Liane Gabora's Homepage

$Cover of Dawn of the Creative Mind$

Coming Soon

My new book, Dawn of the Creative Mind: The Origin and Evolution of Culture and Innovation, will be published by Cambridge University Press in January 2027.

Read about the book | Preorder on Amazon

Is there someone creative on your Christmas list?

When I found out the book won’t come out in time for the holidays I thought up the following creative workaround: If you’d like to give it to someone for Christmas fill this out, and I’ll send you a holiday card with a signed, handwritten note from me, along with a full-colour brochure featuring the book cover, description, and endorsements.

You have something to give them at Christmas, with the book itself to look forward to in January!

Request a Christmas card / brochure packet →

Bio

Hi, I'm an interdisciplinary cognitive scientist at the University of British Columbia. My research focuses on how culture evolves, how the creative process works (with an emphasis on concept combination and cross-domain thinking), and how it fuels the evolution of culture, as well as more generally, the different ways in which evolutionary processes could—and do—work. I have over 200 scholarly publications in diverse journals that span psychology (e.g., Psychonomic Bulletin & Review), cognitive science (e.g., Cognitive Science), biology (e.g., Journal of Theoretical Biology), computer science (e.g., Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence), physics (e.g., Foundations of Physics), mathematics (e.g., Journal of Mathematical Psychology), anthroplogy (e.g., Current Anthropology), archaeology (e.g., World Archaeology), and interdisciplinary research (e.g., Journal of the Royal Society Interface), as well as literary journals (e.g., Fiction). I've given lectures and podcasts worldwide, and my Mindbloggling blog for Psychology Today has over 750,000 views. I am a published fiction writer, and occasionally compose music. As mentioned above, my nonfiction book titled Dawn of the Creative Mind: The Origin and Evolution of Culture and Innovation is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in January 2027, and I just completed a work of fiction titled Quilandria: A Novel about Minds, Ideas, and Other Worlds.

I'm better at generating ideas than fleshing out the finer details. (Interestingly, computational modelling results obtained by myself and former Honours student Simon Tseng appear to suggest that society functions best with a balance of both those who generate, and those who refine and perpetuate :). I can lay claim to a few “firsts” (if you know of evidence that any of these findings were established earlier, please let me know): My PhD thesis was the first publication to introduce a quantum formalism for modelling the contextual nature of concept interactions, and I am the first author (with her Ph.D. supervisor, Diederik Aerts) of the first paper on this topic. I was the first to develop a computational model of cumulative cultural evolution, to develop an autocatalytic framework to explain the integrated nature of human cognition, and to explain creative insight at the level of neural cell assemblies. And to my knowledge, my 2002 paper in Journal of Consciousness Studies was the first to propose that consciousness entails the integration / amplification of information. Over the last two decades, further developments of these ideas, both theoretical and empirical, has led to the Self-Other Reorganization (SOR) theory of cultural evolution, and a theory of creativity—honing theory—that synthesizes research on complex systems, associative memory, and formal models of concept combination. I'm immensely grateful to those whose work has inspired me, and it makes my day whenever I learn that my work has, in turn, inspired someone else out there (that is, if I manage to become myself it's not a chatbot at some online scam hub in the Phillipines).

Research

The overarching goal of my research has been to develop a coherent theory of the process by which culture evolves. I aim to bring forward a theoretical framework for cultural evolution that is as sound as our theoretical framework for biological evolution, and apply it to the tasks of reconstructing our past, exploring possible futures, and furthering human wellbeing. A major component of this interdisciplinary enterprise involves explicating the mechanisms underlying creativity and how the complexity and creativity of the human mind came about. The methods used by my students and I to gain insight into cultural evolution and the creative process include mathematical and computational modelling, as well as human experiments.

The undergraduate experiences that I am most grateful for are a course on the psychology of creativity, a professor's suggestion that I read Flatland, The Tao of Physics, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and another professor's acceptance of my proposal that I develop a computer model of the rabbit circulatory system in place of the mandatory dissection. Back in the 80s it would have been so easy for him to dismiss this request as looney or squeamish but he took it seriously, and gave me an A, and this changed the course of my life. Finally, the influence of my Ph.D. supervisor, Diederik Aerts, permeates almost everything of a remotely academic nature that I have ever done.

