Creativity: Muses or neurons?

'Every act of creation is first an act of destruction', is a quote attributed to Picasso, words which suggest creating from physical matter, or creatio ex materia . This in contrast to the notion of creating "out of nothing", or creatio ex nihilo. Both assumptions involve the nature of creativity and change, and ego, And Picasso, like the Muses of Greek mythology, had big egos - artistic and Greek deity respectively - all that makes for a good story. But from scientific perspectives, ideas are elements of thought across many levels of physical, chemical, and biological description. Yet neuroscientist Dr. Nancy Andreasen, whose research is about the relationship between creativity and the brain, writes that the brain’s abilities are “near miraculous,” and the process of creating something “is neither easy nor obvious.”. And so, her hypothesis is that the brain begins by disorganising and then making connections between various encoded data which were not previously connected. In other words, our brain is a self-organising system meaning that it could easily be chaos, with quadrillions of living, moving parts (neurons), but it somehow keeps itself in order, not unlike flocks of birds or ant colonies.  Now, if every human being possesses what could be called “ordinary creativity”, which goes back to our basic instincts, then our brains learn, unlearn and relearn to recognise patterns in order to aid in our survival. With "extraordinary creativity", on the other hand, as assumed in the case of Picasso, they well may be operating with substantially enhanced neural processes.  *Andreasen, N. (2005) The Creating Brain - The Neuroscience of Genius. Chicago University Press.