Prerational thinking

we usually conceive thinking as a controlled and rational process. however, it seems that important elements of thinking happen outside our familiar sphere of direct conscious control and explicit logical thought: the formation of associations, the springing up of ideas, the 'smelling' of a solution that directs further conscious search. this talk focuses on some of these 'prerational' elements of thinking and discusses conceptual approaches to model them, with an eye towards implementing aspects of prerational thinking in computers or robots in order to create a basis for machine intelligence beyond the mere linking of rules of logic.