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Creative Insight Writ Large

The Eureka act proper, the moment of truth experienced by the creative
individual, is paralleled on the collective plane by the emergence … of a new
synthesis, brought about by a quick succession of individual discoveries.
Arthur Koestler 1

The millennium a.d. 1000–2000 brought mind-boggling changes to the life of
the average person. The French might insist that the more the human condition
changes, the more it remains the same, but from the point of view of the average
person, the change from farming with a handheld plow – a common activity
2
in what was not yet Europe in a.d. 1000 – to trading stocks on the Internet is
not superficial. Historical change is driven by the production of many different
kinds of novelty. People change what they believe; improve their mastery over
material processes; try different forms of economic, political and social organiz-
ation; and struggle to formulate moral dictums by which they can live more
happily. Considered at the millennial scale, the production of novelty is larger
than life and mightier than the individual. The river of conceptual, technolog-
ical and organizational inventions sweeps people along, sometimes to the tune
of ineffectual protests about the loss of this or that value supposedly inherent in
tradition.
The gap between laboratory studies of insight and historical change looks
like the Grand Canyon of cognitive theory. The prospect of bridging it is daunt-
ing, and the construction will require more than the modest beginning attempted
in this chapter. The purpose is to investigate to what extent the theory of insight
is relevant for human affairs and to clarify how the production of novelty unfolds
in realistic contexts. What and how much of what happens in significant crea-
tive projects can be explained by the principles about individual insight events
proposed in Chapter 4? Which features cannot be so explained? Do additional
features and change mechanisms, unrelated to those principles, emerge at higher

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