What is an idea? Where does it come from? Is it a sudden apparition or the result of long preparation?
Since forever, humankind has wondered about the instant in which intuition takes place, generating research, debate, and new questions. Intertwining philosophy and neuroscience, and psychology and biology, Edoardo Boncinelli retraces the footsteps of those who investigated the enigma of creativity.
It was Socrates who first reflected on the content of words, defining the notion of ‘concept’; Plato placed ideas at the centre of thought, putting their existence before knowledge; the empiricists, on the other hand, established the primacy of experience. In every age, human beings have sought to fathom the genesis of the products of their brains, from mental images to memory. Even today, when faced with figures such as Leonardo da Vinci, Leopardi, or Einstein, we cannot help but wonder where great ideas come from, how we can distinguish valid ones from useless ones, what link exists between intelligence and creativity, and whether genius really does sometimes border on madness.
Through descriptions of how neurons and the nervous system work, analyses of cognitive tests, contributions from genetics, and theories on artificial intelligence, Boncinelli guides us through the many hypotheses that have attempted to solve the “problem of all problems”: the inaccessibility of our minds.