7

Consciousness and Creativity

When I give talks about my brain theory, audiences are usually quick to grasp the
significance of prediction as it relates to a host of human activities. They ask many
related questions. Where does creativity come from? What is consciousness? What
is imagination? How can we separate reality from false beliefs? Although these
topics have not been in the forefront of my motivations for studying brains, they
are of interest to nearly everyone. I don't pretend to be an expert in these topics,
but the memory-prediction framework of intelligence can provide some answers
and useful insights. In this chapter, I address some of the most frequently asked
questions.

Are Animals Intelligent?

Is a rat intelligent? Is a cat intelligent? When did intelligence begin in evolutionary
time? I love this question because I find the answer surprising.

Everything I have written so far about the neocortex and how it works depends on
a very basic premise- that the world has structure and is therefore predictable.
There are patterns in the world: faces have eyes, eyes have pupils, fires are hot,
gravity makes objects fall, doors open and shut, and so forth. The world is not
random, nor is it homogeneous. Memory, prediction, and behavior would be
meaningless if the world was without structure. All behavior, whether it is the
behavior of a human, a snail, a single-cell organism, or a tree, is a means of
exploiting the structure of the world for the benefit of reproduction.

Imagine a one-cell animal living in a pond. The cell has a flagellum that lets it
swim. On the surface of the cell are molecules that detect the presence of
nutrients. Since not all areas of the pond have the same concentration of nutrients,
there is a gradual change in value, or gradient, of nutrients from one side of the
cell to the other. As it swims across the pond, the cell can detect the shift. This is a
simple form of structure in the world of the one-cell animal. The cell exploits its
chemical awareness by swimming toward places with higher concentrations of
nutrients. We could say that this simple organism is making a prediction. It is
predicting that by swimming in a certain way it will find more nutrients. Is there
memory involved in this prediction? Yes, there is. The memory is in the DNA of the
organism. The one-cell animal did not learn, in its lifetime, how to exploit this
gradient. Rather, the learning occurred over evolutionary time and is stored in the
animal's DNA. If the structure of the world changed suddenly, this particular one-
cell animal could not learn to adapt. It could not alter its DNA or the resulting
behavior. For this species, learning can occur only through evolutionary processes
over many generations.
120
Is this one-cell organism intelligent? Using the everyday notion of human
intelligence, the answer is no. But the animal does lie at the far edge of a
continuum of species that use memory and prediction to reproduce more
successfully, and by that more academic measure the answer is yes. The point is
not to label some species as intelligent and others as not intelligent. Memory and
prediction are used by all living things. There is just a continuum of methods and
sophistication in how they do it.

Plants also use memory and prediction to exploit the structure of the world. A tree
makes a prediction when it sends its roots down into the soil and its branches and
leaves up toward the sky. The tree is predicting where it will find water and
minerals based on the experience of its ancestors. Of course a tree doesn't think;
its behavior is automatic. But the species is exploiting the structure of the world in
the same way as the one-cell organism. Every plant species has a distinct set of
behaviors that exploit slightly different parts of the structure of the world.

Eventually, plants evolved communication systems, based mostly on the slow
release of chemical signals. If an insect damages part of a tree, the tree sends
chemicals through its vascular system to other parts of the tree, which triggers a
defense system, such as making toxins. Through such a communication system,