“To negotiate an unpredictable world successfully, a brain must be 
permissive – free to make entirely new, and unbound, associations. 
Ultimately, those new associations have to be woven into a coherent 
whole, something that some brains fail to do. The brains of 
schizophrenics, for example, are essentially super-permissive, allowing 
the various mental representations of the world to run riot without them 
ever being bound together properly. Highly creative people also seem to 
have more permissive brains than the more ordinary among us. Could there 
be a common cause? If schizophrenia is a ‘wild brain’ that has slipped 
the bounds of the modulatory systems that impose homeostasis – and 
coherence of mental representation – on it, perhaps highly creative 
brains, if not wild, are nevertheless somewhat feral, more easily 
slipping the modulatory bonds that keep the rest of us solidly leashed 
to reality.”

J Scott Turner, The Tinkerer’s Accomplice: How Design Emerges From Life 
Itself, 2007, p 202

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