Brain-Based Bounded Creativity

The unconscious, intuitive and emotional dimension of human choice is the factor that links Gigerenzer et al.’s programme to studies on human creativity. As in the choices we make in everyday life, when we lack both time and information, so too when we solve complex problems in art and science, the creative leap towards originality and innovation often occurs in unconscious, intuitive-type conditions, with a strong affective and emotional component. In the same way that rationality is bounded in everyday choices by these types of factors, creativity is also bounded when resolving artistic and scientific problems by the implicit, intuitive, emotional and perceptual characteristics of the human mind. In the same way that rationality cannot be Olympic, namely it cannot satisfy the canonical requirements of logic and probability calculus, so creativity too cannot be divine. Although this was something ardently desired by the nineteenth-century Romantics, creativity cannot be set apart from earth’s gravity and human bounds. These constraints and the limits of human thought have been analysed in the past above all from a psychological point of view. Instead, in more recent years there has been a strong awareness of the need to combine psychological tests with neurocognitive research. As is clear from the results of the new neuroeconomics and neuroaesthetics programmes, we need above all to study the cerebral dimension if we wish to understand the characteristics of bounded rationality and bounded creativity. Indeed it is the biological structure of the brain, as it has developed through adaptive evolution, that sets the computational bounding parameters for the style of human thought.