bisociation

Some researchers have used bisociation in order to create an auspicious synergy of benign synergies.

Bisociation: This is a technical term coined by Arthur Koestler.

At the end of the bisociation process, once the junctional nexus has been created, there is a conceptual invention or discovery as the case may be.

The process of bisociation is the simultaneous connection of two association complexes which are suggested to be habitually incompatible.

Koestler argues that the diverse forms of human creativity all correspond to variations of his model of bisociation.

The following, which is adapted from Koestler, and is found at 253-254 of his text, illustrates the principles of bisociation:

Koestler's fundamental idea is that any creative act is a bisociation (not mere association) of two (or more) apparently incompatible frames of thought.

The process of bisociation, as it has been described by Arthur Koestler in his book "Insight and Outlook:

The concept of bisociation has been adopted, generalised and formalised by cognitive linguists Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, who developed it into conceptual blending theory.

He regards many different mental phenomena based on comparison (such as analogies, metaphors, parables, allegories, jokes, identification, role-playing, acting, personification, anthropomorphism etc.), as special cases of "bisociation".

The following provides an excellent illustration of bisociation in which the result is, in the realm of the individual chimpanzee whom is the subject of the observations, an invention:

The term was derived from use in musical writings and from Arthur Koestler's The Act of Creation, who defines creativity as the bisociation of two sets of ideas or matrices.

Nearly anything can be the object of this perspective twist; it is, however, in the areas of human creativity (science and art being the varieties) that the shift results from "structure mapping" (termed "bisociation" by Koestler) to create novel meanings.

Turner and Fauconnier cite Arthur Koestler's 1964 book The Act of Creation as an early forerunner of conceptual blending: Koestler had identified a common pattern in creative achievements in the arts, sciences and humor that he had termed "bisociation of matrices."