By Karen Hume
All learning happens through connection. We make sense of new information by forging connections to something we already know. For example, early automobiles made sense to people because they were described as “horseless carriages.”
When connections are unusual or unexpected, they can lead to creative insights that result in new ideas. For example, William Harvey compared the heart to a pump, which paved the way for his discovery that blood circulates.
Understanding existing ideas and creating new ones rely on recognizing and comparing similarities and differences across concepts—in other words, on making connections. Three forms of figurative language are most often used for this purpose:
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