a self-organizing, self-mending mental model of reality, i.e., a mind as experienced 鈥榝rom the inside.鈥� Your worldview incorporates your way of seeing and being in the world, how you鈥檝e made sense of your experiences, come to terms with them (or not), and reflected upon them, as well as ideas you come up with on your own: the 鈥榗onceptual glue鈥� that weaves your knowledge and memories into a uniquely configured tapestry of understanding. Creative honing is viewed as the iterative process of reconfiguring one鈥檚 worldview by going deep with an idea. Because a worldview is an active shaper of cultural information that uses whatever mental contents it has available to spontaneously tailor actions and responses to new situations, it is minds, not memes, that must be central to a theory of how culture evolves. Unlike other theories of creativity, honing theory can account for why creativity is therapeutic, and unlike other theories of cultural evolution, it can account for phenomena such as cross-domain transfer. I will show how honing theory paves the way for a new understanding of convergent and divergent thought, and present evidence for the theory from empirical studies with musicians, artists, creative writers, dancers, and comedians. If there is time, I will present an agent-based model of two cognitive transitions en route to the capacity for strategic creativity and cultural evolution, the results of which are consistent from data from psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, and archaeology.