Hyperassociativity in the AI Era: Why Wide Semantic Leaps Are Becoming a Rare Human Skill

Composition IV / Wassily Kandinsky / 1911 Kandinsky sought to express inner spiritual necessity through non-representational forms that force viewers to forge their own distant connections between colour, shape, and emotion.

In an era dominated by large language models that excel at close-range pattern completion, one distinctly human cognitive trait is quietly diminishing: hyperassociativity - the capacity to rapidly activate and connect concepts across vast semantic distances. Research on creative cognition consistently shows that highly original thinkers exhibit flatter, more expansive semantic networks, where activation spreads farther and produces remote associations that less creative minds rarely reach. These distant links are the raw material of breakthrough ideas, yet constant exposure to predictive, proximity-biased outputs trains us toward safer, nearer connections. Koestler's bisociation remains the classic description: creativity emerges when two previously unrelated matrices intersect, often across considerable conceptual gaps that require tolerating initial incoherence until insight crystallizes. AI can simulate this through statistical recombination within its training distribution, but it rarely ventures into truly remote territory because outliers dilute prediction accuracy. The consequence for learners and thinkers is a gradual narrowing of associative horizons: we become fluent in probable continuations yet struggle with the improbable bridges that drive genuine novelty. Structured exercises that deliberately pair distant concepts - such as those found in Grandomastery activities like Random Abstractions (grandomastery.com/abstractions) or Random ISM (grandomastery.com/ism) - offer a countermeasure by forcing human minds to traverse those gaps without algorithmic scaffolding. Preserving hyperassociativity matters because it underpins not only artistic and scientific discovery but also the adaptive fluency needed in unpredictable real-world contexts, where solutions often lie far from obvious domains. The challenge ahead is clear: if we delegate remote linking to machines optimized for local coherence, we risk losing the very mechanism that has defined human creative advantage for millennia.

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