Great Metaphors

Unlocking the Nature of Creative Thought

Leaping Through Metaphor
When ordinary words enter the force field of metaphor, they do extraordinary things. They are the ignition point for originality and fuel innovation. They power our writing and are the intense heat at the core of creativity. Meaning doesn’t lie around waiting to be picked up, it has to be actively discovered. Great metaphors don’t just point to meaning, they create it. They don’t just discover similarities, they forge them. Often immediately.

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The invention of metaphor – seeing one thing in terms of another – helped to create language itself. Metaphors are the indispensable root of language. We find our way in the world intuitively by noticing and recognising associations and similarities. The sudden apprehension of relationship connects, links, familiarises and underlies all that we see. Understanding is arriving at a familiarising metaphor which offers us that charged tingle of recognition. In this way they help us to shape and make sense of our world. What process connects a refuse collector who refers to maggots as ‘disco rice,’ a fisherman who compares a poor man’s rights to a fish ‘hanging in a net,’ an Auschwitz prisoner comparing the arrival of dawn to ‘a betrayal’ or a crack addict’s skin to a ‘moth’s flaking dust?’ Such metaphors seem to be tied into the time, the event, the character, the perspective. And yet each in turn can be ‘seen’ by all of us. How? We are moved into a way of thinking, led and sped into a new creative space. We find ourselves at the heart of the imaginative process. We have made the cognitive leap.

This article will explore the nature of metaphor and how it encapsulates the heart of the imaginative process. It will also show how we can make the cognitive leap ourselves and suggest how metaphors can be best used to initiate breakthroughs in our own thinking.

Thinking Aside
How do we come up with innovative ideas? The creative act does not create something out of nothing like in the Old Testament. It uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines and synthesises already existing facts and ideas. Souriau believed that, “To invent, you must think aside.” When the situation is blocked, straight thinking must be supersededby the search for flashes of adjacent possibilities which will unblock it.

Metaphors offer a number of insights into how we can all think slightly more ‘askew.’ Such thinking aside is a temporary liberation from the
tyranny of over-precise concepts, the axioms ingrained in the very texture of our language and specialised ways of thought. Sometimes we appreciate metaphors simply for their poetic power, their beauty, or their aesthetic pleasure. But more significantly, they provide an invaluable way of gaining purchase to elucidate abstract scientific and mathematical concepts. Metaphors can thereby become the

bridge between cabbages and kings. They help us to shape our world, from metaphysics to mathematics, science to psychology.

An Eye for Resemblance
When we liken something to something else, connections are made, and a rival reality is floated into our minds. This might be like that, so we think anew. We picture a likeness, which speeds us towards a new meaning or way of understanding. When we talk about how metaphors work – similes, allegories, analogies, parables – we are talking about ways that we use to substitute meaning, to transfer and translate the abstract into concrete. Metaphoric thinking is how we clarify the abstractions into a more immediately accessible and graspable understanding.

We all have a deep seated drive to integrate, to find patterns, create or expose hidden analogies and ultimately uncover solutions. Creativity needs a bump start, an idea or a way of seeing, which sets off its own generative process. Metaphors do this and in the same process, fuel original thinking.

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Ian Warwick


Ian Warwick founded London Gifted & Talented as part of the groundbreaking London Challenge, which has transformed education across the capital city since 2003. He has co-wrtiten ‘Educating the More Able Student’ and ‘World Class’
in 2016 and has two new books on ‘Redefining More Able Education’. He has recently completed a book on learning called Unfinished Perfection, which focuses on Da Vinci and explores strategies for improving creativity and innovation.