Creativity, Within Reason: Semantic Distance and Dynamic State Creativity in Relational Thinking and Reasoning

Human reasoning and creativity represent perhaps the two highest evolutionary reaches of cognition. These two capacities are distinct from each other, but research on creativity in analogical reasoning has identified a point of convergence between them at one of the farthest forward and most recently evolved reaches of the brain. Analogy is a form of relational cognition because analogies form connections that relate otherwise separate concepts. Quantitative tools for measuring the semantic distance between concepts have advanced the measurement of creativity in relational cognition (more creative relational cognition forms connections across greater semantic distance). These tools are especially useful for the emerging neuroscience of creativity. I describe this semantic-distance approach and how it is being leveraged in my laboratory and elsewhere to investigate not only differences in creative ability between individuals but also creativity as a dynamic state that varies across time within an individual.