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Creativity may be usefully defin ed as the capacity to generate novel solutions to problems, which includes of course the ability to see the world in problem-solving terms in th e first place . Clearly, this creative capacity is the defining characteristic of our specie s, an extremely young branch of the primate order, which has managed to arise and then spread over the entire planet in the course of onl y 3000 or so generations, a mere blink of evolutionary time. This capacity, in turn , rests in some way on our biological hi story: specifically, th e remarkably rapid expansion of brain tissue in our ancestral line, in which th e neo cortex together with its infoldings has multiplied some fourfold in sur face ar ea in the brief evolutionary window of only a couple of million yea rs (Calvin, 2002) . Plainly, a pace this rapid points to a strong positive feedback loop between adaptation and evolutionary pressure, one in which each new degree of development opens up new environmental territory, which then exe rts strong selective pressure for expansion of that new capacity, in the recursive way of evolution. It is this expansion, together with accompanying reorganization, that has both permitted and been driven by the growth and elaboration of imaginal power and the nesting of active and long-term memory, which ar e key to our ability to experiment - i.e ., to create and try out these novel solutions flexibly, both "in our heads " and in the "re al world" . To achieve all this, we ar e evolutionarily" hard-wired " (to use the current cybernetic metaphor) to live by and through a more or less continuous problem-solving process, generating novelty by engaging in an ongoing recursiv e sequence of near-constant scanning of our world (both "inner" and "outer" ), registering contrasts and differences , elaborating an organized picture or map as we go (the "b est available gestalt"), relating that map to an emotional valence, running "scenarios " in our head on th e basis of those scans and that valence, estim ating outcome probabilities, and using the integrated whole of this process as a ground for experim e nt and action, and all the rest of that flexible, recombinant organization of perception that we know as ex perien ce (see Wh eeler, 2000) . This is our ongoing human-process strategy for surviving, me eting challenges, and se eking to grow, given our M. S. Lobb et al., Creative License © Springer-Verlag Wien 2003

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biological nature as low-instinct, high-learning animals, who aren't good at much of anything except this creative problem-solving ability itself. With it , we have managed to outperform and outlast rival hominid and other species across the entire variable range of planetary (and now some extra-planetary) environments. At the same time , this recursive sequence also amounts to a description of our inborn gestalt-process nature, the basic data and subject matter of our Gestalt model of understanding and intervention for change. Thus creativity, seen in this way, is no more than our gestal