This is the second of a series of essays on the subject of higher knowledge and its relationship to creativity and imagination. See here for a listing of all entries in this series.

The division between ordinary knowledge and higher knowledge has been a fundamental aspect of human nature for longer than we can easily reckon. However, there are hints that it was not present in our more archaic cousins, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, or even among the earliest members of our own species.

One possibility is that it may have arisen roughly 100,000 years ago, when a final shift in brain architecture gave rise to modern Homo sapiens. This was followed by the appearance of what is sometimes described as behavioral modernity and, more surprisingly, by the extinction of all other members of what had formerly  been a highly diverse human lineage.

Prior to those events, we and the other members of that lineage had acquired an abundance of practical skills and knowledge that enabled us to thrive in a dangerous world. And yet, none of us had seemingly felt any impulse to innovate or alter our way of life over hundreds of thousands of years.

But then something happened which set us fully modern humans alone on a different course.

Recent studies suggest this special gift may have been a unique pattern of brain organization that allows us to instantaneously form novel connections among previously separate areas of knowledge.

That flexibility, which is sometimes described as neuroplasticity, has the effect of integrating scattered bits of information into new meaningful wholes. It is typically experienced in the form of intuitive flashes that either show us things we already knew in an entirely new light or place our thorniest problems in a larger context where solutions become apparent.

An ability to adapt without hesitation to unexpected challenges would have provided our direct ancestors with a significant evolutionary advantage over our nearest relatives. It could explain why we flourished when not only the Neanderthals and Denisovans, but even the various forms of archaic Homo sapiens, went extinct around 40,000 years ago.

However, the change also affected us in another way that is far more mysterious.

Our sudden flashes of mental reorganization are not smooth or linear. They are characterized instead by an abrupt descent of consciousness into chaos, followed by a recognition of an altered point of stability. And during that radical transition, any number of strange things can unfold.

We might return to conscious awareness with nothing more than a realization that we have been gifted the answer to a previously stubborn dilemma. But we might also find ourselves haunted by images of things that never were and never could be. We might even be left with an unshakeable conviction that we have spent an eternity in an unbounded realm where the categories of everyday life break down in the face of the absolutely unknowable.

All these reactions are related. The accounts of artists and inventors make it clear that the practical, the imaginative, and the mystical are inseparable in any creative act. But not even the creators themselves can say whether these perceptions are objectively real or if they are simply illusions we weave to fill in the blank spots that arise as we pass through a state of complete mental disorder.

Every era has witnessed passionate arguments on both sides of this question. Each era harbors passionate believers in the reality of higher realms alongside confirmed skeptics. But those arguments have never been resolved. Any attempt to identify the ultimate source of higher knowledge inevitably fails and is succeeded by another inadequate model. And the only certainty that remains is that of our own ignorance.

In the end, the best explanation may lie in the old gag line, “You can’t get there from here.” Higher knowledge has the ability to transport us across unknown dimensions of being to places we could never have reached if we had stuck to our maps. And whether these hidden roads exist outside us or only in our minds may be a difference that in the end is not a difference at all.