timelets

Very often it is impossible to find any originator for an idea generated during discussion and critique. Its meaning changes repeatedly; it is adapted and be- comes common property. Accordingly it achieves a superindividual value, and becomes an axiom, a guideline for thinking.

--- Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and development of a scientific fact.

“...the Special Products Division next called in Foote, Cone & Belding, the advertising agency that had lately been signed up to handle the E-Car account. With characteristic Madison Avenue vigor, Foote, Cone & Belding organized a competition among the employees of its New York, London, and Chicago offices, offering nothing less than one of the brand-new cars as a prize to whoever thought up an acceptable name.

...Suspecting that the bosses of the Special Products Division might regard this list [18K names] as a trifle unwieldy, the agency got to work and cut it down to six thousand names, which it presented to them in executive session. “There you are,” a Foote, Cone man said triumphantly, flopping a sheaf of papers on the table. “Six thousand names, all alphabetized and cross-referenced.”
A gasp escaped Krafve. “But we don’t want six thousand names,” he said. “We only want one.”
( Read more... )

--- John Brooks. “Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street.” Apple Books.

In the same way the very seeing of another vista, the very wishing to see another vista, is no little training and preparation of the intellect for its eternal "Objectivity"—objectivity being understood not as "contemplation without interest" (for that is inconceivable and non-sensical), but as the ability to have the pros and cons in one's power and to switch them on and off, so as to get to know how to utilise, for the advancement of knowledge, the difference in the perspective and in the emotional[Pg 153] interpretations.

--- F. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals. Third Essay, 12.

“By the word synthesis, in its most general signification, I understand the process of joining different representations to each other and of comprehending their diversity in one cognition. This synthesis is pure when the diversity is not given empirically but a priori (as that in space and time).”

“Synthesis, generally speaking, is, as we shall afterwards see, the mere operation of the imagination — a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no cognition whatever, but of the working of which we are seldom even conscious. ”

--- Immanuel Kant. “The Critique of Pure Reason.”

The Arcadian god Pan is the best known Classical example of this dangerous presence dwelling just beyond the protected zone of the village boundary.

The emotion that he instilled in human beings who by accident adventured into his domain was "panic" fear, a sudden, groundless fright. Any trifling cause then—the break of a twig, the flutter of a leaf—would flood the mind with imagined danger, and in the frantic effort to escape from his own aroused unconscious the victim expired in a flight of dread.

--- quoted from The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

“the words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be 'voluntarily' reproduced and combined.”

- Albert Einstein, quoted from Herbert A. Simon. Models of my life. p 375.

Simon defined problem isomorphs as problems whose solutions and moves can be placed in one-to-one relation with the solutions and moves of the given problem [17]. The key to isomorphism is that even when two representations contain the same information, they can still provide very different sets of operations for accessing and inferring about that information, which can make a given problem easier or harder to solve [13]

Dou, Wenwen, et al. "Comparing different levels of interaction constraints for deriving visual problem isomorphs." Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST), 2010 IEEE Symposium on. IEEE, 2010.

it's a general observation--that creativity often hinges on inventing new analogies. ... Now, what makes me come up with a new analogy? What allows me to do that? Generally, it's a lower-spectrum kind of thinking, a down-spectrum kind of thinking, in which I'm allowing my emotions to emerge. And, I'm allowing emotional similarity between two memories that are in other respects completely different.
...
Emotion is a tremendously powerful summarizer, abstractor. We can look at a complex scene involving loads of people rushing back and forth because it's Grand Central Station, and noisy announcements on [?] to understand, loudspeakers, and you're being hot and tired, and lots of advertisements, and colorful clothing, and a million other things; and smells, and sounds, and--we can take all that or any kind of complex scene or situation, the scene out your window, the scene on the TV (television) when you turn on the news, or a million other things. And take all those complexities and boil them down to a single emotion: it makes me feel some way.