Metaphors & Creativity

Ignacio Gonzalez-Martinez has a flash of inspiration about the role metaphors play in creative thought.

- Ignacio Gonzalez-Martinez

The equivalence between Richard Feynman’s and Julian Schwinger’s distinct formulations of quantum electrodynamics was by no means obvious. The two physicists themselves saw their methods as competing instead of being complementary. However, after becoming familiar with both approaches, Freeman Dyson had a ‘flash of illumination’ about how to reconcile them, while travelling home in a Greyhound bus. Thus it came to pass that Dyson secured yet another place for himself in the history of physics. And in his book The Emperor’s New Mind (1989), Roger Penrose recounts Henri Poincaré’s narrative of the moment when his search for ‘Fuchsian functions’ came to completion while in the middle of a geological expedition. It turned out, exclaimed Poincaré, that “the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry.” The answer was ‘staring at him in the face all along’, as they say.

Such ‘flash of inspiration’ narratives, in which a coveted creative breakthrough almost violently irrupts into the mind of an ecstatic subject, surely are the archetypal depiction of creativity. This archetype suggests, not particularly subtly, that creative insight is a phenomenon that happens to the subject, not something the subject deliberately produces. Framed in this way, the mystery surrounding creativity becomes, who or what plays the active role in it?

Hypotheses about what lies at the onset of creativity abound. Sometimes people report that ideas ‘come down’ to them, even when they’re not conscious. An example of this is the story told by the German physicist August Kekulé, who claimed to have envisioned the hexagonal structure of the benzene molecule while he was sleeping. In his dream, dancing atoms formed a closed string that subsequently transmuted into a snake eating its own tail.