The brain is a superb recognition machine. The brain is designed to be non-creative. The purpose of the brain is to make stable patterns for dealing with a stable world.

One day a man gets up in the morning and programmes his computer to work through all the ways of getting dressed with eleven pieces of clothing. The computer worked non-stop for forty hours to go through all the possibilities. This is not surprising because there are 39,916,800 ways of getting dressed. If you were to try one every minute you would need to live to be seventy six years old using every minute of your waking life trying a different way of getting dressed.

We do not have to do this because the brain allows incoming information to organize itself into patterns. The way the brain does this is described in my book 'The Mechanism of Mind' (1969). Once the pattern has been formed then, on future occasions, the brain 'recognises' the pattern and uses the appropriate behaviour sequence. This is the nature of self-organising information systems like the human brain.

Judgment And Design
The Classification Approach
The GG3
The Analysis Approach
The Design Approach
Perception
Teaching Creativity
Argument
Summary