One symptom of thought disorder found commonly in schizophrenic patients is "loose associations" and "flights of ideas." Flight of Ideas - A sequence of loose associations or extreme tangentiality where the speaker goes quickly from one idea to another seemingly unrelated idea. To the listener, the ideas seem unrelated and do not seem to repeat. Often pressured speech is also present. e.g. "My hand is five cigars. I've been to Havana. She rose out of the water, bikini. Mushrooms clouds, Wow. You're God."
In creative persons we find a highly developed ability to associate remote ideas. In my own case, I have had a problem with psychiatrists misidentifying my capacity for remote associations as an expression of loose associations and flights of ideas, which are symptoms of schizophrenia.
The Remote Associations Test (RAT) developed by Sarnoff A. Mednick measures how easily a person can find a link between semantically different concepts. Remote associations (unlike loose associations) are a characteristic of creative people. E. Paul Torrance's Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) measures divergent production, that is, how many different answers to a question a person can provide within a time limit. For example, a person might be asked to propose alternative titles to a well-known movie. The more creative the individual the more alternative titles he will produce, or so the psychologists say.
Creativity - Characteristics, Creativity as Ability, Relation to Intelligence, Creativity as Process, Relation to Imagery, Relation to Knowledge
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