We do, however, believe we are being creative when our memory-prediction system operates at a higher level of abstraction, when it makes uncommon predictions, using uncommon analogies. Fex, most people would agree that a mathematician who proves a difficult conjecture is being creative.

A human can perform significant tasks in much less time than a second. Fex, I could show you a photograph and ask you to determine if there is a cat in the image. Your job would be to push a button if there is a cat, but not if you see a bear or a warthog or a turnip. This task is difficult or impossible for a computer to perform today, yet a human can do it reliably in half a second or less. But neurons are slow, so in that half a second, the information entering your brain can only traverse a chain one hundred neurons long. That is, the brain “computes” solutions to problems like this in one hundred steps or fewer, regardless of how many total neurons might be involved.

Neuroscientists have also found that the wiring of the neocortex is amazingly “plastic,” meaning it can change and rewire itself depending on the type of inputs flowing into it. Fex, newborn ferret brains can be surgically rewired so that the animals’ eyes send their signals to the areas of cortex where hearing normally develops.