The Synectics Body of Knowledge was a pioneer in the study and application of metaphor to creative thought and invention. This excellent book by James Geary, I is an Other, The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See The World, takes readers into the investigation of metaphor from Aristotle to the latest neuro-scientific research about how metaphor works in the brain.
"We noticed that, in launching a series of sessions which culminated in the successful solution of a given problem, we were constantly attempting to “make the familiar strange.” Faced with the all too familiar, without understanding entirely what we were doing, we would attempt at first radically to shift our vision so that the familiar (the codified, the set world of the usual) was made strange and new, and therefore subject to new patterns and new laws of operation—subject to invention."
Synecticsworld and its long history of tapping metaphorical thinking in creative exploration and consumer insight is featured in the Chapter entitled Metaphor and Innovation. Read the chapter here, available for download with permission from the author and publisher. To order the book, click here!
To download a PDF excerpt from the book please click here.