Every time we contemplate the leftovers in the refrigerator, trying to figure out what else needs to be fetched from the grocery store before fixing dinner, we?re exercising an aspect of intelligence not seen in even the smartest ape. The best chefs surprise us with interesting combinations of ingredients, things we would ordinarily never think ?went together.? Poets are particularly good at arranging words in ways that overwhelm us with intense meaning. Yet we?re all constructing brand-new utterances hundreds of times every day, recombining words and gestures to get across a novel message. Whenever you set out to speak a sentence that you?ve never spoken before, you have the same creativity problem as the chefs and poets ? furthermore, you do all your trial-and-error inside your brain, in the last second before speaking aloud. We?ve lately made a lot of progress in locating some aspects of semantics in the brain. Frequently we find verbs in the frontal lobe. Proper names, for some reason, seem to prefer the temporal lobe (its front end: color and tool concepts tend to be found toward the rear of the left temporal lobe)
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