ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2024
Cultivating creativity: predictive brains and the enlightened room problem.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Toward a neuroaesthetics of interactions: Insights from dance on the aesthetics of individual and interacting bodies.iScience · 2025Review
- Neural dynamics of semantic control underlying generative storytelling.Communications biology · 2025Article
- How do inner screens enable imaginative experience? Applying the free-energy principle directly to the study of conscious experience.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Article
- Flow and intuition: a systems neuroscience comparison.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Article
- Order and change in art: towards an active inference account of aesthetic experience.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Aesthetics and predictive processing: grounds and prospects of a fruitful encounter.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
How can one conciliate the claim that humans are uncertainty minimizing systems that seek to navigate predictable and familiar environments with the claim that humans can be creative? We call this the Enlightened Room Problem (ERP). The solution, we suggest, lies not (or not only) in the error-minimizing brain but in the environment itself. Creativity emerges from various degrees of interplay between predictive brains and changing environments: ones that repeatedly move the goalposts for our own error-minimizing machinery. By (co)constructing these challenging worlds, we effectively alter and expand the space within which our own prediction engines operate, and that function as 'exploration bubbles' that enable information seeking, uncertainty minimizing minds to penetrate deeper and deeper into artistic, scientific and engineering space. In what follows, we offer a proof of principle for this kind of environmentally led cognitive expansion. This article is part of the theme issue 'Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives'.
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