Ideas as chaotic thought mutations

In James Webb Young's classic 'A Technique for Producing Ideas' he recommends that we "turn a problem over to our unconscious mind and let it work while we sleep" and then "out of nowhere an idea will appear".

All very Delphic you might think. But of course we all know that it works. The question is how?

One established theory in cognitive science that might go some way to explaining how we come up with ideas was put forward by Skarda & Freeman. It has been their long standing claim that our brains are random and ruled by chaos:

"Chaos constitutes the basic form of collective neural activity for all perceptual processes and functions as a controlled source of noise, as a means to ensure continual access to previously learned sensory patterns, and as the means for learning new sensory patterns. Without such a mechanism the system cannot avoid reproducing previously learned activity patterns and can only converge to behavior it has already learned."

It is this chaos which perhaps helps us to invent, create and surprise. Applying the language of evolutionary biology, it might be appropriate to think of ideas as thought mutations which provide us with an evolutionary advantage.

"Chaos has a role to play that sets brains apart from all other information processing systems. Chaos is not just an inevitable consequence of a highly interconnected complex system, it is essential for the creation of information. The brain, unlike machine systems, is selective, i.e., it does not process whatever information is received at the receptor level."

The fact that creating new combinations becomes easier when we are not consciously thinking about a problem is no great surprise if you believe that the selection of of the information that we attend to is random if we are not explicitly directing it.