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The fact that we are able to conceive of ideas that have never before been thought of is baffling to me as well. It's a difficult concept to grasp, especially after thinking of the brain as a system of inputs and outputs. But I agree that an original thought could be an output without an input causing it to occur. I also agree that original thought can come about via something like Descartes' "painter analogy". At this point in the course, I think you could probably tell me anything about how the brain deals with originality, dreams, memory etc. because we've really only begun to scratch the surface. The vast majority of us have also been walking around with preconceived notions in our heads as to why we function the way we do, and since so little has been proven to be absolutely true about our brain function, each question we try to answer begs yet another question. For example, the mother of all questions: is there such a thing as absolute truth?

In other news...

Before I began reading your post Rachel, I read an article in The Washington Times about the questions scientists have about the existence of photographic memory. While they believe it to be an anomaly of sorts, there is some historical "truth" behind it. This guy, Mr. Davis, is the president of something called "Mercury Learning Systems" in MN, which is a program that he hopes will help people to increase their ability to store (remember) important information in the form of images. With this ability perfected, he also believes that like Leonardo da Vinci, who envisioned and drafted plans for what we know today as the helicopter, normal human beings will be able to access the genius within them. In response to this belief, a prof. of neurology and psychiatry pinpoints the hippocampus as "the part of the brain that allows a person to put together fragments of information [and] seems to play an orchestrating role in human memory." I would add to that: ...an orchestrating role in human memory and originality. So maybe Descartes did have a point. If so, is our ability to be innovative stemming from our ability to subconsciously take pieces of the information that we take in and store from our everyday lives and put them together in new ways? Would this mean that innovation could actually be due to a bunch of inputs creating one output? And the questions continue to continue...