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many people to learn that idea creativity is a logical process, because they believe that logic can never achieve creativity. Creativity is indeed logical, but it is a very different sort of logic.
    Logic defines the rules of behaviour within a certain universe. With our normal logic, the universe is one of language or discrete elements: language refers to separate

things like box, cloud, smile, etc. These are discrete or separated elements. With creativity, the universe is that of a self-organising patterning system that makes asymmetric patterns. Logic defines the rules of behaviour within this rather special universe.
    Patterns
    One morning a fellow gets up and realises he has 11 items of clothing to put on. In how many ways can he get dressed?
    He sets his computer to work through all the ways of getting dressed. The computer takes 40 hours to go through all the ways (this was tested some years ago; today's computers will be faster but the concept is the same). With 11 items of clothing, there are 39,916,800 ways of getting dressed.
    There are 11 choices for the first item, 10 choices for the next, and so on.
    If you were to spend just one minute concentrating on each way of getting dressed, you would need to live to the age of 76 years old – using every minute of your waking life trying ways of getting dressed.
    Life would be impractical and rather difficult if the brain worked that way. You would take forever to get up in the morning, cross the road, get to work, read and write.
    But the brain does not work that way. We exist because the brain is a self-organising information system that allows patterns to form from incoming information. That

is its excellence. All we then need to do is to recognise the routine 'getting dressed' pattern, switch into it and go through that normal routine. That is why you can drive to work in the morning, read, write, and all the other things you do in your day-to-day life.
    Imagine you have a piece of paper and you make marks with a pen on that surface. The surface records the marks accurately. Previous marks do not affect the way a new mark is received.
    Change the surface to a shallow dish of gelatin. You now put spoonfuls of hot water on to the gelatin. The hot water dissolves the gelatin. In time, channels are formed in the surface. In this case previous information strongly affects the way new information is received. The process is no different from rain falling on a landscape. Streams are formed and then rivers. New rain is channelled along the tracks formed by preceding rain. The gelatin and landscape have allowed the hot water and rain to organise themselves into channels or sequences.
    In my 1969 book The Mechanism of Mind I showed how the brain, unlike computers, is this second type of information-receiving surface. I showed how neural networks act like the gelatin or the landscape.
    What is a pattern?
    There is a pattern whenever the change from one state to the next one has a higher chance of happening in one direction than in any other. If you are standing on a path

in a garden, the chances of you proceeding another step down the path are much more likely than of you wandering off the path.
    How the brain forms patterns is described in my book The Mechanism of Mind.
    We can even represent a pattern by that path. At each moment we are more likely to take the next step in one direction than move down the path in any other direction. Under given circumstances a certain 'state' in the brain is more likely to be followed by one particular other state than by any other.
    Asymmetry
    Patterning systems tend to beasymmetric, though.
    As above, we can represent a pattern by a path, since at every next step the highest probability is to move along the path rather than stop and consider every side track. Point A is at the beginning of the path towards point B; point C is at the end of a side track. All this means is that the route from A to C is not the same as the route from C to