Research Colloquium at SFU’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology in Surrey presents

Liane Gabora

Wednesday Feb 13th, 2008 at 2:30 - 4.00 pm

SFU Surrey Campus, Room 5380 (5th Floor Galleria)

Liane Gabora

Title: How Does the Creative Process Work?

Abstract:

What happens when you think creatively? Some say creativity involves heuristic search through a space of possibilities. Others say it is a Darwinian process in which you generate lots of candidate solutions, choose the best, and repeat until a satisfactory solution is found. These theories say much about how one selects from alternatives, but little about how one takes a vague glimmer of insight and molds it into a workable idea. I will present a theory of creativity, honing theory, according to which the creative process is a reiterated interaction between one’s conception of a problem or artistic task, and one’s internal model of the world, or worldview. This interaction can exhibit self-organized criticality, subjectively experienced as an insight emerging from a new organized worldview. I will present empirical support for this theory that comes from (1) experiments on how people form analogies, and (2) analysis of the life works of composers.

Bio:

Liane Gabora is a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia - Okanagan. She is best known for her theory of the "origin of the modern mind through conceptual closure." This is built on her earlier work on "autocatalytic closure in a cognitive system: A tentative scenario for the origin of culture." She has contributed to the study of cultural evolution and evolutions of societies, and has focused strongly on the role of personal creativity, as opposed to memetic imitation or instruction. She puts special emphasis on quantifiable archaeological data, e.g. numbers of different styles of arrow points, than on contemporary observations to minimize cultural bias and notational bias. (summarized from Wikipedia page) http://www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/liane/index.html