I don’t mean to single out Arne Dietrich and Riam Kanso, who attempt to debunk the idea of creativity. They are representative of a broader trend in mainstream thinking. Certain topics tend to meet one of two fates: outright dismissal, or attempts at mechanistic reduction. Creativity is no exception.

When studied scientifically, creativity is often reframed as something else — as a problem of divergent versus convergent thinking, for instance. Following Dietrich’s line, both are, in some sense, equally “creative.” This conclusion is not entirely irrational — it follows from a certain logic. If creativity is defined purely by the production of novel or useful outcomes, then structured problem-solving (convergent thinking) can be classified as creative in the same way as free association (divergent thinking). But this framing is deeply unsatisfying, as it bypasses what makes creativity distinct: the emergence of something genuinely new.

Science — specifically neuroscience — offers a counterpoint. Lateralization research suggests that creativity is not merely an artifact of problem-solving but a distinct cognitive process, one that operates beyond conventional analytic reasoning. Something real is happening when we engage in creative thought — when we bring something new into the world.

What brain lesion studies can tell us about creativity

Lesion studies examine individuals who have suffered brain damage, perhaps from a stroke. They provide some of the most intriguing insights into the neurological basis of creativity:

Some of this literature has been popularized. Perhaps the most famous example is The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985) by neurologist Oliver Sacks (1933–2015),which explores cases where patients had neurological disorders that profoundly altered their perception, cognition, and in some cases, their creative expression.

Patterns emerge. Damage to the left hemisphere often leaves a person fully capable of creative work, sometimes with striking changes. Artists, musicians, and writers with left hemisphere damage have been known to switch styles abruptly, as if creativity, once filtered through structured reasoning, is now rerouted through new, unfamiliar channels.

More remarkably, cases exist in which individuals with no prior creative inclination suddenly develop extraordinary artistic or technical abilities following brain trauma. These are known as savant cases. A well-documented example is a Mexican boy who, after suffering a bicycle accident, displayed exceptional engineering abilities. Similarly, in 2011, Patrick Fagerberg, a lawyer, sustained a traumatic brain injury when a 400-pound camera boom fell on his head at a concert in Austin, Texas. After his recovery, he became a virtuoso painter, despite having no previous experience in art.

These cases, while rare, suggest that creativity is less dependent on structured cognition than traditionally assumed. Instead, the right hemisphere appears capable of generating and sustaining creative work on its own, even in the absence of a fully functional left hemisphere.

The structured, mechanized world of the left hemisphere falls away — yet creativity remains. In some cases, it even flourishes.

Tying in C.S. Peirce and abduction

Philosopher and scientist C.S. Peirce (1839‒1914) never wrote explicitly about creativity, as far as we know, but his understanding of abductive inference has clear connections to the cognitive process underlying creative insight. In one of his many papers, he poses what might be the quintessential question about creativity. As I said in The Myth of Artificial Intelligence (2021),

At the beginning of “Guessing,” Peirce asks how “Galileo and the other masters of science” reached the true theories they did after so few wrong guesses. Scientists, and the rest of us, infer explanations from what we know and observe. We want to subsume these inferences into our stream of observations, into the facts. But so much of what we infer is outside the frame of pure observation. Contextual knowledge pervades almost every inference we make. Peirce’s use of Galileo to buttress his story is thus apt: scientific discovery is often attributed to meticulously following known methods, but that’s not really true. We hide mystery behind method. Galileo guessed, too, just like Peirce on the steamer. In both cases, subsequent investigation proved that the guess was somehow on track.

Peirce likened guessing to an instinct, a selection out of “at least a billion” possible hypotheses of the one that seems right:

Holmes meets Watson and asks him if he’s just returned from the war because he sees a tan and a limp. A military doctor fresh from the war in Afghanistan, he figures. Just a guess? No — an inference.

The connection to creativity is clear enough here. If we reverse engineer the growing body of neuroscientific evidence on both abductive inference and creativity, the conclusion is, I think, unsurprising: the two are deeply intertwined in both cognition and experience. The right hemisphere plays a pivotal role in both, suggesting a broader connection — not just between creativity and inference, but between our ability to navigate the physical world and our capacity for commonsense reasoning.

This is where the distinction that separates us from machines — from AI, I mean — becomes stark. What sets us apart is not just our ability to make commonsense inferences but our capacity to leap from those inferences to entirely new ways of understanding reality, from everyday reasoning to paradigm-shifting discoveries like special relativity. In all of these activities, we find an undeniable contribution of the right hemisphere.

