Mednick, S. (1962). The associative basis of the creative process. Psychological Review, 69(3), 220–232. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0048850
Mednick - 1962 - The associative basis of the creative process..pdf.
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Imported: 2024-03-25 9:58 am
Poincare, who talks about an evening when “ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked so to speak, making a stable combination. By next morning I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions.”
“to create consists of making new combinations of associative elements
which are useful. The mathematical facts worthy of being studied … are those which reveal to us unsuspected kinships between other facts well known but wrongly believed to be strangers to one another. Among chosen combinations the most fertile will often be those formed of elements drawn from domains which are far apart.”
define the creative thinking process as the forming of associative elements into new combinations which either meet specified requirements or are in some way useful.
The more mutually remote the elements of the new combination, the more creative the process or solution.
This is an interesting definition of creativity, as it comes from a measure of cognitive processes, not output.
Seems like creativity might be that which does not come from the adjacent possible (in the top-down sense).
Thus when we talk of evolution, it is not so creative, as it physically delves into nearby associations. This gets a bit shaky…
Imported: 2024-04-05 11:55 am
The requisite associative elements may be evoked contiguously by the contiguous environmental appearance (usually an accidental contiguity) of stimuli which elicit these associative elements.
Coming across things will bring things to mind and keep them there for a while, but after a while something new will come up and the two may collide “serindipetously.”
One physicist has described how he has reduced serendipity to a method by placing in a fishbowl large numbers of slips of paper, each inscribed with a physical fact. He regularly devotes some time to randomly drawing pairs of thes
This is pretty much exactly what a good PKM system does, but instead of having a significant chunk if the connections be like “cheese” and “red,” the insights are more directed and intelligent in the scope that they could be capable.
222 SARNOFF A. MEDNICK facts from the fishbowl, looking for new and useful combinations.
The requisite associative elements may be evoked in contiguity as a result of the similarity of the associative elements or the similarity of the stimuli eliciting these associative elements.
A better word for this may be analogy, where we find links between things and ask “what would this other thing that is not yet connected map onto.”
This makes me wonder what the role of isomorphisms are in not just understanding and creating meaning but also creating ideas outright.
The requisite associative elements may be evoked in contiguity through the mediation of common elements.
This is like the triangulation principle; find two notes to find a third one that is the mediating one, or, in the writing of a note, the links combine and can be viewed as a graph. Finding the points that are closer together, mediated by more notes, may have potential of creative insight.
Need for Associative Elements
Taking notes on all sorts of things, keeping them in the knowledge system, allows them to be the fodder for greater ideas.
Keep what is interesting, for we can’t yet connect all the dots.
It would be predicted from Figure 1 that the high creative subject (flat hierarchy) would respond relatively slowly and steadily and emit many responses while the low creative subject (steep hierarchy) would respond at a higher rate but emit fewer responses.