Peter Pan & Superman...

Oh, how I wish I was clever enough to have crafted that headline,
Maybe next year.

What I would like to do is invite all of you to check out The Monday Morning Memo by Roy Williams. This week's is especially valuable when it comes to Associative Thinking and "6-degrees of separation".

I'm going to take the liberty, as a graduate of the Wizard Academy, to post Roy's missive here... but please visit his site, read the complete memo (it's short... maybe 2-3 minutes to read at a conversational speed).

The focus on pattern Recognition is worth it to clarifying your creative process.

Pattern recognition is an important function of the right hemisphere of your brain.
Grouping is a form of pattern recognition.

The Atomists of the late 1800's believed the nature of things to be absolute and not dependent on context. Gestalt theorists disagreed. They believed the human mind instinctively creates wholes out of incomplete elements and that the nature of a thing is greatly altered by its context.

You've likely never heard of the Atomists. This is because they were wrong.
The Gestalt Theorists, however, were right. They said that humanity's instinctive grouping of characteristics causes us to interpret things in predictable ways.

The laws of organization that determine grouping are:
  (1) proximity – items will be grouped according to their nearness
  (2) similarity – items similar in some respect will be grouped together
  (3) closure – items will be grouped to complete a larger entity
  (4) simplicity – items will be organized into simple figures according to symmetry,   
        regularity, and smoothness.

Understand these laws of organization* and you will:
  (A.) enlarge your power to transfer perception, communicate.
  (B.) accelerate your ability to solve problems.

Now, I won't go into a pitch here. But you can see how lateral and associative thinking aligns with this applied theory.

More on associative thinking later this week.

To your creative success!
Mark Alan Effinger