The ethnographic and archaeological evidence indicates a cross-cultural association of dark zones of caves with supernatural phenomena. In various geographic locations and time periods, human beings have frequented dark zones for ritual purposes. Regarding the unsuitable living conditions of dark zones, the following question arises: what drives humans to choose such places for practicing rituals? The answer to this question lies in the way human beings interact with dark cave environments. In this paper, I suggest that experiencing sensory deprivation, in particular lack of vision in dark zones, precipitates the enhancement of abstract and magical thinking. To verify this hypothesis, I employed the methods of cognitive sciences—namely, experimental research. I conducted an experiment using eye-tracking glasses to record participants’ eye-movement trajectories in darkness. The results indicated that eye-movement patterns during darkness resemble those during activities involving abstract and divergent thinking. Consequently, darkness seems to provoke and facilitate creativity. I thus suggest that in addition to social and cultural incentives, darkness, as an environmental cue, sets the stage for human beings to associate dark zones of caves with supernatural powers and therefore choose to practice rituals in such locations.

Understanding creativity begins with investigating its appropriate unit of analysis: what elements constitute and can sufficiently explain creative cognition, without leaving out any essential aspect? Is creativity sufficiently explained by the study of the human brain alone? Or does it go beyond the boundaries of the skull, such that the investigation of the external representations—movement, body, environment, etc.—can also provide essential insights into the nature of creative cognition?This dissertation investigates the appropriate units of analysis of expert-level mathematical creativity as a canonical example of highly abstract creative cognition. To do so, it draws on mathematicians’ self-report accounts, empirical studies, and formal modeling. It provides both causal and correlational evidence of multiple mechanisms through which external representations contribute to creative cognition. It thus argues that even highly abstract creative breakthroughs benefit—and in some cases arise—from interactions across distributed components including the brain, the body, the environment, and their interactions. Thus, a comprehensive account of mathematical creativity, and creative cognition in general, must go beyond the boundaries of the human skull and embrace external representations as well.