Where Does Creativity Come From?
While I'm pontificating on the subject of creativity, I might as well explain how one goes about being creative. Some people confuse creativity with intellectual anarchy; they figure that, in the world of creative thought, one idea is just as good as another. Not so; creativity is serious business and you don't attain high levels of creativity by random daydreaming.
Our minds are associative; new ideas are generated by combining old ideas in novel ways. This combinatorial process is not a simple additive one; you don't jam two ideas together any old way to create a new idea. Instead, they go together in pattern fashion. Consider this highly schematic representation of the concepts in your head (see Figure 7.1 ...
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