How Far the Mind Reaches: Lateral Thinking as Literal Associative Range in Semantic Network Topology

Edward de Bono's concept of "lateral thinking" (1967) has been treated for nearly six decades as a metaphor: thinking "sideways" rather than "vertically." We argue that the metaphor is more literal than its author or subsequent scholarship has recognised. Network neuroscience has established that semantic memory possesses genuine topology: concepts occupy positions in a measurable space where distance corresponds to associative strength, activation propagation time, and the number of intermediate nodes traversed. We propose the Associative Range Hypothesis (ARH): what is experienced and labelled as "lateral" thinking corresponds to longer-range activation across this semantic network topology, the brain literally reaching further across its associative landscape to recruit distant nodes for novel combination. On this account, "creativity" is not a binary trait or a mysterious capacity but a continuous, measurable variable: the effective radius of associative recruitment during ideation. We synthesise evidence from spreading activation theory, the Remote Associates Test, default mode network research, reduced latent inhibition in creative populations, and computational models of semantic networks to support this reframing. We further argue that the persistent treatment of creativity as a categorical phenomenon ("creative" vs. "non-creative") constitutes an instance of Binary Bias (Temte, 2025), the automatic compression of continuous distributions into binary categories, and that recognising associative range as a continuous variable has implications for creativity training, neurodivergent cognition, and the evaluation of AI-generated novelty.