1 C. M. Mooney (1957), ‘Age in the development of closure ability in children’, Canadian Journal of Psychology, 11(4): 219–26.
2 Mooney, ‘Age in the development of closure ability in children’, 219.
3 It is possible that such memory storage is not completely immutable. In my experience, though, one moment of ‘insight’ into an image does appear to be enough to last a lifetime.
4 G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
5 Almost certainly, this is something of an over-simplification. If there are some people who are good at finding answers we all agree with, then we may trust them to define the answers for more tricky problems, which leave most of us flummoxed. This is how things work in lots of areas, of course – we trust mathematicians or literary critics more than ourselves to work out what is a really exciting mathematical breakthrough or a landmark novel. And perhaps we trust these ‘experts’ (if at all) because they can demonstrate their competence at things we do all know something about. So maybe we should give more weight to judgements of the ‘right answer’ by people who do well in IQ tests.
6 The spectacular successes of contemporary artificial intelligence work by incredibly memory-intensive methods has been made possible by major advances in both computer algorithms and an exponential growth in computer memory, computer power and the availability of massive quantities of data. These successes will, I believe, change our lives fundamentally, but they will do so by assisting and enhancing the human mind, rather than replacing it. It is telling, I suspect, that in large areas of mathematics the computer is a powerful and sometimes essential tool, but almost no interesting mathematical results have been discovered automatically; and, indeed, most mathematics is still done, more or less, with a pen and paper. The elasticity of the human imagination has, as yet, no computational parallel.
7 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By; D. R. Hofstadter, Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1995).