Artists of all stripes swear by the need for solitude. A simple internet search will churn out 100s of quotes from well-known and accomplished individuals avowing the same. So there seems to be broad consensus for this idea. Indeed, the quest for self-knowledge, self-realization and self-awareness to any end across different spiritual traditions (e.g., achieving a deep understanding one's self, realizing that the self is an illusion, etc.)  emphasizes the need for some form of effortful distancing. Distancing oneself away from the collective via solitude or silence in order to be in a position to engage in deep self-reflection or inward monitoring. 

At the same time, meaningful collaboration and connection with thought-stimulating others has also been touted as exceedingly important in the creative process. Discourse allows for the exchange of ideas. Exposure to others' ideas increases our own conceptual knowledge. With that, the chance of our arriving at unusual combinations of ideas increases. It is little wonder then that the vital role of social spaces in facilitating discourse has been strongly advocated by several experts (e.g., Steven Johnson's "Where Good Ideas Come From"). This is in fact one of the grounds that have been put forward to explain greater levels of innovation and productivity in big cities (Bettencourt et al., 2007; 2011).

I think the following quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke capture some aspects of these two sides well.

• “The only journey is the one within.”
• “I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”
• “Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything."

 
Most of the discussion of what we "gain" in communication with others is on the increase of our knowledge by virtue of exposure to others' ideas (that resonate with us or fundamentally inform us in some way). We are mere RECIPIENTS in this constellation.

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Here is what's missing from this picture though.
What rarely, if ever, gets a mention much less a discussion is the fact that one also arrives self-knowledge as the AGENT of communication. This is exemplified in letters between artists and people close to them. Indeed, Rilke's outpourings of introspective wisdom (and inestimable generosity) were captured beautifully in his countless letters, the most well-known of which are the collection titled 'Letters to Young Poet'. Here are four further examples of powerful statements made by other profoundly reflective thinkers that speak to this idea.

1. (A quote by Michel de Montaigne)
“The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.” 


2. (An excerpt from the 2014 Paris Review Interview of Adam Phillips by Paul Holdengraber)
PHILLIPS
"... a Welshman called Ernest Jones, had an idea that, interestingly, sort of disappeared. He believed that everybody’s deepest fear was loss of desire, what he called aphanisis. For him that’s the thing we’re most acutely anxious about, having no desire. People now might call it depression, but it wouldn’t be the right word for it, because he’s talking about a very powerful anxiety of living in a world in which there’s nothing and nobody one wants. But it can be extremely difficult to know what you want, especially if you live in a consumer, capitalist culture which is phobic of frustration—where the moment you feel a glimmer of frustration, there’s something available to meet it. Now, shopping and eating and sex may not be what you’re wanting, but in order to find that out you have to have a conversation with somebody. You can’t sit in a room by yourself like Rodin’s Thinker.

INTERVIEWER
Why not?

PHILLIPS
Because in your mind, you’re mad. But in conversation you have the chance of not being. Your mind by itself is full of unmediated anxieties and conflicts. In conversation things can be metabolized and digested through somebody else—I say something to you and you can give it back to me in different forms—whereas you’ll notice that your own mind is very often extremely repetitive. It is very difficult to surprise oneself in one’s own mind."


3. (An Interview with Martin Shaw, mythologist & storyteller.
Watch from the start. The moment arrives around the 1st minute.)


4. (An excerpt from Kahlil Gibran's 'Self-Knowledge')
And a man said, Speak to us of Self-Knowledge.
And he answered saying:
Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.
But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart’s knowledge.
You would know in words that which you have always known in thought.
You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.

And it is well you should.
The hidden well-spring of your soul must needs rise and run murmuring to the sea;
And the treasure of your infinite depths would be revealed to your eyes.
But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure;
And seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff or sounding line.
For self is a sea boundless and measureless ...

"We often think, naively, that missing data are the primary impediments to intellectual progress - just find the right facts and all problems will dissipate. But barriers are often deeper and more abstract in thought. We must have access to the right metaphor, not only to the requisite information."
 -  Stephen J. Gould, The Flamingo's Smile

Plenty of food for thought here. The emphasis on the "right" metaphor is particularly critical. Metaphors wield much power. When they resonate (thereby allowing us to reach meaningful insights), we cling to them and use them as anchor points that guide our understanding of complex phenomenon. A famous case in point is Einstein's "Train Metaphor," a thought experiment to explain the Relativity of Simultaneity. So it is important that we latch on to the right metaphor.

Makes it worth exploring how they - Metaphors, Analogies and Insight - relate to one another. We learn fairly early on in childhood, when taught the intricacies of a language, that metaphors are in fact a kind of analogy. In the neuroscience of creativity though, these are often treated as being distinct, largely because the paradigms to study analogical reasoning and metaphorical processing are quite different, and their associated brain activation profiles only partially overlap. The question though is whether it makes sense to do this. Is that enough of a foundation to argue for fundamental and even qualitative differences between metaphor and analogy? Is it a case of X versus Y? Or X1 versus X2? If it is the latter, when we need to reframe how we approach this subject.

Here is an interesting characterization of metaphors (Crowther, 2003):
"Aristotle’s emphasis on ‘vividness’ in his account of metaphor is missed by many later theories. Metaphor operates by the imaginative realization and traversal of connections which exist in the ‘latent field’ of possible associations for the tenor of the metaphor. As such, it exploits and draws attention to structural features involved in all acts of cognition."

This depiction beautifully articulates how metaphors are imbued with the necessary features that allow insights to transpire. Which leads to the next point. How are they linked? The relation between metaphors, analogies and insight has been considered in terms of how the use of metaphors and analogies can lead to insights during problem solving (Keefer & Landau, 2016). But how does this come to pass? Crowther's poetic characterization gives an inkling of the operationalization of this process. Psychologists are necessarily concrete in their explanations. Here is one take from key researchers in the field (Kounios & Beeman, 2014): "Insight occurs when a person suddenly reinterprets a stimulus, situation, or event to produce a nonobvious, nondominant interpretation. This can take the form of a solution to a problem (an "aha moment"), comprehension of a joke or metaphor, or recognition of an ambiguous percept."  

Paul Taylor published an article in 1989 on "Insight and Metaphor" in the journal Analysis which explores the nature of a metaphor, and the conditions under which it does or does not express an insight. Here is an excerpt from the introductory paragraph.
"Theorists generally agree that a metaphor can be a stimulus to insight. 'Juliet is the sun' leads us to see various ways in which Juliet is, literally, like the sun. Since there is no stage at which all illuminating points of comparison have been exhausted, there is a sense in which a metaphor like this is ineliminable; something would be lost if we replaced it with a finite list of comparisons or other literal paraphrase. Part of the value of Simon Blackburn's discussion of metaphor in Spreading The Word ([1], pp.171-9) lies in the way it focuses the discussion on a clear and fruitful question: whether a live metaphor can function only as a stimulus to insight or whether a metaphorical statement can in itself express an insight or truth."

When I saw this GIF image several months ago, I experienced a clear moment of the latter. I felt I had stumbled across a wonderful metaphor that depicts how insight occurs in our minds. An insight about the instantiation of the process of insight from a metaphor.

Is it the "right" metaphor, though?