If You’re Seeing Things
“If you see things others don’t see, you could be mad. Or you just could have better eyesight.” —Hippokrites
My wife has suggested that a good definition of intelligence would be the ability to see relationships. I agree. It’s also a good definition of creativity, but then I don’t draw a big distinction between intelligence and creativity, for certainly creativity is a component of intelligence. Perhaps one could simply add one word to make this definition more specifically about creativity: intelligence is the ability to see new relationships.
Metaphor is the not-so-secret ingredient in creativity. And what is metaphor but the ability to find unsuspected and unusual relationships between apparently unrelated things? This is true of not just art, but science as well. Isn’t that what Einstein did when he realized that free falling in an elevator was the same as floating in orbit? And so gave us the General Theory Of Relativity.
