Scientists have recently found special neurons in the brainstem of rats which focus exclusively on new, novel sounds and help them ignore predictable and ongoing noises. These novelty detector neurons, as researchers call them, quickly stop firing if a sound or sound pattern is repeated. They will briefly resume firing if some aspect of the sound changes. The implications are, as usual, that we humans may be like rats.

Namely that we may have an embedded neurophysical heuristic that propels our attention towards novelty. According to the researchers, this helps us cope—

“It is probably a good thing to have this ability because it allows us to tune out background noises like the humming of a car’s motor while we are driving or the regular tick-tock of a clock,” said study team member Ellen Covey, a psychology professor at the University of Washington. “But at the same time, these neurons would instantly draw a person’s attention if their car’s motor suddenly made a strange noise or if their cell phone rang.”

And the idea of novelty neurons that are tightly embeded into humans to novelty has further, more poetic resonance beyond survival and the isolation of meaningful signals. According to Terence Mckenna and his Timewave theory, novelty is an embeded characteristic of time. Or rather it is the attractor which fuels the progression of time towards a future apocalyptic point which he dubs the End of History.

Mckenna credits Alfred North Whitehead with the creative underpinnings of this theory, often citing this quote from Whitehead’s Process and Reality (p. 26)—

Creativity is the principle of novelty. Creativity introduces novelty into the content of the many, which are the universe disjunctively. The creative advance is the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which it originates. The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the ‘many’ which it finds and also it is one among the disjunctive ’ many’ which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesises. The many become one, and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are disjunctively ‘many’ in process of passage into conjunctive unity… Thus the ‘production of novel togetherness’ is the ultimate notion embodied in the term concrescence. These ultimate notions of ‘production of novelty’ and ‘concrete togetherness’ are inexplicable either in terms of higher universals or in terms of the components participating in the concrescence. The analysis of the components abstracts from the concrescence. The sole appeal is to intuition.