This conclusion is particularly relevant today, because the left hemisphere is demonstrably better at verbalizing, systematizing, and following rules — not the same as language itself, but a fixation on linear thinking, algorithms, and control. And yet, it is precisely this left-hemisphere mode of thought that seems to be shaping and dominating our culture today.

This brings us back to the question of creativity and culture.

A grand synthesis

When I look around today, I see ample evidence of psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist’s thesis — that the modern world is increasingly dominated by left-hemisphere ways of thinking. He describes a kind of feedback loop, in which we build rectilinear, high-tech environments that reinforce the cognitive patterns of the left hemisphere. The more we engage with machines, the more the world itself begins to resemble one. And as we become further enmeshed in digital structures, algorithms, and rigid systems, the vision self-reinforces.

McGilchrist’s central complaint is that the great ages of intellectual and artistic flourishing — those that still illuminate history — seem suspiciously right-hemisphere-driven. The Italian Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution — these were not eras of technological installation alone, but of expansive, imaginative breakthroughs. Theorizing, hypothesis generation, and paradigm shifts draw deeply from the right hemisphere, even though the left hemisphere is involved. This is a point McGilchrist takes pains to emphasize, likely in order to preempt the predictable objections of his neuroscientific colleagues.

What emerges from this synthesis is that abduction, or hypothesis generation, is central to science, and its fundamental cognitive structure is nearly indistinguishable from creativity. The core question remains:

Given all the near-infinite possibilities, why this one?

There is no algorithmic answer to that question. The left hemisphere’s attempts to understand creative thinking and discovery tend toward two unsatisfactory extremes: denialism (creativity is a myth, a retroactive illusion) or reductionism (creativity is just a process, fully programmable). We seem to be living in precisely this world today, even as AI advances in remarkable but ultimately predictable ways.

What is missing — what must be revived — is imagination. We need a renewed focus on precisely those aspects of thought that cannot be reduced to mechanical operations.

Let me wrap this up with a final thought. A peroration, if you like.

A disquieting thought

I’m beginning to wonder whether today’s thought leaders are committed to an uninspired view of the person because the dominant organizational forces require conformity rather than creativity.

Serendipity has been gradually exorcized from the web — which, for many, has become synonymous with the world itself. Creativity, once seen as something rare and remarkable, is now treated as a stubborn myth, or worse, an atavistic illusion — one of those naïve ideas we now know better than to take seriously.

I can’t help but think this is self-serving — and desperate.

Let me add here too: while the educational system and pop culture tend to overtly reject pure mechanism, their treatment of creativity as something “everyone can have” amounts to a reduction just the same. Creativity is flattened, made indistinguishable from routine participation, until it loses any real meaning.

The common culprit here, I think, is the problem that McGilchrist identified — we are living through an era that is both technocratic and controlling, yet saturated with rhetoric about dazzling technological futures. A miasma of promise, to be sure, but one wrapped in the same depressing cloak of centralized control and the slow asphyxiation of personhood.

Technocracy Marcus Spiske Unsplash

Mainstream science today — to the extent that we still have a functioning institution — is increasingly fixated on a computational model of the mind, endlessly cataloging the ways in which we are biased, limited, and fundamentally error-prone.

What can all this be about?

A culture of conformity will value rule-following above theorizing and creativity. It rewards allegiance to structure, shaping institutions — science included — around a vision of the person as a machine: reducible, understandable in parts, brilliant only in its ability to converge rather than diverge.

The consumer economy, too, thrives not on independent thought but on passive engagement. It values people who find advertising endlessly titillating, who are only loosely convinced of their ability to live full and meaningful lives.

The forces at the top, so to speak, have a vested interest in a vision of the person that is reductively easy to manipulate. (Their children, of course, won’t grow up thinking this — just as the scientist who declares there is no free will certainly does not live as if he has none.)

I am not a revolutionary, but my peroration is meant to suggest that the many fragmentary signals of our time all point to a single structural shift. A world increasingly modeled on mechanistic thought.

And yet, neither our uniquely human ways of thinking — our capacity for inference, for abductive leaps — nor our greatest creative insights fit within that model.

That is the left hemisphere’s dream — the emissary turning on the master.

One wonders how much deeper these roots will grow, and how much longer the tree will bear fruit.

Here’s the first part of my essay: The slow decline of a key aspect of creativity. The mechanization of mind is changing how we think about creativity — and not in a good way. In this first of three parts, I look at the role of serendipity — the art of making happy, unexpected discoveries — and how a mechanized world diminishes it.

And here’s the second: Stranger things: Why mad scientists are mad. At the highest levels, creativity seems to bypass the deliberate, structured thought process altogether. The real danger of reductionism is not just that it fails to explain creativity, but that it actively encourages dismissal of what cannot be reduced.