Mental Wormholes and the Inner Workings of Creative Thought

TL;DR

This paper explores how creative minds form 'mental wormholes' connecting diverse concepts across domains, influencing creative processes and informing computational models of creativity.

Contribution

It introduces the hypothesis of mental wormholes as a mechanism for cross-domain connections in creative thought and discusses modeling approaches for these interactions.

Findings

Mental wormholes connect disparate concepts in creative thinking.

Non-compositional interactions occur within these mental wormholes.

Techniques are being developed to model and understand these interactions.

Abstract

Most creative outputs are readily classified as belonging to a particular domain such as art, music, or technology. But does that mean the creative thinking that goes into creative projects respects these conventional domain boundaries? This question provides the departure point for this chapter. It is an important question because the answer has implications for how the creative process works, as well as for computational models of creativity, and thus it provides the departure point for this chapter. Next we look at how the creator sifts out from its vast contents those items to incorporate into a creative project, and converts these raw materials into a form that "gels" with the project. We then explore the hypothesis that the creative mind forges "mental wormholes" that connect concepts and percepts, often from seemingly disparate domains. Finally, we take a brief look at the strangely non-compositional interactions that take place in these mental wormholes, and techniques being advanced to model and understand these interactions.