The creative-thinking maven Michael Michalko (in ThinkerToys) tells the story of Louis Braille, the inventor of the Braille alphabet for the blind. He was musing on the problem of how blind people could be enabled to read books, and happened to pick up a pine cone. The impression of the sharp spines of the cone on his hand, coupled with his musing about reading, showed him the path to an alphabet based on touch.

This is one example of bisociation, the fusing together of ideas from two different planes of experience. Arthur Koestler coined this term in his 1964 book The Act of Creation. As Koestler explains it, “The pattern underlying [the creative act] is the perceiving of a situation or idea in two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference.”

Like any good Hollywood movie pitch (“Imagine Mission Impossible meets The Muppet Show!”), aligning two incompatible worlds sparks the creative impulse to see things in different ways. Do bisociative exercises like randomly writing down two lists of words, pairing them up and brainstorming associations between the pairs (what does the pairing of “golf club” and “elephant” bring to mind?). Michalko’s books and his website creativethinking.net have a lot of wonderful examples.

A key to the concept of bisociation is its inherent instability. As Koestler says, it produces a “transitory state of unstable equilibrium where the balance of both emotion and thought is disturbed.” To practice bisociation, you have to be willing to get a little uncomfortable. So, in addition to exercising your capacity for making connections, you’ll also help your creativity by cultivating a basic flexibility of mind, developing curiosity, openness, and self-awareness of your own discomfort as the curious associations emerge.

Try It: As preparation for entering the bisociation zone, take a few minutes to breathe and get centered. If your thoughts or emotions are already disturbed, it may be harder to get to the creative disturbance you are seeking. Then go to a random word generator (like this one) and spin up a pair of random nouns. Now bisociate!