It seems to me that this web-like structure and creative potential may be what differentiates the human mind from that of other animals, and gives us the capacity for complex culture. I have been working on a theory of how the cognitive transition underlying the origin of culture could have taken place, inspired by Kauffman's autocatalytic theory of the origin of life. The basic idea is that a genetic mutation causes the storage and retrieval of memories to be more highly distributed, which prompts the formation of abstractions . As the density of abstractions increases, the density of associations, or retrieval pathways, amongst them increases even faster. Eventually the memories and abstractions self-organize into an internal model of reality, or worldview, wherein there exists a potential pathway of associative recall from any one memory or concept to any other.
Social interaction plays a vital role.
The beer can theory of creativity . Creative Evolutionary Systems . A tentative scenario for the origin of culture . See also commentary on this article. To top of this page 3.