Intuition, Insight, Imagination and Creativity

Can computers have intuition and insights, and be creative? Neurocognitive models inspired by the putative processes in the brain show that these mysterious features are a consequence of information processing in complex networks. Intuition is manifested in categorization based on evaluation of similarity, when decision borders are too complex to be reduced to logical rules. It is also manifested in heuristic reasoning based on partial observations, where network activity selects only those paths that may lead to solution, excluding all bad moves. Insight results from reasoning at the higher, non-verbal level of abstraction that comes from involvement of the right hemisphere networks forming large "linguistic receptive fields." Three factors are essential for creativity in invention of novel words: knowledge of word morphology captured in network connections, imagination constrained by this knowledge, and filtering of results that selects the most interesting novel words. These principles have been implemented using a simple correlation-based algorithm for auto-associative memory. Results are surprisingly similar to those created by humans.