On the temporality of creative insight: a psychological and phenomenological perspective

The psychological study of creativity is essential to human progress. If strides are to be made in the sciences, humanities, and arts, we must arrive at a far more detailed understanding of the creative process, its antecedents, and its inhibitors. This review, encompassing most subspecialties in the study of creativity and focusing on twenty-first-century literature, reveals both a growing interest in creativity among psychologists and a growing fragmentation in the field. To be sure, research into the psychology of creativity has grown theoretically and methodologically sophisticated, and researchers have made important contributions from an ever-expanding variety of disciplines. But this expansion has not come without a price. Investigators in one subfield often seem unaware of advances in another. Deeper understanding requires more interdisciplinary research, based on a systems view of creativity that recognizes a variety of interrelated forces operating at multiple levels.

The hypothesis of a Hierarchy of the Sciences with physical sciences at the top, social sciences at the bottom, and biological sciences in-between is nearly 200 years old. This order is intuitive and reflected in many features of academic life, but whether it reflects the “hardness” of scientific research—i.e., the extent to which research questions and results are determined by data and theories as opposed to non-cognitive factors—is controversial. This study analysed 2434 papers published in all disciplines and that declared to have tested a hypothesis. It was determined how many papers reported a “positive” (full or partial) or “negative” support for the tested hypothesis. If the hierarchy hypothesis is correct, then researchers in “softer” sciences should have fewer constraints to their conscious and unconscious biases, and therefore report more positive outcomes. Results confirmed the predictions at all levels considered: discipline, domain and methodology broadly defined. Controlling for observed differences between pure and applied disciplines, and between papers testing one or several hypotheses, the odds of reporting a positive result were around 5 times higher among papers in the disciplines of Psychology and Psychiatry and Economics and Business compared to Space Science, 2.3 times higher in the domain of social sciences compared to the physical sciences, and 3.4 times higher in studies applying behavioural and social methodologies on people compared to physical and chemical studies on non-biological material. In all comparisons, biological studies had intermediate values. These results suggest that the nature of hypotheses tested and the logical and methodological rigour employed to test them vary systematically across disciplines and fields, depending on the complexity of the subject matter and possibly other factors (e.g., a field's level of historical and/or intellectual development). On the other hand, these results support the scientific status of the social sciences against claims that they are completely subjective, by showing that, when they adopt a scientific approach to discovery, they differ from the natural sciences only by a matter of degree.

We propose a new approach to the neuroscience of consciousness, growing out of the 'enactive' viewpoint in cognitive science. This approach aims to map the neural substrates of consciousness at the level of large-scale, emergent and transient dynamical patterns of brain activity (rather than at the level of particular circuits or classes of neurons), and it suggests that the processes crucial for consciousness cut across the brain-body-world divisions, rather than being brain-bound neural events. Whereas standard approaches to the neural correlates of consciousness have assumed a one-way causal-explanatory relationship between internal neural representational systems and the contents of consciousness, our approach allows for theories and hypotheses about the two-way or reciprocal relationship between embodied conscious states and local neuronal activity.