Daily Inspiration Quote by Jeff Hawkins

Calling prediction “by analogy” and then quietly renaming it “creativity” is a neat piece of conceptual judo. Jeff Hawkins isn’t praising imagination as a mystical spark; he’s demoting it to an everyday cognitive reflex. The line’s force comes from its reframing: what we celebrate as original thought is, in his view, the brain doing what it always does - compressing experience into patterns, then projecting those patterns onto new situations. Creativity stops being an elite talent and starts looking like a default setting.

That final clause, “so pervasive we normally don’t notice it,” is the tell. Hawkins is pointing at a blind spot created by fluency. When a mental move happens fast enough, it feels like perception instead of inference. We don’t experience ourselves as constantly guessing; we experience ourselves as “seeing” and “knowing.” The subtext is mildly deflationary: your mind is not a camera and your best ideas aren’t lightning bolts. They’re high-quality predictions stitched from prior data.

Context matters here. Hawkins, as an inventor and AI thinker, has spent years arguing that intelligence is fundamentally predictive, not merely reactive - a view tied to his “memory-prediction” framework. So the quote also works as a quiet manifesto for machine intelligence: if creativity is structured analogy-making, then it’s not off-limits to computation. The line challenges a comforting human exceptionalism while offering a more intimate takeaway: if you want to be more “creative,” you don’t wait for inspiration; you feed your pattern library, then practice recombining it.