Pattern-Seeking Through Play

Meredith's worldplay was shot through with yet another well-recognized ingigredienlent of creative thinking, the comparison and synthesis of two or more unlike things. As the mathematician and poet Jacob Bronowski famously expressed it, the discoveries of science and of art "are explorations—^more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness The same holds true for the insights generated in worldplay. Documents of play in Lewis, like many a child, combined the animal and the human in Lord Big. Una Hunt conflated bold designs in her mother's rug with woods, rivers, and seas. Stanislaw Lem blended burned-out transistor tubes and spools of thread into impossible machinery.

Michele Root-Bernstein, Inventing Imaginary Worlds, From Childhood Play to Adult Creativity Across the Arts and Sciences (2014)

• imagination
• paracosms
• play
• world play