Here is something cool. This website shows the 'intellectual genealogy' of each person who has earned a PhD in mathematics or a related discipline, showing who their doctoral advisor was, and his/her doctoral advisor, and so forth. My intellectual lineage includes Bohr, de Broglie, Poincare, Poisson, Euler, Newton, and Galileo! (Some of these people had two co-advisors so there are multiple branches.)

Representative Publications

Journal Articles

Rakshit, A. & Gabora, L. (2025). An AI-powered interactive platform for visualizing psychological states and processes. Leonardo, 58(6), 1-18. Online ISSN: 1530-9282; Print ISSN: 0024-094X; https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02671

Gabora, L. & Steel, M. (2020). A model of the transition to behavioral and cognitive modernity using reflexively autocatalytic networks. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 1720200545. http://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2020.0545 [https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.10.185512v1]

Gabora, L. & Steel, M. (2020). Modeling a cognitive transition at the origin of cultural evolution using autocatalytic networks. Cognitive Science, 44(9). [http://arxiv.org/abs/2007.06442]

Voorhees, B., Read, D., & Gabora, L. (2020). Identity, kinship, and the evolution of cooperation. Current Anthropology, 61(2), 194-218. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.06530]

Scotney, V., Schwartz, J., Carbert, C., Saab, A., & Gabora, L. (2020). The form of a 'half-baked' creative idea: Empirical explorations into the structure of ill-defined mental representations. Acta Psychologica, 202, 102983. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2019.102981 [http://arxiv.org/abs/1911.12549]

Gabora, L., & Tseng, S. (2017). The social benefits of balancing creativity and imitation: Evidence from an agent-based model. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 11(4), 457-473.

Gabora, L. (2017). Honing theory: A complex systems framework for creativity. Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences, 21(1), 35-88. [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.02484v1.pdf]

Book Chapters

Gabora, L. (2024). How does culture evolve? Chapter 1 in: M. Gelfand, C. Chiu & Y. Hong (Eds.) 10th Volume of the Annual Series on Advances in Culture and Psychology (pp. 1-52). New York: Oxford University Press. . [https://psyarxiv.com/kga47]

Gabora, L. & Ganesh, K. (2020). Exaptative thinking as what makes us human. In: C. La Porta & S. Zapperi (Eds.) Understanding innovation through exaptation, (pp. 183-192). Basingstoke, UK: Springer-Nature (Frontiers Collection) [https://psyarxiv.com/jd9mc/].

Gabora, L. (2019). The making of a creative worldview. In Nalbantian, S. & Matthews, P. (Eds.) Secrets of creativity (pp. 220-236). Oxford UK: Oxford University Press. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.11236]

Gabora, L. (2018). The neural basis and evolution of divergent and convergent thought. In O. Vartanian & R. Jung (Eds.) The Cambridge Handbook of the Neuroscience of Creativity (pp. 58-70). Cambridge MA: Cambridge University Press. [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.03609.pdf]

Gabora, L. (2016). The creative process at work in musical composition. In Hans-Joachim Braun (Ed.) Creativity: Technology and music (pp. 131-141). Frankfurt / New York: Peter Lang. [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.02471v1.pdf]

Papers in Conference Proceedings

Gabora, L. (2019). Reframing convergent and divergent thought for the 21st Century. In A. Goel, C. Seifert, & C. Freska (Eds.) Proceedings of the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, (pp. 1794-1800). Austin TX: Cognitive Science Society. (Held July 24-27, Montreal.) [http://arxiv.org/abs/1811.04512]

DiPaola, S., & Gabora, L. & McCaig, G. (2018). Informing artificial intelligence generative techniques using cognitive theories of human creativity. Procedia Computer Science, vol. 145 (pp. 158-168). DOI: 10.1016/j.procs.2018.11.024 (Presented at the Annual International Conference on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures, held August 22-24, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic.)

Bell, S. & Gabora, L. (2016). A music-generating system based on network theory. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computational Creativity. Palo Alto: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Press.

General Areas	Specific Questions
Evolution of human cognition Creativity Comparative study of evolutionary processes: biological and cultural	Under what conditions can something evolve? In what sense does culture evolve? How did the human mind become capable of evolving culture? How did it become so creative? How does the creative process work?