Much of our ability to understand, and to be creative and novel in our understanding, is due to our ability to see connections and to draw parallels between events. Of course, when the parallels drawn are between one episode of eating in a restaurant and a similar episode, our work doesn't seem creative, even though it results in a new idiosyncratic mental structure. Drawing parallels between events in one arena and those in a very different context seems more creative. We can recognize that what we have learned to do in one situation may apply in another.

When a person acts stupidly in one situation and suffers the consequences, we expect him to learn from his experiences. We find it hard to understand why he would repeat the same behavior in a new, but similar, circumstance. The kind of learning from experience we expect of people comes from our belief that they can and do recognize similarities in situations.

I used this argument in previous chapters as a justification for structures like MOPs. But even MOPs are too specific. As noted in Chapter 4, we often get reminded across situations that have only very little in common on the surface. Thus, there must be structures that capture similarities between situations that occur in different domains and, furthermore, these structures must be able to capture similarities that are far deeper than those on the surface.