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Creative Insight: The Redistribution Theory 97

For the purpose of explaining insight, the key point is that the subjective
experience of seeing an object or a situation is the result of a number of rapid
and unconscious but nevertheless real choices, constrained and biased by the
prior experience encoded in the relative strengths and activation levels of the
vertical and horizontal links. The existence of an outgoing link from process-
ing unit U in layer N to unit W in layer N+1, the activation of that link, the
activation of excitatory and inhibitory links within a layer and the activations
of the feedback links from higher to lower levels are determined by prior expe-
rience as well as by current perceptual input. The biases residing in the relative
strengths and activation levels jointly produce the visual system’s best guess as
to the nature of the perceived situation. The final percept – the working mem-
ory content – is a projection of prior experience onto the situation at hand.

Language comprehension
Research in psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology has established that
comprehension is no less an interpretive and constructive process than is visual
perception. It requires choices, although we are usually unaware of them. For
example, a pervasive feature of English as well as other languages is that words
are polysemous, that is, they have multiple meanings. For example, my diction-
ary lists 14 distinct senses for the word “line.” Laboratory studies show that the
process psychologists call lexical access activates a word’s meanings in parallel
and settles on the right one for each context through a complex series of excit-
atory and inhibitory interactions among the possible meanings of the words in a
sentence. The word “wire“ is interpreted differently when it occurs in a sentence
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that also contains “electrical circuits” than in a sentence that also contains “circus
act.” Words mutually constrain each other’s meanings. Walter Kintsch originally
proposed his construction-integration process for the case of language.
Like visual perception, discourse requires multiple layers of processing
(lexical access, syntactic parsing, implicit inferences, etc.) before the language
processing system arrives at what psycholinguists call a situation model, that
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is, a mental representation of what the text refers to or is about. Once again,
each processing layer executes choices, however implicit and unavailable for
conscious inspection. The construction-integration process operates within
each layer. Processing, although it passes through the successive layers in
sequence, is not bottom-up. On the contrary, each layer provides a context for
the previous layer and influences the processing at those layers via downward
feedback links. The sentence, they are washing pans is parsed differently in the
context of gold digging (a type of pan) and in the context of a field hospital (a
type of activity).