The Many Faces of Creativity

This Element deepens our understanding of the relationship between embodied sensory experience, emotion, creativity and metaphor.

In this Element, the authors compare the written descriptions of sensory and emotional experiences produced by twenty synaesthetes and twenty non-synaesthetes, and explore the characteristics of their writing, particularly as they relate to metaphor. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.Creative metaphor has been of central interest to the cognitive linguistic research community in recent years. However, little is known about what propels people to use metaphor in a creative way. In this Element, the authors identify and explore some of the clues that synaesthesia may provide to help us better understand the factors that drive creativity, with a particular focus on creative metaphor. They identify the factors that seem to trigger the production of creative metaphor in synaesthetes, and explore what this can tell us about creativity in the population more generally. Their findings provide insights into the nature of creativity as it relates to metaphor, emotion and embodied experience. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.