Twenty years into teaching advanced English learners, I noticed something peculiar. Students who could articulate complex philosophical arguments would freeze when asked to connect two seemingly unrelated ideas. They had vocabulary, grammar, sophisticated reasoning – but lacked the cognitive architecture to leap between distant conceptual domains. This wasn't a language problem. It was a creativity problem. Arthur Koestler identified this gap in 1964. In The Act of Creation ,

I have spent two decades observing a peculiar cognitive limitation among otherwise accomplished professionals and advanced learners. When confronted with concepts from different domains, most minds reflexively search for surface similarities, retreat to dictionary definitions, or simply declare no meaningful relationship exists. A minority, however, immediately begins generating unexpected connections, perceiving structural parallels, discovering functional analogies that ill