Creativity and Dissociation

Vygotsky says:

Many authors, with complete justification, suggest that the roots of such creative combination may be noted in the play of animals. Animal play very often represents the product of motor imagination. However, these rudiments of creative imagination in animals cannot lead to any stable or major developments in the conditions under which they live; only man has developed this form of activity to its true height.

This leads me to question, why? My first thought is perhaps this is due to the union of thought and word, supposedly a uniquely human trait. On the other hand, I suppose if we were to assume the contrary, that other animals could use their imaginative thinking to create stable and major developments in the conditions in which they live, we would likely see them, yet (to my knowledge) we generally do not.

I found Vygotsky's claims regarding dissociation to be very interesting and reminded me of a discussion during one of our early sessions. He writes:

In order to subsequently join together the various elements [of experience], a person must first break the natural association of elements in which they were initially perceived... It is this isolation of individual traits and neglect of others that we call dissociation. This process is extremely important in all human mental development; it is the foundation of abstract thinking, the basis of concept formation.  (p. 26)

The most successful mathematicians and scientists are those who have the most creative and original insights, those who have combined past experiences and thoughts in such a way that has never been done before (and have written about them and shared those writings with their colleagues). Contrary to the "everyday" notion that imaginative thinking is antithetical to scientific or realistic thinking, as Vygotsky explains quite nicely, they are codependent on each other.

The above quote about dissociation reminds me of what some mathematics educators call interiorization.

"Material has reached the interiorized level when it has been disembedded from its original perceptual context and it can be freely operated on in imagination, including being 'projected' into other perceptual material and utilized in novel situations. Interiorization is 'the most general form of abstraction; it leads to the isolation of structure (form), pattern (coordination), and operations (actions) from experiential things and activities (Steffe & Cobb, 1988, p. 337)" (Battista, 1999, p. 418). 

This also reminds me of Vygotsky's discussion of concepts being internalized as tools that can be used in novel situations. As we discussed last week, through instruction within a student's ZPD, the student can be led to actively reflect on the purpose and nature of a thing, to critically examine how that thing can be used to control or understand some aspect of their world, as a tool. It seems this process of socialization and instruction (within their ZPD) should lead toward dissociation of the thing in question from its original perceptual context.