Looping

Knit fabric is made of many interconnected loops. The knitter holds as many loops as are needed to form the width of fabric on one of two needles and then works across each row, pulling a new loop into each loop on the first needle by manipulating the second needle. As each new loop is made, it is moved onto the second needle. Rudolf Steiner, who founded the Steiner Method of education (Waldorf Schools) called thinking "cosmic knitting" and he encouraged the teaching of knitting in his schools so that the children's hands and minds alike should be richly trained. He believed there was a connection. When the first Waldorf school started in Germany in 1919, we didn't know very much about the actual workings of our brains.

Here is a delightfully circular description of some things we knew about creativity and the mind by 1977. It is from his bibliography Chase, Chance and Creativity by James H. Austin.

   When you solve problems over the full range of situations in life, you likewise use a wide repertoire of association loops, varying from the commonplace to the esoteric, poised at various levels of consciousness,  and you connect them at some very implausible intersections. And when I speak of "loops" in the above context, the word is quite literally correct, for the links made by free associations connect nerve cells in the cortex of the frontal lobes up in front, for example, with those back in the occipital lobes, forward from there to the temporal lobes, up from there to the parietal lobes, down to subcortical nerve cells, over to the opposite cerebral hemisphere, back again--on and on in multiple swirling successions. Indeed to give birth to even the simplest thought, not one but multiple neuronal circuits will be involved even before the primitive idea starts to float up into the more conscious mind's eye or ear. Each circuit is unlikely to be a simple one, because each nerve cell may have up to 10,000 connections, and therefore, big clusters of stimulated cells will be drawn along and invest each association loop.