“this notion of personifying is a very important part of the discovery process; the capacity to imagine yourself as something else, or to imagine something that other people would find rather unusual or unacceptable…people who are creative will usually make those discoveries when they are doing…some kind of an activity that’s not overly physically taxing, but some kind of an activity where the visual templates on which ideas and memories are engaged repeatedly. Some people can make good use of it; other people condition themselves to eliminate extraneous stimulation – that is, not to engage in the metaphorical constructs that enhance creative knowledge – but to reduce metaphors to ideational concepts, to semantic statements. Then it takes someone like Mark Johnson…to show that creative meaning is actually carried by the metaphor, not by the semantic content of the statement that we would verbally translate that into…one has to have faith that the metaphorical abstraction is actually where the meaning resides.”
