Associative Theory Of Creativity

This research goes back to the 1960s, when psychologist Sarnoff Mednick was studying patterns of thought in people diagnosed with schizophrenia. He was exploring the idea that highly creative individuals might share certain associative patterns with those diagnosed with schizophrenia, namely, the tendency to make connections between seemingly unrelated ideas. In a classic 1962 experiment, Mednick asked participants to say the first word that came to mind when they heard a prompt like table. Less creative participants tended to respond with obvious associations like chair or leg. The more creative participants gave those answers, too, but they also came up with more surprising ones, like food or even mouse.

Mednick’s observations led him to propose that highly creative people have a different kind of memory structure—one that holds a wider range of ideas and forges more unexpected connections between them. He called his theory the associative theory of creativity. His research showed that creative ideas are more likely to emerge from combinations of concepts that are further apart in the mind’s conceptual network. The greater the distance between two ideas, the more original and surprising their combination tends to be. More recent research, by Kenett and others, confirms these observations.

Some of the best-known stories of invention come from unexpected associations. Velcro, for example, was invented when George de Mestral was walking his hairy sheepdog through a field of burr-covered plants. It’s notoriously difficult to remove burrs from an animal’s hair, which means the animal is going to carry seeds a far distance, allowing the plant to spread more successfully. De Mestral took out a magnifying glass and saw very tiny hooks that clung to the dog’s hair. Then he made the distant connection: The burr’s mechanism, designed by nature to spread seeds, could be used to make a clothing fastener. There’s no shortage of other surprising inventions that began with distant connections: Post-It notes, the X-ray, shatterproof glass, the microwave oven, silly putty, heart stents.

- More Here