One explanation for how creativity works is by a process called associative thinking. By linking ideas and information together in unique ways, people are able to come up with something new. This happens spontaneously (what’s the first word that pops into your head) and also in a directed way (what’s the connection between these two clues).
See also:
- Tools for networked thought attempt to model this directly
- Consciousness is categories and we think in categories and connections
- Human intelligence is a special case of artificial intelligence
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Creative People Are More Associative in Their Thinking
From a recent survey paper about associative thinking, the authors found that more creative people generate a broader set of associations compared to less creative people and tend to perceive distant associations as closer together. Researchers tested this using word associations games and measuring the vectorized distance which approximates the semantic distance between words.