Creativity and Surprise

This paper describes a computational model for creativity in which surprise plays a central role. There is no doubt that creative products, being unexpected and unpredictable products, cause surprise. In order to make those products surprising and supported by recent evidences from neuroscience, which say emotions are biasing devices in decision-making, we defend that decisions made during the creative process may be, consciously or unconsciously, to some extent, surprise-guided. Moreover, when evaluating a product in what concerns to its creativity, the degree of surprise that product causes is certainly one part of that evaluation. We illustrate with examples the role played by surprise both in the production of creative products and in the evaluation of already existing creative products.