this purple crayon, the drawing becomes real, although it’s still identifiable as a childish sketch. For instance, when Harold wants to go for a walk, he simply draws a path with his crayon. This fictive sketch then transforms into a real walkway, which Harold can stroll along. This magic crayon is seemingly the solution to every problem.
But here’s the twist that makes Harold and the Purple Crayon such an engaging book: it blends together two distinct concepts of the world. Although the magic crayon is clearly a fantastical invention — a conceit that could never exist — Harold still has to obey the rules of reality. So when Harold draws a mountain and then climbs it, he must try not to slip and fall down. When he does slip — gravity exists even in this crayon universe — Harold has to draw a balloon to save himself. In other words, the book is delicate blend of the familiar and the fictional; Harold has a surreal tool, but it operates amid the usual constraints. Mark Turner, a cognitive psychologist at Case Western Reserve University, has used this children’s book to demonstrate that even little kids can easily combine two completely distinct concepts into a single idea. If they couldn’t, then the travails of Harold would make no sense.
What does conceptual blending have to do with creativity? Although people take this mental skill for granted, the ability to make separate ideas coexist in the mind is a crucial creative tool. Insights, after all, come from the overlap between seemingly unrelated thoughts. They emerge when concepts are transposed, when the rules of one place are shifted to a new domain. The eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume, in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, described this talent as the essence of the imagination:
All this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience. When we think of a golden mountain, we only join two consistent ideas, gold, and mountain, with which we were formerly acquainted.
Hume was pointing out that the act of invention was really an act of recombination. The history of innovation is full of inventors engaged in “compounding” and “transposing.” Johannes Guten-berg transformed his knowledge of winepresses into an idea for a printing machine capable of mass-producing words. The Wright brothers used their knowledge of bicycle manufacturing to invent the airplane. (Their first flying craft was, in many respects, just a bicycle with wings.) George de Mestral came up with Velcro after noticing burrs clinging to the fur of his dog. And Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed the search algorithm behind Google by applying the ranking method used for academic articles to the sprawl of the World Wide Web; a hyperlink was like a citation. In each case, the radical concept was merely a new mixture of old ideas.
Dick Drew was a master at conceptual blending. After he invented masking tape, a colleague told him about a strange new material called cellophane. (By this time, Drew had become a full-time researcher.) The material was translucent and shiny but also strikingly impermeable to water and grease; it was being sold by DuPont as a packaging solution, a cheap way of wrapping products for shipping. Drew took one look at the material and had another idea, which he would later describe as the insight of his life: cellophane would make a perfect adhesive. He ordered a hundred yards of cellophane and began coating the material with glue.
Drew called it Scotch tape. By 1933, less than two years after the see-through adhesive hit the market, the product had become the most popular consumer tape in the world. Although masking tape and cellophane were completely unrelated — it had never occurred to DuPont researchers to make their wrapping material sticky — Drew saw their possible point of intersection.
This process has been
But here’s the twist that makes Harold and the Purple Crayon such an engaging book: it blends together two distinct concepts of the world. Although the magic crayon is clearly a fantastical invention — a conceit that could never exist — Harold still has to obey the rules of reality. So when Harold draws a mountain and then climbs it, he must try not to slip and fall down. When he does slip — gravity exists even in this crayon universe — Harold has to draw a balloon to save himself. In other words, the book is delicate blend of the familiar and the fictional; Harold has a surreal tool, but it operates amid the usual constraints. Mark Turner, a cognitive psychologist at Case Western Reserve University, has used this children’s book to demonstrate that even little kids can easily combine two completely distinct concepts into a single idea. If they couldn’t, then the travails of Harold would make no sense.
What does conceptual blending have to do with creativity? Although people take this mental skill for granted, the ability to make separate ideas coexist in the mind is a crucial creative tool. Insights, after all, come from the overlap between seemingly unrelated thoughts. They emerge when concepts are transposed, when the rules of one place are shifted to a new domain. The eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume, in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, described this talent as the essence of the imagination:
All this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience. When we think of a golden mountain, we only join two consistent ideas, gold, and mountain, with which we were formerly acquainted.
Hume was pointing out that the act of invention was really an act of recombination. The history of innovation is full of inventors engaged in “compounding” and “transposing.” Johannes Guten-berg transformed his knowledge of winepresses into an idea for a printing machine capable of mass-producing words. The Wright brothers used their knowledge of bicycle manufacturing to invent the airplane. (Their first flying craft was, in many respects, just a bicycle with wings.) George de Mestral came up with Velcro after noticing burrs clinging to the fur of his dog. And Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed the search algorithm behind Google by applying the ranking method used for academic articles to the sprawl of the World Wide Web; a hyperlink was like a citation. In each case, the radical concept was merely a new mixture of old ideas.
Dick Drew was a master at conceptual blending. After he invented masking tape, a colleague told him about a strange new material called cellophane. (By this time, Drew had become a full-time researcher.) The material was translucent and shiny but also strikingly impermeable to water and grease; it was being sold by DuPont as a packaging solution, a cheap way of wrapping products for shipping. Drew took one look at the material and had another idea, which he would later describe as the insight of his life: cellophane would make a perfect adhesive. He ordered a hundred yards of cellophane and began coating the material with glue.
Drew called it Scotch tape. By 1933, less than two years after the see-through adhesive hit the market, the product had become the most popular consumer tape in the world. Although masking tape and cellophane were completely unrelated — it had never occurred to DuPont researchers to make their wrapping material sticky — Drew saw their possible point of intersection.
This process has been
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