© Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining 2014 DOI 10.1179/0308018813Z.00000000068 Published by Maney on behalf of the Institute INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, Vol. 39 No. 1, March 2014, 62–72 Creativity in 3D: Poets and Scientists Converge on Writerly Invention Jason Wirtz Curriculum and Teaching, Hunter College, New York, USA Data from interviews with accomplished poets is used alongside findings from neuroscience, to examine three aspects of writerly invention: automa- ticity, emotional knowledge, and the social dimension. Writerly invention references the creative process writers use to originate ideas via writing. It is shown that a three-dimensional view of writerly invention becomes tenable when scientific findings are viewed in a consilient manner with the introspections of poets. In addition, a call is made for the sciences to help elucidate a mind-state found to be germane to writerly invention — the receptive stance. keywords creativity, rhetoric, poetry, neuroscience, automaticity, receptivity The neuroscientist Bruce Bridgeman suffers a condition known as stereo- blindness. For Bridgeman, the world is remarkably flat. When wed go out and people would look up and start discussing some bird in the tree, I would still be looking for the bird when they were finished, he says. For everybody else, the bird jumped out. But to me, it was just part of the background (Peck, 2012). Stereo-blindness is a condition resulting from each eye acting independently rather than binding the two slightly alternative perspectives into a single image  a process which enables depth perception. The binding of independent sensory data to form holistic experience  often referred to as parallel processing  is a fundamental operation of the brain. Keeping with the example of vision, we know of separate neuronal pathways not only for depth perception but colour, motion, and form  each of which bind together to provide us with what we experience as a unitary faculty of the mind: vision. Our brains have evolved to facilitate these connections between many elements. In the words of Nobel laureate Eric Kandel: Thus, what makes the brain a remarkable information processing machine is not the complexity of its neurons, but rather its many elements and, in particular, the complexity of connections between them (Kandel et al. 2000, 34). Drawing from this parallel processing model of the brain, my argument in this article