The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler

> In this major and long-awaited study Arthur Koestler advances the theory that all creative activities — the conscious and unconscious processes underlying artistic originality, scientific discovery, and comic inspiration—have a basic pattern in common, which he attempts to define.

This is mentioned in Alan Kay's OOPSLA97 talk.

> So I'm going to use a metaphor here for this talk which is drawn from wonderful book called The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler. Koestler was a novelist who became a cognitive scientist in his later years. And one of the great books he wrote was about what might creativity be. Learning, he realized that learning of course is an act of creation itself because something happens in you that wasn't there before and using the metaphor of thoughts as ants crawling on a plane, in this case, it's a pink, pink plane, and there's a lot of things you can do on a pink plane. You can have goals, you can choose directions, you can move along, but you're basically always in the pink context. And if you think about that, that means that progress in a fixed context is almost always a form of optimization because if you were actually coming up with something new, it wouldn't have been part of the rules or the context for what the pink plane is all about.

> So creative acts generally are ones that don't stay in the same context that they're in. So he says every once in a while, even though you've been taught carefully by parents and by school for many years, you have a blue idea, maybe when you were taking a shower, maybe when you're out jogging, maybe when you're resting in an unguarded moment.

> Suddenly that thing that you were puzzling about, wondering about, looking at appears to you in a completely different light as though it were something else. And Koestler said the emotional reaction to this comes basically in three forms, which is if you're telling a joke it's "haha", if you're doing science it's "aha", and if you're doing art it's "ah". He says, because in each case, something very similar as having a joke takes you down the garden path and then suddenly reveals it's about something else.