Revised edition of Boden’s study of the human mind, how it works and how it can surpass itself. Artists and scientists rarely know how their original ideas came about – some appeal to intuition but cannot say how it works. Nor can many psychologists tell us much about it, and it is widely believed that no scientific theory of creativity will ever be possible – for how could science ever explain fundamental novelties?

Here Margaret Boden sets out to show how parts of the puzzle can be put into place. She argues how intuition works. Drawing on examples ranging from chaos theory to Coleridge, and using the idea that creativity involves the exploration of conceptual spaces in people’s minds, she describes these spaces and ways of transforming them to produce new ones. In doing this, she uses computational concepts drawn from artificial intelligence